1. Youtube hater, I respect your right to free speech.

Comment #70704 by icouldbewrongbut on September 16, 2007 at 4:49 pm

madShelly: Exactly! Yuck.

2. Youtube hater, I respect your right to free speech.

Comment #70701 by icouldbewrongbut on September 16, 2007 at 4:34 pm

Sapient,

I defined 'fucktard' as 'name-calling' because it seemed to me emotional and non-descriptive. I didn't consider my criticism of RRS behavior name-calling - though I'm open to correction - I was just trying to state the negative emotional response I experience to your approach. I'm sorry you felt it was insulting.

If the song had been "I can't stand Kent Hovind", I wouldn't have found that name-calling.

I'm 'ok with with people calling others out on what they think of them' if by that you mean the part of criticizing their actions / beliefs with which you disagree and stating why. The part about pure name-calling as defined above - I support your right to express it - I don't support atheist activists / speakers who use it.

You're free to do whatever you want. I'm free to call it like I see it and choose to avoid reading / watching RRS and to criticize your actions when it seems warranted. You're free to call Kent Hovind a 'fucktard' all you want. To me though, it's immature and offensive. You don't have to agree. I don't have to like RSS's approach. It's not an insult. I have nothing against you.

PS My opinions here are based on the assumption that, objectively, 'fucktard' is a non-specific, subjective, emotional term.

3. Youtube hater, I respect your right to free speech.

Comment #70680 by icouldbewrongbut on September 16, 2007 at 3:07 pm

I agree with Sinful Messiah, Severus Snape, brake, okmichigan..

I was disappointed to see this entry appear on RichardDawkins.net.

I personally can't stand RRS, though I admire their intentions. Their apparent self-importance over concern about humanity grosses me out. They definitely don't speak for me (I don't include them in whatever weak affilation of atheists I'm a member of) - at least in the cases when they act immaturely.

Of course, they can do whatever they want to do, and they don't represent me; They speak for themselves. I cringe though, when they become seen as THE spokespeople for atheists/atheism - ie on Nightline, that they will scare fence-sitters away.

They seem to me to get attention because they are the the loudest and most sensational group around. On their site, they ended their video of Brian Sapient's phone call by running a music video bashing Kent Hovind that went on and on singing the offensive phrase "You're a Fucktard". Are you kidding me? An epiteth based on the disgusting, bigoted phrase "Retard"? I'd like to see atheist spokespeople rise above name-calling. I thought this went without saying.

RRS is free to do what they want, but I'd definitely welcome RRS's approach not being celebrated by the likes RichardDawkins.net when RRS's actions warrant criticism.

For me, I prefer intelligent discussions about how to rid the world and the people I care about of the sickness of religion.

I just hope to continue to see more well-spoken folks like Richard Dawkins / Sam Harris / Christopher Hitchens get the limelight rather than RRS.

4. Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #63307 by icouldbewrongbut on August 13, 2007 at 9:13 pm

PeterK,

Thanks for your interesting response. I'm going to move this topic to a forum.

I've had a similar response to my acceptance of death by those around me (my parents are in major denial / fear of their own death). It seems unacceptable to be accepting of death around those who are using delusions of personal specialness and greater meaning to handle their own death / annihilation anxieties. It's as if when we don't act incredulous at the fact of death, that we're seen as not caring about the loss. It's as if death acceptance makes others suddenly aware that their own death is right next door, and we are not going along with pretending that it's not. Do you think that those who 'don't now how one could deal with death .. without belief in God' are indeed simply experiencing their own suppressed fear of death coming to the surface, and haven't learned to accept the fact of it?

'it is in times like this that I am so happy to be an atheist.' Me too. Is it possible to get them to see as a good thing, as we do, the acceptance of the finality of death in this life - i.e. that our consciousness actually does likely end for all eternity.

Perhaps by acknowledging that we will die and likely be gone forever, even though it's a strike on our egos, we are able to shed the terror of annihilation. Can we show them that instead of denying death that we can instead accept our own death and the impermanence of life? - granted not as a great thing, but by accepting it as 'the way it is' - knowing that we won't enjoy the act of dying, and that we miss those around us who die. To accept the impermanence of our lives is to let go of our own feelings of specialness and to face the terrifying emptiness / nothingness, it seems.

