This week, Carisa joins me as we talk about the Westboro Baptist church getting hacked, the burning of a Koran in Afghanistan, and the Richard Dawkins / Archbishop of Canterbury debate.
It still amazes me the way we let experts on nonsense babble on about their specific deity and its role in the natural world. What does super-magical-man-you-can’t-disprove have to do with evolution? The moderator made the mistake of claiming both Dawkins and the Archbishop knew for certain what the truth of the Universe was. Dawkins ended up admitting the limitations of his own understanding (and the obvious inability to disprove a negative), and yet this same humility in the face of the unknown is never displayed by our religious counterparts. How can the Archbishop be certain that his specific brand of fairy-tale bullshit is the right one? He just decided it was true, and the rest was easy.
The annoying thing in all of this is the fact that mouth-breathers couldn’t wait to point out the fact that Dawkins had to concede that he couldn’t fully be sure of the existence of God. It’s our honesty that gets the better of us when it comes to that question, because the truth is, this uncertainty is extremely overstated. Remember, religious people rely on absolute certainty to tell them about the world they live in. In their minds, doubt is a golden opportunity to convert someone. Religious folks just can’t understand the fact that atheists naturally accept the incomplete picture of nature we do have, specifically because that uncertainty has scientific value. How can progress ever be made if people think all of the answers to the questions of the Universe were answered a few centuries ago by illiterate animal herders?
Could this guy be more wrong? Here are a couple of choice passages I couldn’t help but comment on (as I’m sure most of you will dissect the rest).
As crusading atheism is sort of a cause today, it is popular, I don’t want to say among scientists, I mean that’s too general and it isn’t so.
Is it ironic for a Christian to use the word “Crusade” when talking about atheism? I sometimes wish these clowns would study their own history. It would make them abandon such a word. The Crusades were one of the bloodiest, savage and murderous campaigns in human history. To compare men like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris to Crusaders is a false equivalence. Comparing professional sectarian murderers with academic debaters is not only insulting; it’s just plain stupid.
I think human beings have faced hard challenges. The Second World War was a difficult a crisis as mankind ever will face. Fifty million people died, humanity teetered on the edge.
Actually, Steven Pinker has a fantastic presentation on the myth of violence, in particular this idea the Second World War was the bloodiest and most savage conflict in human history. Yes, many people did die, but compared to the mortality rates of other ancient conflicts, the odds of being killed by your fellow man in WWII was much lower. We are living in the most peaceful time in the history of mankind, and yet we’re constantly thinking the opposite.
State paganism was preached aggressively by Hitler-ite Germany, which despised Christianity as much as it hated Jews; didn’t hate Christians as people, but it hated Christianity.
Yeah, the Reichskonkordat seems to contradict your retarded statement, Dave. For anyone unfamiliar with this treaty, it was signed only 6 months after Hitler took power, and it’s still technically valid today. The Concordat made the Holy See of Rome the only official religion of Germany. Hardly sounds like paganism, does it?
Here’s a speech by Richard Dawkins from last year’s Global Atheist Convention Melbourne. As always, his talk is poetic, inspiring and beautiful. A must watch for any fan.
I love the last sentence when he says of Kurt Wise (a young-earth creationist with a PHD in geology):
“You cannot argue with a mind like that. A mind like that, it seems to me, is a disgrace to the human species”.
Snap!
Reddit, that preferred social news website of godless heathens, got members to ask questions and some were answered by Richard Dawkins. How cool is that? If I could have asked a question, it would have been “how often do fine ladies hit on you at conferences?”
With 1/3 of all British schools being faith based, Dawkins released this doc examining why they exist, and how their rebirth has forced parents to change their behavior in order to give their kids the best access to education. Faith has about as much place in a state run school as prayer does; which is to say none. If you aren’t British, odds are you haven’t seen this, so enjoy.
Man, how awesome was it to be at that bloody lecture? Both Richard and Neil are two of the best at demonstrating the true beauty of the Universe. While robed clowns profess the wonders of their limited and myopic mythology, these intellectual giants help us to see the Universe for what it really is. If you’ve ever taken the wonders of science for granted (something we are all inclined to do), remember we are perhaps the luckiest generation yet born, who knows enough about the Cosmos to fathom our true place among the stars.
