1. Shaw TV Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #175266 by Thanny on May 5, 2008 at 3:55 am

It took me a while to figure out why the interviewer was asking barely coherent (or downright incoherent) questions, and had a strangely puzzled look on her face as Richard responded.

But at about 27 minutes in, it became clear. She's as thick as a sequoia. Do the genes heal the body? Does she have any notion of what genes are? Shouldn't she have spent two minutes looking it up before interviewing a biologist who wrote a book entitled "The Selfish Gene", about which she planned to ask a question?

2. Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher

Comment #159725 by Thanny on April 13, 2008 at 1:37 am

Oh, and one other thing.

Maher was *JOKING* when he said he interviewed Collins, and confirmed that the latter believed in the talking snake. It certainly seemed to me that Richard was also joking with his response.

Not that my estimate of Collins' intelligence is at all high, after reading bits from his book (I couldn't possibly stomach reading the whole thing).

3. Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher

Comment #159718 by Thanny on April 13, 2008 at 1:00 am

OK, several points.

1) Real Time does not use laugh tracks. Only second-rate sitcoms use them. Professor Dawkins' reply is sufficient explanation for why you heard laughing with the time delay (and it's also possible we heard the normal audience while it was played for them).

2) Bill Maher lives in California. Perhaps it's only something only native-born Americans would understand, but Californians have their own stereotype, that of being flaky. Like all stereotypes, there's some truth behind it, and Maher has his share of West-coast flakiness. If you really want to retch, watch the episode where had the founder of PETA on. She actually said that nitrogen was a greenhouse gas, in a nonsensical tirade where she tried to claim that non-vegetarians couldn't be environmentalists.

3) ALL people are imperfect. Some of you seem like the kind of prat who would break off an engagement because the fiance put the toilet paper on the roll backwards. Honestly, learn how to deal with real people. You're not going to find anyone who shares your point of view exactly.

4) If you think Maher isn't funny, you have no sense of humor. I know you think you do - everyone thinks they have a sense of humor - but sorry, you don't.

4. Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher

Comment #136842 by Thanny on March 1, 2008 at 8:44 pm

Pentecost:

Oh no! Bill Maher isn't right about everything! Let's hurry up and accuse him of being a completely worthless human!

If you think Maher is a poor comedian, you're merely demonstrating a crippled sense of humor. The notion that he's a misogynist is rather ludicrous, but you'd have to actually pay attention to what he says to know that.

Yes, he's got some wacky ideas about food and medicine. Hitchens has some wacky ideas about Iraq. That doesn't mean I need to assassinate their characters, and dismiss everything they say as tainted.

That's because I'm a grown-up. Look into it.

5. Sam Harris debate with Rabbi David Wolpe

Comment #107572 by Thanny on January 4, 2008 at 7:01 pm

Wolpe is not an intelligent man. He's an encyclopedia of failed religious arguments, with no ability to comprehend their rebuttals.

What a wanker.

6. 2007, a bad year for God squadders

Comment #101605 by Thanny on December 20, 2007 at 3:03 pm

It started out not so bad, but just had to end with rubbish.

I've yet to see any screed remotely in favor of religion that showed any real consciousness of the fact that there have been thousands of belief systems invented on this planet, and that no religion (not even their pet one, whatever it may be) has ever held sway over a majority of the earth's peoples.

All these pro-faith nitwits come across as provincial ignoramuses.

7. CBC News: Sunday - Richard Dawkins

Comment #100086 by Thanny on December 18, 2007 at 8:25 am

That interviewer is a moron. There is no way in which any reasonable person can claim anything more than a decent probability that MLK was inspired by religion. The evidence suggests he was inspired by human decency, and used religion as a tool.

And what's with the lead-in garbage about ridding the world of religion, stealing Xmas and other religion holidays, etc.? Is he really that stupid that he can't even read what Dawkins has actually said on "religious" holidays?

Update:

Good grief. I should have watched the second half before commenting. That interviewer isn't just a moron, he's a complete wanker. Listening to his drivel is demeaning to human intelligence in general.

8. Gamma-Ray Wipe-Out

Comment #47215 by Thanny on June 3, 2007 at 2:34 pm

This is a bit dated. Short GRB's have a good explanatory theory now.