What solves the problem of this terror of emptiness / nothingness? I sometimes feel that terror, but often do not. Is it mitigated by embracing subjective meaning? the privilege to get to see this reality? Perhaps even life's impermanence itself helps to reduce emptiness / nothingness fear.

This all seems related to Ernest Becker's writing, but a lot of atheists seem to have come up with a death acceptance strategy that I haven't see addressed by Becker, nor by the current psychologists working on Terror Management Theory, and I'd love to have a clear understanding of it.

Thanks, and I wish you well in your grief.

5. Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #63274 by icouldbewrongbut on August 13, 2007 at 7:18 pm

Wow, did he nail that one.

However, yes the universe is beautiful. But I don't think that seeing the grandeur of the universe is enough to mitigate the death/annihilation terror of most folks who cling to belief in supernaturalism / personal specialness. What exactly is it that we atheists tell ourselves that causes us to be at peace with the fact that we are here for nothing and are safe only due to the luck of the stability of our surroundings? We acknowledge that we're here for no reason - why is this satisfying to us and not to others? Why are we not running around terrified of our certain annihilation? Is it because we tell ourselves that there is nothing after death? - that we depend on a particular death story / or that the fact that we just don't know what happens is thus no reason to be alarmed?

I'd like to see a detailed exposition on the common death anxiety mitigation strategies of those atheists who are successful at living outside of or with major annihilation / nothingness terror..

6. Philip Kitcher - Living with Darwin

Comment #59687 by icouldbewrongbut on July 30, 2007 at 7:42 am

Strange. I posted the following comment about 8 hours ago, was told that it was posted successfully, but then it never appeared:

*** I think that this interview should be in the Featured section; I think this topic is at the core

of all the difficulty. ***

Bravo! I've been wanting to see this topic discussed - The need to help bridge the emotional gap for religionists. I've felt a void on the atheist side of things wrt validating religionists real emotional concern / hesitancy / need for meaning and especially the mitigation of death anxiety.

I loved the point about Dawkins apparently not respecting the extreme emotional difficulty others have with meaninglessness, etc, and how he doesn't seem to realize that he has been evidentally blessed with a strong sense of purpose and has been seemingly spared from the worst of the existential issues that people deal with. (I wonder if Dawkins agrees with this) I've wished Dawkins would try to address it more exhaustively and try to offer solutions. I understand Dawkins' goal was to demonstrate the illogic of God-belief, and getting into the details of religionists' emotions perhaps seemed unimportant. (or perhaps it's unclear what their emotial reality is)

I can see that for a lot of religionists, an understanding of science isn't mitigating their honestly-felt emotional fears. It seems that they still have deep anxiety based on meaninglessness and death anxiety -natural to the human condition - that we atheists aren't addressing very well, as far as I've seen.

But perhaps there is more that we can do to try to encourage religionists to let go of baseless
beliefs by helping to reduce their this anxiety. If so, what?

I recently read Ernest Becker's the "Denial of Death" and watched the related "Flight from Death" documentary. I haven't seen it discused on atheist forums, I wonder how many other concerned atheists are aware of Becker's ideas - basically that we all naturally, due to the reality that we humans are mortal animals, have repressed intense death anxiety, and that the mass of culture, esp. ideology / religion is necessarily constructed by us (subconsciously) to repress it (I'm not doing great justice to the theory). I highly recommend the documentary for insight into why people are susceptible to relgious and ideological belief (as self perpetuation).

It seems to me that Secular Humanism could also add a structure to intentionally help to mitigate
this death anxiety (which is perhaps the largest perpetuator of the religious crutch).

Can't we atheists figure out what strategies we use to mitigate our own death anxiety enough to
explain it to non-atheists? Would a good start be for us atheists to explore witnin ourselves how we are subconsciously dealing with our own death anxiety? - that is, when we really are aware of facing death, what is our unconscious strategy for suppressing death anxiety?

