Veritate Podcast

Before I became Catholic, I could not tell the difference. Two Jehovah's Witnesses would leave my door and I had heard something about Jesus, something about the Bible, something about a better world coming. It sounded like everything I had already heard from the Baptists down the street. That was not an accident. They are fluent in a language most Americans already half-speak, and they have replaced what every word means underneat...

There are 44,000 of them in the United States. They have no shared name, no common creed, no authority above the local pastor. They call themselves just Christians. When I was an atheist, I could not figure out what they were. I visited a gymnasium, a barn, a community college classroom, and a church in Yuma, Arizona that locked the doors once you were...

The Episcopal Church kept everything. The bishops. The creeds. The apostolic succession. The sacraments. The Book of Common Prayer. It is the most Catholic-looking Protestant denomination in America, and it is also one of the most theologically progressive. That is not a contradiction. It is the result. This episode is the American continuation of the ...

I was seven years old at a family reunion when I heard something that terrified me. Some of my family members were Pentecostal. Someone began to pray and what came out of their mouth was not a language. I did not have the framework to say that at seven. I just knew something was wrong with the sound. I speak English, Spanish, conversational Arabic, and...

John Knox would not move. He stood before a weeping queen and held his ground, certain he had followed the argument to its rightful end. He had taken Calvin's theology from Geneva to Edinburgh and built the most disciplined, most intellectually rigorous expression of Reformed Christianity the Reformation ever produced. The Westminster Confession. The r...

John Wesley never intended to leave the Church of England. He was ordained an Anglican priest, educated at Oxford, and spent his entire ministry insisting that the Methodist movement was a renewal from within, not a departure. But the Church he was trying to renew had been built on a political compromise two hundred years before he was born, and no amo...

I told you last week we were doing the Methodists. We are not. Not yet. Because before John Wesley makes any sense, you have to understand what he was standing in. And that means going back to 1534, to a king who once held the title Defender of the Faith and then severed his nation from Rome not over doctrine, not over Scripture, not over any question ...

Most Americans have a Baptist in their family. Maybe they are one. The tradition is woven into the fabric of American religious life so deeply that it can feel less like a denomination and more like the default setting of Christian faith in this country. But Baptist churches did not spring from the New Testament. They trace to a single man, John Smyth,...

Three reformers had already broken from the one Church Christ founded. Luther broke from Rome. Zwingli rejected Luther. Calvin built an entirely new system from the rubble of both. And then a group of people looked at all three and said the same thing each of them had said before. You didn't go far enough. The Anabaptists stripped away every layer of a...

John Calvin was the most systematic thinker of the Reformation. A lawyer by training, he built a complete theological framework covering predestination, total depravity, and irresistible grace that was tighter and more organized than anything Luther or Zwingli produced. But a system can be internally consistent and still be wrong. In this episode, John...

How did Christianity go from one Church to tens of thousands of denominations? In this episode of Veritate, we confront the question directly. If truth comes from God, then truth cannot contradict itself. Yet today Christianity appears fractured into thousands of groups, many of which disagree on core teachings. This episode examines how that happened by stepping back and asking the same four questions that guided the search for tr...

When you step back and investigate Christianity honestly, the modern landscape raises serious questions. Thousands of denominations, thousands of interpretations, and everyone claiming to follow the same Christ and the same Bible. As a practical atheist forced to confront the historical reality of Jesus, the investigation begins by doing what every investigator does when things look chaotic. Build a timeline. Go backward until the ...

In this episode, I walk through the moment my atheism began to fracture. The Shroud of Turin. The Sudarium of Oviedo. Forensic details that refused to behave like myth. Once I applied the scientific method honestly, neutrality died. If you claim to follow truth wherever it leads, then you do not get to ignore evidence when it appears.

But the collision with history was only the beginning. Over 5,000 English Bible versions. Competin...

I did not skip Christianity because it lacked evidence. I skipped it because I did not want Christ to be true.

In this episode, I come clean. I revisit childhood abuse, denominational division in the South, an alcoholic father who rejected Jesus, Iraq, and the years I carried an accusation against God. I explain why New Age spirituality felt safer. It offered a universe without judgment, without sin, without accountability. It pres...

After examining Zoroastrianism and its cosmic battle between light and darkness, I turn to two very different systems: Confucianism and Shintoism. Why combine them? Because both attempt to build civilization without centering salvation. Both prioritize harmony, order, ritual, and refinement. Both shaped entire cultures without insisting on a singular, personal saving God.

In this episode of Veritate, I apply the same four structura...

Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest moral systems in human history, and one of the most influential. Long before modern politics or psychology, it framed reality as a struggle between good and evil and placed responsibility for the future squarely on human choice.

In this episode of Veritate, Zoroastrianism is tested using the same four questions applied throughout the series. Who is God. Who is man. What went wrong. How is it fixe...

In this episode of Veritate, I walk through Buddhism the same way I have examined every worldview in this series, by forcing it to answer four questions, who is God, who is man, what went wrong, and how is it fixed. I explain why Buddhism appealed to me as an atheist. It did not demand belief in a creator, it did not rest on revelation, and the Buddha did not claim to be God. It offered a disciplined diagnosis of suffering and a pa...

Hinduism claims antiquity, depth, and permanence. Older than Christianity, older than Judaism, it presents itself not as a single religion but as an eternal way. In this episode of And the Questions, I examine Hinduism the way I was trained to examine anything that claims authority, under pressure. Beginning with the Bhagavad Gita and tracing backward through the Upanishads and the Vedas, the system reveals not one voice, but many....

In this episode of Veritate, I begin where I began as an atheist.

Before belief, before revelation, before any claim that God speaks, I turned to Taoism. Not because it is the oldest religion, it is not. Hinduism predates it. I began with Taoism because it claims to describe reality before religion itself. No personal God. No commandments. No revelation. Only “the Tao.”

Using Taoism’s own writings, including the Tao Te Ching, I tes...