godlessness
pharyngula | May 5, 2007Christopher Hitchens' appearance on the Daily Show was a disappointment—largely because Hitchens seemed to be half in the bag, and Stewart kept stepping all over his words trying to make them funny, and the short format was not to the favor of a fellow who tends to speak in complete sentences and paragraphs. So how about a half hour interview with an alert Hitchens, with an interviewer who's interested in hearing what he has to say, and gives him the opportunity to speak at more length? Here's Hitchens on the Charlie Rose show.
Much better, even if I disagreed strongly with Hitchens on much…
pharyngula | May 4, 2007Tomorrow is 5 May, and I mentioned in myreview of A Brief History of Disbelief that this excellent documentary on atheism/agnosticism was supposed to be aired on PBS stations all across the country around this time. It's been hard to track down, though; I've looked in my local TV listings, and there's no mention. Readers have contacted their stations directly, and some have reported back that they will be seeing it, while others have found that their stations are not carrying it. It's very confusing.
Well, a reader found a grid listing all of the airdates and stations that will be showing A…
pharyngula | April 30, 2007Eh.
It wasn't bad. Hitchens declared some laudable objectives for his book: he wants to end the idea that calling someone a person of faith is a compliment, and he laid out his position on the origins of religion. It's built on fear of the dark, fear of death, and hatred of sex, and those aren't sound bases for rational thought. So the sentiment was good.
Presentation … well, that wasn't so good. I know Hitchens can be eloquent, but he wasn't. He bumbled about and couldn't quite manage to put two coherent sentences together.
I'm still getting the book, but I don't think his performance…
pharyngula | April 30, 2007Christopher Hitchens will be on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart tonight! I'll tune in, but if he tries to defend the Iraq war, it's going off.
pharyngula | April 29, 2007Since I didn't get in my usual god-bashing today, you'll have to take in The Carnival of the Godless #65 and Revere's Freethinker Sunday Sermonette. They'll clear the piety out of your sinuses and flush the veneration right out of your colon.
pharyngula | April 28, 2007There's an interesting idea floating around at a few other godless sites: the Parking Lot Challenge, which proposes that atheists take up the task of putting together positive statements about reason and rationality and materialism and naturalism, a little active proselytizing for godlessness.
Instead I want to see YouTube videos of people ambling around church parking lots during Sunday services and placing pro-rational "tracts" on people's windshields. I'm not talking about in-your-face "God doesn't exist, get used to it, ya fuckin' hayseed!" stuff, but something genuinely useful and even…
pharyngula | April 28, 2007Brian Flemming reveals that the godless debaters who will engage the two idiots on 5 May are Brian Sapient and Kelly of the Rational Response Squad. He also mentions that Ray Comfort is planning to bring a banana to the debate. Oh, man, I hope so.
If the debate rolls around to atheist morality (which it probably will) there's one comment they could make that would discombobulate me, so I hope they stick to the banana. The troubling revelation would be the fact that Karl Rove may be an unbeliever.
Ack.
I rather doubt that Comfort/Cameron will damn atheists with the litany of "Hitler, Stalin,…
pharyngula | April 25, 2007I just finished watching a copy of a three-part program that was broadcast in England three years ago — A Brief History of Disbelief, narrated by Jonathan Miller. All I can say is … wow. It's less an advocacy of atheism than a kind of post-atheism, a historical and philosophical review of this strange, dying idea of "religion" that reveals the progressive growth of atheistic thought. It's wonderfully dismissive. The real question isn't how people can disbelieve, but how faith can survive and still linger on.
Here's a brief summary of the programs:
A Brief History of Disbelief combines an…
pharyngula | April 24, 2007Their engagement is on youtube, if you prefer your video streaming.
It's more like one round of a ping-pong match than the full bare-knuckle fist fight we'd like to see, but it's not bad. Keep your expectations reasonable, and Dawkins did very well.
pharyngula | April 23, 2007I'm back! I had a long, busy day at a teaching conference, and got persuaded about a few things — I'm designing a new course for freshmen biology majors for the fall term ("Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development", or FunGenEvoDevo for short), and I've been following the pedagogical ideas of Eric Mazur for a while, and this was my chance to go hear him. He said what I wanted to hear about getting basic concepts across to students, which is going to help a great deal in my summer project.
I got back too late to catch Dawkins on the O'Lielly show, though. My wife saw it, said it…
pharyngula | April 22, 2007The author of The Lifelong Activist, Hillary Rettig, sent me a lovely quote and a recommendation.