For example, we don't have an immortality belief to lean on, but perhaps some of us at the thought
of our death, realize the we're only here for a brief time, so we should revel in it, etc. I know Dawkins has addressed some of this, but I think we need a real dialogue / exploration where we identify atheists' more common strategies for dealing with death and existential meaninglessness and compare them to those of religionists to see what total solution we can offer in an understandable form, while fully validating the emotional concerns of religionists (if even unconscious).

7. The Creation Museum: Prepare to believe

Comment #41287 by icouldbewrongbut on May 15, 2007 at 7:30 pm

Love the unicorn museum idea, wagnerpe. =)

Does anyone know of any forums where ideas are being raised for a permanent protest?

Seems wise to gear it towards saving the children of the creationists. Would be great if it couldn't be ignored and had it's own draw - like a scaled 5 billion year walk that maybe starts in the city and ends at the museum w/ the eons marked and explained how the dates of rocks are known, etc.

8. Two idiots get a forum

Comment #35799 by icouldbewrongbut on April 28, 2007 at 10:37 pm

Ray Comfort conceded the banana argument on the Hellbound Alleee show (show #103) at time 22:00.
site link: http://www.hellboundalleee.com/oldarchive.html#Eshows
HIFI:http://www.strongatheism.net/shows/hashow/show103.mp3
LOFI:http://www.strongatheism.net/shows/hashow/show103b.mp3

9. NEXT MONDAY: Bill O'Reilly interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #33159 by icouldbewrongbut on April 19, 2007 at 1:52 pm

I don't like this either. O'Reilly doesn't deserve to have a chance to use his invalidation tactics against Dawkins. I think I'll skip this one.

10. The God Debate

Comment #29112 by icouldbewrongbut on April 1, 2007 at 5:12 pm

Good point Stephen J.

It seems that notions of absolute morality derive from our arbitrary biological emotional wiring and are thus subjective rather than absolute. IE, Our urge to commit to fairness and our experience of empathy are only human subjective universals (which we may want to think of as de-facto absolute universals for purposes of how to live). I don't hear Harris or Dawkins explain morality this way enough when attacked about where morals come from without god. I'd like to hear them explain that we have intrinsic moral compasses that result from our biological wiring / genetics, and that possible actions seem good or evil to us because our emotional triggers are biologically wired that way, and that is the foundation of morality - because I think that concept doesn't occur to the masses of religionists nor do they come across it.

Another thing that I don't hear often enough in these debates is the following. Upon being charged as a closed-minded atheist (to the possiblity of being wrong and God existing), and the atheist saying indeed that he is open given sufficient evidence (frequently confounding the believer), I'd like to hear the atheist loudly respond, "Are you open to the possibility of God Not Existing"? turning the table to force the believer to acknowledge his close-mindedness. It seems effective when I've heard it used.

11. The Salem Hypothesis

Comment #27146 by icouldbewrongbut on March 23, 2007 at 9:37 am

I agree fonex_86. I think your IC example is a good one. A lot of Electrical and Computer Engineers, if not the majority, can get-by in their Science and Electromagnetics classes and never think about physics once in their careers. A lot of EE jobs operate at a layer abstracted beyond the underlaying physics. True for the vast majority of engineers at my last job.

12. The Salem Hypothesis

Comment #27137 by icouldbewrongbut on March 23, 2007 at 9:06 am

I'd expect a survey to find engineers to be statistically more religious than, say, biologists and statistically less religious than the general population.

My critical thinking came before my engineering, but I was interested in science and its ability to find actual truth instead of the horrid uninformed authoritative claims to knowledge abounding around me.. There were numerous factors that influenced my path to atheism. Primary factors were: My own critical thought / observance of reality as a child in contrast to what I was told by my parents and by my catholic grade-school; As a child being fascinated by what science said (Cosmos, etc) about fossils / the age of the universe / evolution; My philosophy courses in college in which we studied various divergent metaphysical paradigms - I learned the mature way to think about metaphysics. I (unfortunately) never took any biology / geology / etc courses, even in high-school. My science courses in college were 1 chemistry and 3 phyics classes.

