Thanks for taking the time to tell your story here, interesting to hear about the legal wrangling that has to go on just to protect from the intrusion of religious dogma into our legal system. I would personally like to thank you for aiding this case, I find it somewhat disturbing that when you have such a blatant violation that one would still have to “show harm”, “it’s unconstitutional” should be enough.

Here’s what I mean by that. Imagine you were one of those twats that hang around shopping malls badgering every pitiful bastard you run into to take your crumby survey. On this survey you have one question: “Do you believe in God(s)?” On this survey there is simply a blank line for each participant. It’s up to you, the surveyor, to interpret their answer as yes or no.

Answer 1: “Yes” (That’s easy enough now isn’t it)

Answer 2: “No” (This one isn’t so bad either)

Answer 3: “Who’s God?” (This one may be a puzzler, but can someone who has never heard of God believe in God? I honestly don’t think so. The answer here would be “No” since this person cannot believe in God.)

Answer 4: “I don’t know.” (Finally! We have someone that doesn’t know whether or not they believe in God. At least that’s what they’re saying right? Well, claiming to not know whether or not you believe is not the same as believing. If they do not actually believe, then the answer must be “No”.)

My point is this: anything short of believing is not believing. It’s really that simple. Claiming that you “don’t know” is functionally equal to saying “No” since neither answer is “Yes”. Belief is something one actively participates in and it’s not possible to not know if you are actively participating in something. An equivalent example would be: “Are you swimming?” If someone answers, “what’s swimming?” that still equals “No.” If someone says, “I don’t know,” that’s still “No.”

Hold the press! If someone answers “I don’t know” doesn’t that mean they really don’t know? Not exactly. We give special consideration to the question of God belief because of the elevated status that religion enjoys in our culture. Take the swimming example from above. The answer, “I don’t know,” no longer makes any sense does it? Believing is no less a verb than swimming, so why should “I don’t know” be any less of a ridiculous answer? No one of sound mind can possibly “not know” if they believe in God or not.

The primary reason that we point out this absurdity on the show is because many folks that lable themselves as “agnostic” use this ambiguity and intintionally blur the line of distinction. I honestly don’t mind people using the agnostic lable. Indeed, all rational people are agnostic (wheither theist or atheist) so it’s a fine lable to use. My problem is with muddying definitions in order to create ambiguity which is basically used for misdirection. It’s a selfish shell game that is only advantageous to those that wish to remain ambiguous. The rest of us are stuck cleaning up their shit.

Now, the coin flipping scenario you offered doesn’t really work here. Your example, unlike the question of God belief, does not offer a binary option. The choices you offer aren’t between belief and disbelief; they are between belief A and belief B. The options to disbelieve that the coin was even flipped or it landed on it’s side aren’t offered, but they’re still just as valid.

The only rational answer to your example is to believe none of your options for the same reasons I don’t believe in God: no evidence. All I have to work with is your anecdotal story about flipping a coin. In other words nonparticipation is always an option, but with the question of belief in God, nonparticipation is equivilant to No.

Sorry if this explanation seems poorly thought out. It’s after 2:00am here and I’m just up because I can’t sleep right now :P

Oh, I’m really glad you like the show. Thanks for listening!

But you either believe something or you don’t, you either know something or you don’t.

Your belief or knowledge can be incorrect, tentative or incomplete but you still have it or you don’t. There’s no “I don’t know if I know” and there is no “I don’t know if I believe”.. if you don’t know if you believe then you don’t believe… that’s the identity of “belief”.

Btw, I love your podcasts.

Mulder didn’t have a porn career, he had a porn collection.

Scully was catholic. Very, very catholic. They devoted entire episodes to her faith and about how ironic Mulder thought her faith was, given her scientific background and the fact that she would scoff at Mulder’s supernatural theories.

As far as my personal opinion goes, I think it’s ultimately unhelpful to cross “In God We Trust” off of our money. I would only support such an action if humor is deployed in the message. For example, crossing out “God” and replacing it with “Xenu,” or trading “Trust” for “Truss” would be funny. The message would be the same but the delivery would be far more entertaining.

I have added Mr. Icke to our list for further investigation / shredding.

Thanks for listening and thanks for your comments!

