Stafford Betty, Free Will in the Moment |572|

Dr. Stafford Betty, is professor of religious studies and popular author.

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[00:00:00] Alex Tsakiris: On this episode of skeptiko. A show about God’s rules.

[00:00:06] clip: ===

There are only two rules. You can’t tell anybody your God, and you can’t mess with free will. Uh, can I ask why? Yes, you can. That’s the beauty of it.

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Alex Tsakiris: And what they mean for free will.

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[00:00:22] Stafford Betty: But what we can do is, at every moment of every day, right now, we have a choice to make. What am I gonna say next? , how am I going to, , live my life in the next hour? This little nugget of freedom that we have at every moment of our.

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[00:00:41] Alex Tsakiris: That first clip was from the movie, Bruce almighty. And the second was from today’s guest. Dr. Stafford, Betty.

You’re going to meet in a minute and I think you’re going to like him as much as I do. He’s just done a tremendous amount of work on. After death, and he’s also a religious scholar and very, very interesting guy. I hope you like the

[00:01:05] Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptical, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m host Alex Caris Today I’m excited and honored to welcome Dr.

Stafford, Betty to Skeptical. Let me read a little bio here. Stafford Betty earned a PhD from Fordham, was a professor of world religions at Cal State University, Bakersfield for a long, long time, just retired a couple years ago. He has become one of the country’s most acclaimed experts on the afterlife, and you can see numerous books up there if you’re looking at this on YouTube.

In 2011, he published the Afterlife Unveil. His most popular book, a more recent publication, Heaven in Hell Unveil 2014 is an in depth description of spiritual life with an emphasis on how spirits progress from lower to higher planes. I’m always talking about whether or not there is a hierarchy to consciousness, and I always have to throw that out there.

Like a question for people who haven’t really looked at the evidence. Here’s a guy who’s looked at the evidence and says, Man, there’s a lot of evidence for a hierarchy. Who knows? But if we’re just gonna follow the data, Dr. Betty’s telling you there’s a lot of data there. We’ll get to that more in a minute.

His 11th book, When did you ever become Less by dying? Uh, was in 2016. He’s written blogs for the Huffington Post. Um, what else? Written some novels as well. Very, very nice writer. Easy to engage with the writing, and yet it’s forceful and powerful. He’s written a number of peer reviewed, professional publications as well.

And, uh, again, you know, the thing I would touch on just a second ago and, uh, we’re, we’re gonna make this an emphasis or a point to emphasize really, is. This is a guy who’s touched the lives of thousands of students that have crossed through his doors over the years with the kind of,