My critical thinking and desire at the time to really understand the universe attracted me to science --and computer engineering seemed like a guaranteed path to making good money and allowed at least critical thought if not direct study of the universe itself as I would have liked. As a systems engineer, I used the scientific method every day debugging issues - hypothesis of the problem / devise tests / test hypothesis / come up with new hypothesis. Development engineers often must test and debug their designs, and this process seems to me to resemble the scientific method.

So , I think that engineers use much critical thought and some scientific method, and are usually well informed on certain categories of science. However, there seems to be a great diversity among engineers wrt interest in all of science, esp. the topics in science that reflect on religion. Programmers and hardware designers in computer engineering can get by their entire careers, if they are so predeposed, without having to face what Science say about religion.

I'm an electrical/computer engineer and worked in Colorado Springs for 6 years. I worked with over 100 engineers, and religion abounded among them. I'd estimate that about 5% of the engineers I knew would be open to arguing about the foolishness of god-belief. About another 20% were secular / non-church going agnostic types. I'd estimate about a 30% of the engineers were true-believers who would value Ted Haggard/New Life Church and Focus on the Family (including one of my bosses). The rest seemed to be in the middle - fence sitters - not wanting to cause offense - going to church if their family goes - conditioned to react negatively to attacks on religion but seeing foolishness in fundamentalism..

Getting out of college, I had expected engineers to be overwhelmingly non-religious. I think I was looking-forward to being in an environment of people I respected intellectually. So it was a huge disappointment to discover otherwise. Religious engineers always struck me as intellectually lazy or dishonest or naive or fearful in not applying their good critical thinking skills to all of their beliefs, even their cherished beliefs.

(Oh yea, and the majority are politically conservative)

13. Why Children Love Their Security Blankets

Comment #24859 by icouldbewrongbut on March 8, 2007 at 11:36 pm

Huh?

Sancus, You seem to have missed the boat.

It seems clear that the significant idea here is that it is a common human trait to feel emotional attachment to specific instances of objects, even when they are interchangeable with others.

In my view, children weren't singled-out as foolish, they were simply the subjects of the study on human behavior. The article included adults in the behavior by using the art and murderer references. The article is thus interested in general human behavior.

Also, the article doesn't say there's something wrong with having the ability to identify an original copy - rather, I think it's specifically getting at the curious notion that we are wired to feel emotional attachment to particular objects even when they are functionally interchangeable.

For example, the curious way a Star Wars Luke Skywalker action figure, given by Santa, feels a bit more special than its identical replacement if lost. It seems to me that we tend to grow out of this feeling somewhat later in life and the impact becomes lessened.. I suspect that it is stronger when we're children before we analyze the situation to realize, that though the Santa Luke Skywalker feels more special, that the reality is that it's objectively the same as its replacement. And so, we thus handle our emotions (esp. when they are perhaps doing us a disservice) by using logic and seeing the situation objectively. Yet even as adults, the emotional wiring persists in some cases to feel that particular instances of objects are more special.

Thus, the big question of 'why?' is opened (and left open). ie - How has this emotional wiring served our ancestors? Aside from the seemingly negative purpose in the example, what positive purpose does it serve us? Perhaps this is simply a hardwired emotional uneasiness with exchanging our favorite object, that we like and that we know works, with another apparently 'as good' replacement - this wiring enabling us to avoid getting tricked, or to discover that the replacement isn't as good as the original (before mass production).. It seems we experience excitement to part with our special objects when we are offered upgrades that we believe are even better....

Perhaps our attachment to specific things is related to anthropomorphizing - we grow fond of specific objects as we go through life with them similarily to how we grow fond of individual people as we go through life with them. Though obviously there's a huge difference between people and objects, perhaps the mental process that makes us feel that individual people are special / not-replaceable is utilized on objects..