–Joe

You didn’t lose this female listener, and could you please do podcast about David Icke, because I’m dying to hear you shred him.

Lovin’ your podcasts courtesy of Zune,
Tahanet

Do you have any links to site that detail how to develop Socratic thinking/arguments?

Thanks,
Richard

I was trying to make the point that even though we see attitudes like theirs represented in mass American culture (granted, they’re caricatures), much of those archetypal qualities were constructed out of whole cloth in the 1950’s and 1960’s, first in response to the Cold War and the Soviets (Walter), and second in response to those Walter-like figures (the Dude). He wanted more examples, so I brought up the “under god” in the pledge and on our money as a response to the godless Soviets. Many today take those things for granted, as if they were always there since the founding of the nation. My student did, and he was surprised to learn they were relatively new.

He wanted more examples of that sort of erasure of history, so I paralleled the above example with how much of Christmas celebrations comes from pagan ritual, and the church used to not tolerate such elements during Christmas. Yet every Christmas we see all of these pagan adornments and practices brought right inside Christian churches, and people sort of go about their business as if Christmas was always that way. The same kind of situation holds for the hyper-nationalism Walter is a caricature of in the film.

I never should have used the Christmas example because I didn’t know the student was raised in a fundamentalist home, so he started asking me what I believe. I hedged, as I don’t think it’s my place to throw out my own beliefs on religion in a public university classroom, especially in a class that has nothing to do with religion. So he pulled Pascal’s Wager on me.

Trying to figure out how to respond without coming right out and telling him what I believe and don’t believe, I said if we take the student’s position and assume god both exists and created us, then we also know he gave us rational minds to work through problems and assumptions, plenty of bible verses that talk positively about using reason, but I’m not sure of the right one to pull out for this argument — need to find that.) We know that rational minds have produced a lot of good for the world (computers, agriculture, Stanley Kubrick films), so if it’s good, this must line up with a god-given faculty.

That means that if we DIDN’T use that god-given rationality to question the veracity of god, AND if god exists, then we’d be acting against god’s will. If god exists and you didn’t challenge that fact through one’s capacity for rationalism, imagine getting to heaven’s gates and being sent away because it was a sin to act only on faith and not on the tools provided by providence.

Then I threw in the bit about the word Israel meaning ‘to struggle with god,’ and how in Judaism the nature of god is argued all the time, kind of like in the Talmud. (I’ve been to Seders where the after-meal debate turned into a referendum on whether Moses just led the Hebrews out of a physical slavery and into a moral one, and if Moses was doing this on orders from god, that makes god something like a spiritually ambivalent and plantation owner.)

He dropped it there, and said he didn’t know how to argue that. Granted, he’s a first-year college student. I don’t know how that would work against more sophisticated apologists. That’s why I need to find the verses praising rationality, and throw the special pleading flag when they say the bible wants us to reasons for god’s existence, not against.

You keep listening, we’ll keep recording!

By the way, a follower of Socrates is a socratist.

Necrocygnophilia (not “necrocygnaphilia”) would be sex with dead swans.

Regarding your suggested campaign against the proposed UK Christian adverts, you can make complaints online, so no letter writing required.

http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/how_to_complain/complaints_form/

Oh, and thanks for making the correction regarding the BBC from my comment on a previous episode.

The BBC is not “government run”. It is not a state-broadcaster, despite being publicly funded through a licence fee levied on television owners.

It’s a pretty minor comment, and I do appreciate your podcasts, keep it up!

I’ll have to check that DVD set out.

oh man, necrocygnaphilia, that is going to haunt my dreams for months to come.

Thanks for the corrections and input, it is highly valued, thanks for listening.

NECROCYGNAPHILIA

You’re welcome.

And it is gorram brilliant.

There are exceptions, natural and induced chromosome doubling in plants being the most obvious example, something which can in fact result in more (agriculturally) useful plants. But plants are as far as I know the main exception. Thus, segregation tends to be a lesser source of mutations, while recombination can in fact induce a number of mutations, including inversions, duplications, translocations and deletions. Other are caused by the replication-machinery of the cell, etc.