My main problem with this article, however, is the end. No, you can't predict a GRB, but if you know the mechanism, you can see whether or not any can occur close enough to do damage.

There are no potential GRB objects close enough to cause any problems for life on earth at this time, so we needn't worry about that.

9. Sam Harris Strikes Back

Comment #45824 by Thanny on May 29, 2007 at 11:03 am

Those of you who are willing to give Hedges a pass because he's not "really" religious are both hitting the point square on and missing it entirely.

He's attacking "atheism", and defending "religion".

As Harris points out, he's a textbook case of a religious "moderate" trying to preserve the obscene immunity from criticism for any belief labelled "religious". Unlike most such moderates, he's not merely doing this in an attempt to protect his own bland beliefs from criticism, and only incidentally protecting extreme religious beliefs. He's actually convinced himself that such beliefs don't really exist.

To clarify, I consider anyone who thinks the earth is literally thousands of years old, that evolution is false, etc. to be holding extreme religious beliefs.

10. The root of all evil?

Comment #43698 by Thanny on May 22, 2007 at 10:16 am

Not a horrible article, on the whole, but I do wish these people would read and understand what they claim to be representing about what others have said.

The quote "Martin Luther King an orgiast" gives entirely the wrong impression about what Hitchens actually wrote. He clearly admired King as a person very much, and merely made reference to the fact that King was also a human being with a sex life. He also did not consider King to be actually religious at all - merely using the best tools he had at his disposal to serve his goals.

11. Hitchens on Falwell, Part 2

Comment #43578 by Thanny on May 22, 2007 at 4:06 am

Regarding the "Dr." Falwell, bit, it was only Reed calling him that.

After the second time he used the title, you can hear Hitchens scoffing at him.

12. Christopher Hitchens Is a Treasure

Comment #43312 by Thanny on May 21, 2007 at 5:17 am

At one point, Hitchens proposes a thought experiment...

Is that really true? I hope it's cited, because that line is an almost verbatim lift from a practically identical thought experiment in Sam Harris' The End of Faith.

But as Sam Harris states rather pointedly in The End of Faith, if we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Márquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin.

13. Catholic Church Reconsiders Limbo

Comment #43309 by Thanny on May 21, 2007 at 5:05 am

One might think that it's highly improbable that there are both people in this world with absolutely no sense of humor (none at all), and people who think The Onion isn't funny.

But you needn't multiply the probabilities, for they are one and the same.

14. Four arrested in Iraq 'honor killing'

Comment #42873 by Thanny on May 20, 2007 at 3:33 am

If you cause the death of anyone but yourself, you've forfeited any conceivable claim to having participated in an "honor" killing.

Maybe we can spread the meme of seppuku to these barbarians, so the sense of dishonor that their prudery engenders at least doesn't lead to the brutal murder of innocent women.

15. Among the Disbelievers

Comment #40531 by Thanny on May 14, 2007 at 12:15 pm

"Dawkins's sense of history is so minimal that it approaches the vanishing point. He is a classic example of the kind of shallow rationalist who thinks that all you have to know about history is that everything was cloudy and dark until the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at which point the sun began poking through."

I believe the proper Brit response to a comment like this is "horse puckey".

The historical errors made by the author of this article make the above statement not only an insult, but an exercise in hypocrisy.

16. Consciousness Comes from DNA

Comment #39936 by Thanny on May 12, 2007 at 10:43 am

I find myself irritated by this mirror test. Or, rather, by the lofty interpretations of it.

My cat recognizes its own reflection in the mirror, but doesn't care. It doesn't inspect itself, or meet any of those other criteria.

So how do I know that it knows the reflection is of itself? Because my cat is fiercely territorial, and would attack another cat on the spot.

If you actually think about it, *any* animal which, in nature, has occasion to visit a watering hole of some sort, will likely be equipped to recognize its own reflection. Most simply ignore it.

These mirror tests confirm only that the animals in question (including humans) are vain enough to be interested in looking at themselves.

Any animal that has no reaction whatsoever to its image in a mirror probably knows it's a reflection, and simply doesn't care.