14. The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum

Comment #23622 by icouldbewrongbut on March 1, 2007 at 8:24 pm

The author seems to miss the simple point that the argument for unguided evolution isn't,

We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p;Therefore p is true.

Hey, we have all of this massive EVIDENCE for p;We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p;Therefore p is true.

15. Debate between Sam Harris and Reza Aslan

Comment #22112 by icouldbewrongbut on February 12, 2007 at 11:44 pm

Seems that maybe Aslan defines religion to himself as the cultural history of people seeking the transcendant/mystical, and he seems to equate others' invalidation of (his notion of) religion as an invalidation of the pursuit of the transcendant/mystical experience, without realizing that Sam is actually in support of the pursuit of this experience and is, in fact, arguing for a decoupling of this experience from the trappings of organized religion.

Seems like Aslan hasn't formed the idea, that Sam and others have, that the subjective transcendent/mystical experience can be separated from religion and be valid on it's own, within a secular reason-based framework, and without it being invalidated via materialism, as he suggests. Rather than being automatically indicative of religious experience, this experience is instead fully compatible with atheism.

Aslan seems kind of irresponsible in not clarifying, for his own understanding, what definition of religion Sam is rejecting. And he doesn't seem to be aggressively seeking out where it is that he may agree with the atheist.

16. Panel discussion on atheism where no atheists are included

Comment #20880 by icouldbewrongbut on February 6, 2007 at 10:26 pm

In case you want to contact the panelists directly, from Google, looks like the two female panelists' email addresses are:

Karen Hunter:

(now corrected, sorry!)
professorhunter@aol.com
( http://filmmedia.hunter.cuny.edu/faculty_am.shtml )

dschlussel@yahoo.com
( www.debbieschlussel.com )

17. Open Letter to Rev. John Auer

Comment #16796 by icouldbewrongbut on January 8, 2007 at 8:46 pm

DavidJMH, I think that John Patrick Murphy is a freethinker:

www.freethinkerscs.com
Infidels.org

18. Sam Harris's Faith in Eastern Spirituality and Muslim Torture

Comment #16489 by icouldbewrongbut on January 6, 2007 at 11:01 pm

What Sam actually Says:

from: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy2/

"Response to Controversy
A few of the subjects that I raised in The End of Faith continue to inspire an unusual amount of malicious commentary, selective quotation, and controversy. I've elaborated on these topics here:

My position on torture:
In The End of Faith, I argue that competing religious doctrines have divided our world into separate moral communities, and that these divisions have become a continuous source of human violence. My purpose in writing the book was to offer a way of thinking about our world that would render certain forms of conflict, quite literally, unthinkable.

In one section of the book (pp. 192-199), I briefly discuss the ethics of torture and collateral damage in times of war, arguing that collateral damage is worse than torture across the board. Rather than appreciate just how bad I think collateral damage is in ethical terms, some readers have mistakenly concluded that I take a cavalier attitude toward the practice of torture. I do not. Nevertheless, there are certain extreme circumstances in which I believe that torture may not only be ethically justifiable, but ethically necessary. I am not alone in this. Liberal Senator Charles Schumer has publicly stated that most U.S. senators would support torture to find out the location of a ticking time bomb. While rare, such "ticking-bomb" scenarios actually do occur. As we move into an age of nuclear and biological terrorism, it is in everyone's interest for men and women of goodwill to determine what should be done when a prisoner clearly has operational knowledge of an imminent atrocity, but won't otherwise talk about it.

My argument for the limited use of torture is essentially this: if you think it is ever justifiable to drop bombs in an attempt to kill a man like Osama bin Laden (and thereby risk killing and maiming innocent men, women, and children), you should think it may sometimes be justifiable to torture a man like Osama bin Laden (and risk torturing someone who just happens to look like Osama bin Laden). It seems to me that however one compares the practices of torturing high-level terrorists and dropping bombs, dropping bombs always comes out looking worse in ethical terms. And yet, many of us tacitly accept the practice of modern warfare, while considering it taboo to even speak about the possibility of practicing torture. It is important to point out that my argument for the restricted use of torture does not make travesties like Abu Ghraib look any less sadistic or stupid. Indeed, I considered our mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to have been patently unethical. I also think it was one of the most damaging blunders to occur in the last century of U.S. foreign policy.

