Saturday, December 31, 2011
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Thursday, December 15, 2011
In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.
“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.
“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.
Source:
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/12/In-Memoriam-Christopher-Hitchens-19492011
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
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Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Monday, November 28, 2011
Stephen Colbert Interview with Neil Degrasse Tyson
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/watch/2010/01/29/stephen-colbert-interview-montclair-kimberley-academy
Saturday, November 26, 2011
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Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Christopher Hitchens debates Jay Richards part 1
Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBF2ybZWmeQ&feature=related
Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nVIluSG69k&feature=related
Part 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mn5i467e5k&feature=related
Part 5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKbNE9mGDtw&feature=related
Part 6:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ4DJP8hj5I&feature=related
Part 7:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC2wR8DfJQY&feature=related
Part 8:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHO7dYVRiAY&feature=related
Part 9:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lVrQtbfK5I&feature=related
Part 10:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3xrWofgXKI&feature=related
Monday, August 29, 2011
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Thursday, August 11, 2011
Stephen Hawking
(Click Pic to Embiggen)
-Stephen Hawking, Curiosity S01E01 - Did god create the universe?
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
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Monday, June 6, 2011
How can you have morals without God?
Morality in general is broken down into (at least) three branches: Consequentialism, or the belief that the morality of an act is based on the consequences of the action; Deontology, or the belief that the morality of an act is based on whether or not it is compliant with a rule/rules; and Virtue ethics, or the belief that morality should be based on what people 'are', rather than what people 'do'.
Using these definitions, most of today's religions advocate deontology, with the set of rules being ordained by supernatural entities. However, there is nothing inherent in this branches that requires them.
Beyond that, morality can be studied within the fields of psychology and sociology. While both offer explanations of its existence, neither field offers a solution to say that one set of morals is greater than another, but the notion can still be achieved through secular philosophy. This is evidenced by the judicial actions of secular institutions (perhaps the best example is that of secular governments) or prevailing social norms which have no basis in religion or are not held by religious adherents. Examples would include the outlawing of slavery, and the rejection of sexism and racism.
Conversely, dogmatic approaches by religions to establish one solid set of rules, which explicitly state one thing is wrong and the other is not, deter progress in morality.
"But look! The most horrible murderous leaders in history have been atheists! Hitler! Pol Pot! Stalin!"
A common misconception that has been decidedly promoted among the theist community is that each of these evil dictators was evil because they were atheists. The implication is that without a god, people have no 'moral grounding' and are therefore somehow inclined to perform evil acts such as mass murder.
This is completely false. Morals and morality are natural to all humans, and are entirely separate to religious belief. Would a believer in religion suddenly decide to kill and rape if they stopped believing in god? Indeed, if morals are truly determined by religious teachings, then slavery, the stoning of adulterers, homosexuals, misbehaving children, and many of the other atrocities condoned by the Bible would not be considered atrocities at all -- they would be perfectly 'moral' things to do. In practice, morality is better described as being an inevitable result of the Zeitgeist (from the German phrase meaning 'the spirit of the times'), the ever-changing social understanding that we all share that determines what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior within every society.
If a person doesn’t already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won’t discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran -- as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.
We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn’t make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery -- and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture, like the golden rule, can be valued for its ethical wisdom without requiring us to believe that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.
The argument is also intrinsically wrong for the following reasons:
- The existence of gods is not contingent on who takes a theist or atheist position.
- Causality is crucial in understanding any kind of relationship. The causality between examples of immoral atheists and atheism is borderline non-existent, in most cases -- as much to the point as saying that Hitler and Stalin were both bad because they had mustaches.
- The causality between immoral actions is much greater with religions. Perhaps the purest and most recent example is the attacks on various European cartoonists drawing pictures of Islam's Mohammad. Were the attackers not Muslim, it's doubtful they would take such violent offense.
- It denotes grave misunderstandings of history as will be discussed later in this section
In regards to Hitler, Pol Pot & Stalin, it is important to point out first that Hitler appears to have not been an atheist at all. He was raised as a Catholic, regularly invoked Jesus in his speeches, and spoke often of his and the German peoples' "manifest destiny" -- a decidedly un-atheist position. It is also worth noting that aside from Hitler, the overwhelming majority of Nazi party members were religious, and it was they who committed the crimes of the Nazi party first hand. In addition, the Nazi party also officially banned books that "ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy." Pol Pot was raised Buddhist, later spent eight years in a Catholic seminary, but was more accurately described as a deist as he professed a belief in "heaven" and "destiny." Stalin was born into a very religious household and attended the Tiflis Theological Seminary, from which he was expelled. His personal religious beliefs are hard to pin down exactly, however he did publicly advocate the idea that religions were unnecessary and was likely to have been an Atheist.
Sam Harris provides a typically lucid explanation regarding the actions of these men:
"People of faith regularly claim that atheism is responsible for some of the most appalling crimes of the 20th century. Although it is true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying degrees, they were not especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements were little more than litanies of delusion--delusions about race, economics, national identity, the march of history or the moral dangers of intellectualism. In many respects, religion was directly culpable even here. Consider the Holocaust: The anti-Semitism that built the Nazi crematoria brick by brick was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, religious Germans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, the religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.)
Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself--of which every religion has more than its fair share. There is no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable, or too accepting of rational inquiry."
Source: http://www.reddit.com/help/faqs/atheism#HowcanyouhavemoralswithoutGod
Sunday, June 5, 2011
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Tuesday, May 31, 2011
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Is Atheism a religion?
