TAOI (these aren’t our ideas)

This is Part One of our series on the Gospel of Mark — and we’re going straight to the texts themselves. Why do Jews reject the Gospel of Mark? Not because they’re stubborn. Not because they’re spiritually blind. But because when Mark is read as a Jewish text — in its original scriptural, theological, and covenantal context — it repeatedly breaks Jewish law, Jewish expectation, and Jewish theology...

Is morality something handed down from God—or something we built ourselves? For many Christians, morality only makes sense if it comes from God. Without divine commands, they’re told there’s no objective good or evil—only opinion, chaos, and moral collapse. But is that actually true? In this episode, we examine the claim that morality depends on Christianity. We ask whether moral truth requires Go...

In this episode, Jacob continues the presentation for Divine Inspiration from the Bible. Humans are the only creatures who know they’re going to die. That awareness shapes everything — our fears, our identities, our tribes, and maybe even our gods. In this episode, Jake explores a difficult question: What if religion isn’t primarily a revelation from heaven, but a human response to mortality? Draw...

In this episode, Jacob takes a look at Divine Inspiration from the Bible. Humans are the only creatures who know they’re going to die. That awareness shapes everything — our fears, our identities, our tribes, and maybe even our gods. In this episode, Jake explores a difficult question: What if religion isn’t primarily a revelation from heaven, but a human response to mortality? Drawing from anthro...

Fifteen years after leaving Christianity, Josh reopened the Bible — starting with Genesis — and read it as an adult, without inherited assumptions. What he found wasn’t the timeless, unchanging God he was taught to worship. In this episode, we examine the evolving character of God across scripture — from the embodied, reactive deity of the Book of Genesis, to the wrathful potter of Epistle to the...

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” This episode begins there—and then asks whether that beginning can withstand scientific scrutiny. In this conversation, a former evangelical fundamentalist—now a career scientist and research professor—examines Christianity, the Bible, and divine inspiration through a scientific and analytical lens. Raised to believe the Bible was inerrant...

Christianity often presents itself as unshakable truth—but what if it’s more fragile than we’ve been told? In this episode of These Aren’t Our Ideas, we examine Christianity as a house of cards: a belief system built on layered assumptions—biblical inerrancy, theological certainty, historical claims, and inherited interpretations—that depend on one another to stand. We explore what happens when ju...

Welcome to Episode One.  Before we start questioning ideas, doctrines, or traditions, we need to explain why we’re here. Hi, we are Jake and Josh, and we grew up fundamentalist Independent Baptist. This first episode isn’t about theology, arguments, or scholarship. It’s about our stories. We grew up inside Christianity. We didn’t arrive at our beliefs randomly—we inherited them. Church, worship, c...

Hosts Jake and Josh invite listeners to explore ideas as invitations rather than possessions, encouraging curiosity over certainty. Drawing on science, philosophy, psychology, and religion, this episode models open, respectful questioning and the willingness to sit with paradox in pursuit of truth.