My guest this week is Joel Berry, the podcast host of the Petty Prophet Podcast. Both his blog of the same name and the podcast are from the Christian believer and politically conservative perspectives. Joel is very much a believer. He had listened to the Graceful Atheist Podcast and was curious enough to initiate a conversation.
[Due to fundamentalism] I think that I was teetering, when I was 19,
…, and I was deciding which direction to go with my life, teetering in my faith a little bit, and I joined the military, became a Marine Corps infantry man. Within a year I was in Fallujah.
[I was] a sheltered kid, [a] home schooled fundamentalist. I am taken out of the [United] States, out of my Christian bubble, and I spent a year in Iraq.
… I had a little Bible in my flak jacket that I read when I could.

Joel meets me in an honesty contest in which we both push each other but also take the time to listen to one another. I think it makes for a compelling conversation.
What compels me about Christianity? I think the first thing was that, and this is experiential … ,
I was taken out of a Christian world …
and I open my Bible and I read the words of Jesus in the Gospel and the words of Jesus really drew me in, there was something about that man that seemed other worldly and amazing to me.

Joel experienced a deconstruction from a fundamentalist form of Christianity. He left the IFB. He left a fundamentalist Calvinist theology. But he maintains in his words “a childlike faith.”
[I got into] aplogetics, the reasons to believe, the reasons for my faith, but all that stuff it’s all arguments, none of it is completely conclusive, and there is still an element of childlike faith involved.

This is a 20 Questions with a Believer episode. Joel and I take turns asking each other questions and then crucially allowing the other person to answer.
Links
Joel on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/JoelWBerry
The Petty Prophet Blog:
https://thepettyprophet.com/
The Petty Prophet Podcast
https://thepettyprophet.com/homepage/petty-prophet-podcast/
Interact
In the final thoughts section I make reference to this tweet:
https://twitter.com/GracefulAtheist/status/1218199410682691594
Joel brings up several episodes he has listened to. Here are links to those episodes:
Laura Anderson: Adverse Religious Experiences:
https://gracefulatheist.wordpress.com/2019/10/31/laura-anderson-religious-abuse-and-religious-trauma/
Matthew Taylor: Confessions of a Young Earth Creationist:
https://gracefulatheist.wordpress.com/2019/06/20/matthew-taylor-confessions-of-a-young-earth-creationist/
Attribution
"Waves" track written and produced by Makaih Beats
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Makaih_Beats 
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

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