First, the quote:
Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are men who
want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be
both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing
without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist, Letter to an…
pharyngula | April 21, 2007Larry Moran raised an interesting comparison over at Laden's place. In response to this constant whining that loud-and-proud atheism 'hurts the cause', he brought up a historical parallel:
Here's just one example. Do you realize that women used to march in the streets with placards demanding that they be allowed to vote? At the time the suffragettes were criticized for hurting the cause. Their radical stance was driving off the men who might have been sympathetic to women's right to vote if only those women had stayed in their proper place.
This prompted the usual cry of the…
pharyngula | April 15, 2007
Once upon a time, some people on a road were stopped by a wall.
We didn't mind. It was a good place to stop for a while, and as more people coming down the road stopped at the wall, a community grew at its foot. Most people enjoyed gathering together, so the wall seemed like a fortuitous event, a good reason to rest and celebrate and work together for a while.
The wall wasn't impassable, of course. Some could still clamber over the pile and continue on their journey, but the wall was a little daunting, and the happy community was so tempting, and few bothered.
People being people, we…
pharyngula | April 15, 2007Then let Josh Timonen know that you're interested.
If we were doing this right, though, it would involve ritual scarification and great bloody painful welts, rather than just a t-shirt. You're getting off easy.
pharyngula | April 14, 2007Nisbet and Mooney do it again, with an op-ed in the Washington Post … and I'm afraid they've alienated me yet further. I am convinced now that theirs is not an approach that I could find useful, even if I could puzzle out some useable strategy from it. In the very first sentence, they claim that Richard Dawkins gives "creationist adversaries a boost" — it's the tired old argument that we must pander to religious belief. This is their rationale:
Leave aside for a moment the validity of Dawkins's arguments against religion. The fact remains: The public cannot be expected to differentiate…
pharyngula | April 14, 2007John Holbo has devised a wonderfully useful coinage (don't be afraid to follow that link! It's only two paragraphs; he'll have to work it over for a few more weeks to expand it to Holbonian mass) that he applies to Jonah Goldberg's intellectual evasiveness.
To put it another way, Goldberg is making a standard rhetorical move which has no accepted name, but which really needs one. I call it 'the two-step of terrific triviality'. Say something that is ambiguous between something so strong it is absurd and so weak that it would be absurd even to mention it. When attacked, hop from foot to foot…
pharyngula | April 10, 2007(This post was causing some browsers to crash. Let's see if browsers are happier if I hide it below the fold.)
Kevin Beck's response to an interesting article about kids persecuting another kid who was an atheist:
When I first read the blog entry, I thought I was dealing with a bunch of first- or second-graders. Once I quit skimming, I was shocked to learn that the kids in question are all sixth-graders.
Kevin, you are such a naive young innocent. I read the story as a familiar example of common bigotry at all ages — my daughter experienced the same general phenomenon in elementary school,…
pharyngula | April 10, 2007A reader sent me a mild ethical problem, and asked that I put it up to get reader input. This isn't a life-or-death sort of situation, but the kind of low-level, day-to-day aggravation with which we're all familiar.
Today I went to get my car inspected as my state requires it annually, and you will get a ticket for having an expired inspection sticker. The inspection place I went to had a Christian radio station in the waiting room. I politely asked the guy at the desk (who I later confirmed was the owner) to change the channel to one that was not religious. He said he would not.
I…
pharyngula | April 10, 2007I'm not really fond of the idea of categorizing atheists (you either are or aren't, and the game of labeling is often a short step away from ranking, and then you're on the slippery slope to the No True Atheist fallacy), but Hank Fox has an interesting comment that categorizes reasons for being an atheist. It's relevant to that video of a mother reacting to her son's 'coming out', though — one category is the "Rebel Atheist" who adopts the idea to piss off his mother.
Now let's all aspire to be Awakened Atheists.
pharyngula | April 9, 2007Wilkins is not happy that I jumped down Pagels' throat for a stupid comment in an interview. He thinks I ought to take Pagels more seriously (as did some of the commenters here), and, unfortunately, also goes on to mischaracterize the uppity atheist arguments, like so:
This is what I reject about the Dawkins/Moran/PZ aggressive atheism - it takes the most stupid version of religion, argues against it, and then claims to have given reasons for not being religious. At best (and here I concur) they have given reasons not to be stupid theists. But a good argument takes on the best of the…