You are partially right that mutations (inc. genetic drift) are the reasons why different populations look different, but not entirely. Keep in mind that even without these, you could still have radically different populations arising from the same stock, simply on account of changes in gene frequencies facillitated through segregation and recombination, via (natural) selection. And it would be a lot faster than only mutations and drift, which is probably the main advantage to sexual reproduction.

Ultimately mutations are what allow populations to continue to diverge indefintly (excluding HGT), but in the vast majority of cases these have only a very tiny effect on the appearance, relative to that caused by random recombination and segregation, when we compare child with parent in sexual organisms.

But don’t take what I say as “gospel truth”. I just study biology (at the bachelor level in fact, hope to finish it by summer) so I’m hardly an expert. I just have strong opinions. But thanks for the compliments. :)

Cheers.

I will admit that this may not be why you “look different” it’s an exaggeration to drive home a point without genetic drift and mutation populations would be much more similar in appearance.

As to scientific laws, I do stand corrected (on multiple accounts), what makes a “law” in science seems more objective than I can handle.

Lastly, to the RNA/DNA question, there’s a lot of interesting research going on, and abiogenesis is still a relatively young field, in earlier shows I think i tried to be more clear of the uncertainties surrounding this work, apologies if I was sounding too certain. Work in this field is fascinating and we seem to see breakthroughs every month or so, an exciting time to be sure.

Thanks for sharing your corrections, while I spend a lot of time reading on a wide range of fields it’s always nice to have an expert in a single field come down and tell me what’s up. I also dig your handle.

Other than those points (which stood out because I happen to study biology), I just want to praise your podcast as being very enjoyable. Keep up the good work. Cheers!

I just want to make that clear before I vote.

On the last topic of conversation – whether or not religious belief is a hinderance on bad people doing bad things… I’m leaning towards agreeing with Eli on this. Because even if you don’t fear the police or legal system, if the notion that you might spend eternity in a pool of fire trying to outswim piranha *does* stop you from doing bad things, then perhaps you aren’t that bad of a person to begin with.
In addition, I’ve seen instances where people are just downright nasty to their fellow man, and when confronted they say it doesn’t matter whether they are forgiven here, because all they need to worry about is whether or not God/Jesus forgives them… in other words they can do anything they want Monday – Saturday, and so long as they make it to church on time Sunday and confess they are completely at peace with themselves and their actions. It’s a way of shedding themselves of their responsibility for their actions, and I’ve always found that to be cowardly.

One last comment: you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall specifying that the drinking game had to involve alcoholic drinks per se… my brain just latched on to the irony of the phrases “Jesus” and “Christ” and started keeping a tally, and I didn’t want to be the only nerd out here keeping track.

It seems to me that those who are lumping Hitler in to this “pool of godlessness” are either doing so to separate him from their church (Christians would never do something so cruel!) or are taking the imagery of evil that Hitler portrays and applying it to atheists so that people will consider the word “atheist” to be synonymous with the word “evil”.

And Eli – your recap of your New Years Eve reminded me of the party you had in high school… only we all missed the countdown because we were too involved with our game of Trivial Pursuit to pay attention to the clock.

I had it added to the music list of the following new atheist browser bar: http://www.godbar.net/
It’s “the most godless creation online’.

I hope you’ll mention them, and that in turn those who download the bar will have ready access to all your shows. I’m listening to #15 streaming through them right now.

You might be right in a way. I think we all agreed that when government agencies allows any sort of religious display, it’s either all or nothing–but that it seems more responsible to simply keep our public spaces free of such displays.

Where we may have missed the boat is on the specific intentions of the FFRF. It never occurred to me that the FFRF deliberately crafted an explicitly inflammatory sign with the singular intent of pointing out how volatile such an arrangement could become.

It did occur to me that the sign itself was meant to achieve this end by the virtue of it simply being an “atheist sign,” but never that authors tossed some extra “sauce” on it to emphasize their point. If so, I am still not sure that I would have gone about it in exactly the same way. I have always been impressed with the FFRF. They have always stood out as a class act in my mind, but this particular approach smacked of passive aggression.

It’s a small matter, though. In the end I can only applaud their efforts–whether they be exactly as I would do them or not. On the whole, the FFRF is one of the finest secular organizations there is and the world can only get better so long as they keep on keeping on.

great things fellas.