Indeed, who wants an absolute moral authority? If you accept such an idea, then whatever that authority decides must therefore be moral, even if he condones slavery, murder, incest, rape and genocide. Do you not find it in the least bit ironic religious people who condemn us for not having a higher moral authority believe in one who so clearly violates our own basic moral compass? Do you put your trust in our modern secular society, or do you trust rigid theocratic dogma? I’ll let you visit other religious states and then make up your mind…
Hey guys, as promised we are right on schedule for another great episode of the TGA podcast. This week Ryan and I talk about the distressing news that rifle sights in the US military have secret Bible codes on them, and we also talk about Richard Dawkin’s ‘Non Believers Giving Aid’ charity, and how some religious folks don’t seem to understand you can be good without God!
This week, Ryan and I break down the works of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennet, and Harris. If you’ve never read their books or wanted to know what we thought of them, you’ll love this week’s show.
I love listening to professional charlatans about how they employ their craft. I can understand why some of them dedicate their lives to educating people about what they do. It’s kind of like the first time your apartment gets robbed; you get a small sense of just how crappy some people are. Derren is extremely popular; last time I posted a video, people were still playing it a year later. So yeah, I love Derren Brown.
I wanted to include all six, but for some strange reason, part 3 can’t be embedded.
Here is a great interview with fellow Canadian Steven Pinker for fans of evolutionary science. The video is over an hour long, so if you’re going to watch this all in one sitting, might I suggest planning your afternoon accordingly. Trust me, it’s worth it!
BBC News has an interesting and in depth interview with Richard Dawkins. I’ve read almost everything he’s written over the years, so I guess that makes me a fan. Personally, I much prefer it when he talks about science than religion, but that certainly doesn’t mean it isn’t always interesting. Here’s a highlight:
As the observance of religion in our particular country has declined, we’ve seen the rise of perhaps what (laughing) you might call more irrational beliefs. I mean I’m talking about astrology and crystal gazing and things of that kind. It seems perhaps from that, to argue the need for religion, that there is never a vacuum in human ideas, that focus around religious notions.
Yes, that’s an interesting point. My prejudice is that those things are even worse than religion. As for whether you’re right that they signify a vacuum that needs to be filled, I’m not sure about that. I suppose the human mind is complicated, it has all sorts of desires and things that satisfy it. If there are people who seem to need either religion or astrology and crystal gazing to satisfy them, I would like to have a go at giving them an alternative, and just to see whether perhaps it might work better as a satisfying agent. And that would be understanding of the real world, and understanding of why you exist, where you come from, what the world is, what it’s all about.
I think that is such a satisfying thing to have in your head, that I find it very hard to believe that anybody would prefer astrology, crystal gazing, or religion. And so my suspicion is perhaps there is a vacuum that needs to be filled, and it may be that scientific rationalism just hasn’t got its act together enough to fill that vacuum, and if it did, it would fill it.
If you want to know how to waste your time, then how about trying to prove to a rich creationist that transitional fossils exist. Adnan Oktar is a wealthy writer who is the Turkish equivalent of Richard Dawkins (in light of the country’s failure to accept evolutionary theory, he’s as good as it gets). He’s supposedly put up a trillion lira up (that’s roughly 7 million dollars), daring anyone to provide evidence of a transitional fossil.
Oktar released a book entitled The Atlas of Creation, which is the kind of junk writing you’d expect from someone who’s convinced their Bronze Age book of magic must somehow be taken literally. In it, he argues that life has not evolved, and the Qur’an is the only truly scientific text on the origin of species. Yeah, sounds like a real page turner, no?
Although I’m not usually inclined to judge a book by its cover, this guy looks more like a Colombian Drug Lord than a respected scientist. This is the same douche who pushed to have Dawkin’s site banned in Turkey, since he inevitably felt your average adult would be unable to handle it.
You’re all welcome to try and point this jack hole in the direction of any serious scientific literature that’s come out on the subject in the past 60 years, but he’s convinced all the good stuff was done on the subject roughly 1400 years ago.