Is atheism a religion?
"Atheism is just another religion." or "It takes faith to be an atheist."
There are several errors in such an assumption. Primary among them is that atheism is descriptive of a singular characteristic: a lack of belief in a god or gods. Quite literally anything else is negotiable. It's possible for an atheist to believe that ghosts exist, for example, so long as those ghosts aren't gods. Theism, the counterpart to atheism, is also not a religion. Religion requires doctrine, rituals, and other bells and whistles.
That, however, may not be enough to convince someone inclined toward the belief that atheism is some sort of religion. Luckily, there are many other common characteristics of religions:
Sacred objects, sacred places, sacred times or days
There is no concept of "sacred" inherent to atheism.
Rituals focused on the above
Being atheist just is. There is nothing that needs to be done to become an atheist or remain one save not believing in gods.
Making statements on existence, either current or origin
These things are often claimed by religions in the form of creation myths. Atheism has no such thing.
Providing a philosophy
"Lack of belief in a god or gods" doesn't speak to how to live. The society one lives in does.
Providing a world view
The religious version is often basically "God did it" and builds from there. Atheism has no such thing.
Providing a moral code
These things are inherent to humanity in general. Most people regardless of belief (or lack thereof) will agree that it's wrong to shoot someone in the face, for instance. Atheism itself makes no statements on morals or behavior.
Do you have to be X to be an atheist?
Do you have to be a rationalist, materialist, skeptic, humanist, freethinker, secularist, and/or naturalist to be an atheist?
Simply put, no. You can be an atheist and believe in almost anything -- except a theistic god. There are certainly atheists who are spiritual, believe in the supernatural, accept mind/body dualism, and so forth. You will find, however, that most self-identified atheists will take a rationalist approach to defending their beliefs on a philosophical level. For this reason, you will find a predominance of skepticism and naturalism and a general rejection of the supernatural in most godless forums of discussion, including this subreddit. This predominance of rationalism is reflected within this FAQ. Indeed, many common questions directed at "atheists" should be more accurately described as questions directed toward freethinkers, or rationalists, or materialists. It is a possibility that many of the questions might be answered by atheists would would attribute it to some kind of spirit, alien, or other poorly founded response.
The atheist stereotype
Often times people who aren't atheists have arrived at a stereotype in their head of an atheist as someone who must be anti-theist and is often rude, arrogant, outspoken or angry.
While there aren't any hard statistics to back this stereotype, it's most likely the result of the 'Toupee Fallacy'. Everyone thinks that they can spot a toupee wearer because they only see the shoddy toupees. The convincing toupees go by undetected. To this extent, people think they know that atheists are often outspoken, arrogant, etc. because those are the most easily noticed atheists.
If there is a prevalence of these attitudes, it can be understood by simple comparison to any fictitious entity. Were the world's population killing itself over firm commitments to various breeds of invisible centaurs, one should hope that any logical person would be angry and outspoken, or that they should be susceptible to arrogance and rude behavior.
Source:
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
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Friday, April 29, 2011
Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry vs. The Catholic Church
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
Saturday, April 23, 2011
We Are Here: The Pale Blue Dot
I know I have featured "The Pale Blue Dot" by Carl Sagan before, but this version does an excellent job of combining the speech with a great musical score. And besides you can never have enough Carl Sagan.
Hitchens' address to American Atheists
Dear fellow-unbelievers,
Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.
That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.
Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.
As the heirs of a secular revolution, American atheists have a special responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution that patrols the boundary between Church and State. This, too, is an honor and a privilege. Believe me when I say that I am present with you, even if not corporeally (and only metaphorically in spirit...) Resolve to build up Mr Jefferson's wall of separation. And don't keep the faith.
Sincerely
Christopher Hitchens
Friday, April 22, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
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Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Robert Heinlein
"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a God superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child."– Robert A Heinlein
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Sam Harris
"On almost every page, the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise non-believers."-Sam Harris
Monday, April 4, 2011
Nick Annis
"Religious morality shouldn't ever be allowed anywhere near secular law, especially law related to sex and gender."-Nick Annis
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Friday, April 1, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
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Thursday, March 24, 2011
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Sam Harris
"In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs."
-Sam Harris
Monday, March 21, 2011
Doug Stanhope and Daniel Dennett
“Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.”-Daniel Dennett
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Christopher Hitchens
""Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."-Christopher Hitchens
Steven Weinberg and Science
"They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it’s a good thing."-Steven Weinberg
Friday, March 18, 2011
Nietzsche and Einstein
"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Thomas Hobbes and the Pope
"The Papacy is no other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof."-Thomas Hobbes
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Ambrose Bierce
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Tim Minchin and Pascal
"Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other."- Blaise Pascal
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Lenny Bruce and two religions
"If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses."-Lenny Bruce
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Stephen Fry and Arthur Clark
"I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent."
-Arthur C. Clark
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Calendar and Roddenberry
"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."- Gene Roddenberry
John Adams and Santayana
"The Government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion."
-John Adams
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Justin Brown and Star Wars
"An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished..."
-Justin Brown
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Bertrand Russell
"And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence."-Bertrand Russell
Jefferson and Sagan
"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep-seated need to believe."
-Carl Sagan
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Atheism's one commandment...
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart"- H. L. Mencken
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Religion vs. Science
"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
- Steven Weinberg