Veritate Podcast

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 noise disappears. That search leads to a critical moment in Christian history: the year 1054, known as the Great Schism, when the Christian world formally divided between East and West.
In this episode of Christianity and the Questions, we examine the first major fracture in Christianity and what it reveals about the early Church. For nearly one thousand years before this moment, Christianity existed as one structured communion with bishops, councils, apostolic succession, and shared Scripture. The Schism divided the Church into Catholic and Orthodox traditions, but it did not produce the chaos of denominations we see today. That realization pushes the investigation forward to the next major turning point in the timeline, 1517, and the challenge of Martin Luther.

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. Competing canons. “The Holy Spirit told me.” The Book of Mormon and restoration claims. If Christ founded a Church, where is it? If Scripture is authority, who defined it? We return to ground zero and apply four questions: Who is God? Who is man? What went wrong? How is it fixed? And we close by preparing to examine the fracture that reshaped Christianity.
Truth does not change because it is uncomfortable. Next episode, we confront the division.

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 preserved autonomy.
But evil is real. Abuse is real. War is real. Justice is real. And once you admit that, you must ground it. New Age could not carry that weight. The logic of moral reality forced me toward something I had deliberately avoided. The Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo made Jesus a historical problem I could no longer dismiss. And that realization did not comfort me. It frightened me.
Next week, we confront Christianity directly. If Christ is real, what did He actually establish?

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 structural questions: Who is God? Who is man? What went wrong? And how is it fixed? From the viewpoint of the practical atheist I once was, these systems appeared disciplined, stable, even admirable. Confucian ethics and Shinto reverence seemed capable of preserving society without divine intervention. At one point, I even believed Christianity had borrowed its morality from Confucius.
But under pressure, harmony is not redemption. Refinement is not resurrection. And purification is not transformation.
This episode marks a turning point. Because when Christianity appeared fractured and chaotic from the outside, I skipped it entirely and moved into the New Age instead. The search for coherence continues.

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 fixed. When examined carefully, Zoroastrianism reveals why modern society still believes it can save itself, and why that belief inevitably leads to exhaustion, anxiety, and collapse. This episode shows that Zoroastrianism never truly disappeared. Its answers live on, and so does its ending.

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 path of detachment that promised relief.
But I also show where that path comes up short when the questions turn from inner turmoil to moral evil. Buddhism can explain suffering through craving and ignorance. It can train the mind and reduce reactivity. What it struggles to do is weigh chosen cruelty with the force that conscience demands. By the end, the popular claim that all religions are the same collapses under honest examination. Next week we turn to Zoroastrianism, a system that names evil directly and forces the question of good and evil into the open.

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. Many texts. Many gods. Many answers, none of which correct the others.
Rather than comparing text to text, this episode asks the only questions that matter. Who is God? Who is man? What went wrong? How is it fixed? Hinduism offers wisdom and discipline, but it refuses definition. God becomes undefined, man becomes divine yet unaccountable, evil is reduced to ignorance, and the solution to suffering is escape rather than restoration. This episode does not mock Hinduism. It tests whether it can carry the weight of reality.

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 test that claim by asking the four questions every worldview must answer.
Who is God.Who is man.What went wrong.How is it fixed.
At the time, my goal was not to find truth, but to prove that all religions were false. Taoism was the first system I put under that pressure. What it offered was calm, balance, and detachment. What it could not explain was justice, evil, or why human actions truly matter.
This episode does not assume faith. It begins in skepticism. And it confronts the popular claim that all religions are simply different paths to the same destination.
Because before you can ask which faith is true, you have to ask whether they can all be true at the same time.

In this episode of Veritate, Judaism is examined using the same four questions applied throughout the series. This is not an attack, but a test of continuity and truth.
The episode distinguishes between Biblical Judaism and modern Rabbinic Judaism, explaining how the destruction of the Second Temple permanently altered the religion described in Scripture. Without sacrifice, priesthood, or Temple, the system commanded by the Law can no longer function as written.
Using key texts from Isaiah, the Psalms, and Daniel, this episode explores whether Judaism identifies the problem of sin without resolving it, and why Christianity claims fulfillment rather than expectation.
The episode closes by challenging the idea that all religions lead to God, leaving one final question intentionally unanswered.
Truth does not fear examination.

This episode of Veritate begins a year-long examination of the world’s religions, starting with Islam.
Using the Qur’an and the Catholic Bible side by side, we ask the same questions every religion must answer. Who is God? Who is man? What went wrong? How is it fixed?
Islam is examined first because it was the first religion I was forced to outwardly practice in Iraq in 2005 for survival.
Christianity had already existed for nearly six hundred years when Islam emerged. This episode shows how Islam defines God by rejecting Christian claims about Fatherhood, Sonship, Incarnation, and the Cross.
The conclusion is unavoidable. Submission and sonship cannot coexist.
Next week, we examine Judaism and the questions.