It is not clear that having a torture provision in our laws will create as slippery a slope as many people imagine. We have a capital punishment provision, for instance, but this has not led to our killing prisoners at random because we can't control ourselves. While I am opposed to capital punishment, I can readily admit that we are not suffering a total moral chaos in our society because we execute about five people every month. It is not immediately obvious that a rule about torture could not be applied with equal restraint.

It may be true, however, that any legal use of torture would have unacceptable consequences. In light of this concern, the best strategy I have heard comes from Mark Bowden in his Atlantic Monthly article, "The Dark Art of Interrogation." Bowden recommends that we keep torture illegal, and maintain a policy of not torturing anybody for any reason. But our interrogators should know that there are certain circumstances in which it will be ethical to break the law. Indeed, there are circumstances in which you would have to be a monster not to break the law. If an interrogator finds himself in such a circumstance, and he breaks the law, there will not be much of a will to prosecute him (and interrogators will know this). If he breaks the law Abu Ghraib-style, he will go to jail for a very long time (and interrogators will know this too). At the moment, this seems like the most reasonable policy to me, given the realities of our world.

While my discussion of torture spans only a few pages in a book devoted to reducing the causes of religious violence, many readers have found this discussion deeply unsettling. I have invited them, both publicly and privately, to produce an ethical argument that takes into account the realities of our world—our daily acceptance of collateral damage, the real possibility of nuclear terrorism, etc.—and yet rules out the practice of torture in all conceivable circumstances. No one, to my knowledge, has done this. And yet, my critics continue to speak and write as though a knock-down argument against torture in all circumstances is readily available. I consider it to be one of the more dangerous ironies of liberal discourse that merely discussing the possibility of torturing a man like Osama bin Laden provokes more outrage than the maiming and murder of innocent civilians ever does. Until someone actually points out what is wrong with the "collateral damage argument" presented in The End of Faith. I will continue to believe that my critics are just not thinking clearly about the reality of human suffering.

My views on the paranormal—ESP, reincarnation, etc.:
My position on the paranormal is this: While there have been many frauds in the history of parapsychology, I believe that this field of study has been unfairly stigmatized. If some experimental psychologists want to spend their days studying telepathy, or the effects of prayer, I will be interested to know what they find out. And if it is true that toddlers occasionally start speaking in ancient languages (as Ian Stevenson alleges), I would like to know about it. However, I have not spent any time attempting to authenticate the data put forward in books like Dean Radin's The Conscious Universe or Ian Stevenson's 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. The fact that I have not spent any time on this should suggest how worthy of my time I think such a project would be. Still, I found these books interesting, and I cannot categorically dismiss their contents in the way that I can dismiss the claims of religious dogmatists.

My views on Eastern mysticism, Buddhism, etc.:
My views on "mystical" or "spiritual" experience are extensively described in The End of Faith and do not entail the acceptance of anything on faith. There is simply no question that people have transformative experiences as a result of engaging contemplative disciplines like meditation, and there is no question that these experiences shed some light on the nature of the human mind (any experience does, for that matter). What is highly questionable are the metaphysical claims that people tend to make on the basis of such experiences. I do not make any such claims. Nor do I support the metaphysical claims of others.

There are several neuroscience labs now studying the effects of meditation on the brain. While I am not personally engaged in this research, I know many of the scientists who are. This is now a fertile field of sober inquiry, purposed toward understanding the possibilities of human well-being better than we do at present.

While I consider Buddhism almost unique among the world's religions as a repository of contemplative wisdom, I do not consider myself a Buddhist. My criticism of Buddhism as a faith has been published, to the consternation of many Buddhists. It is available here:

Killing the Buddha "

19. William Crawley, BBC Belfast, names Richard Dawkins as Person of the Year 2006

Comment #15650 by icouldbewrongbut on January 1, 2007 at 9:49 pm

I don't understand this. _Whose_ man of the year is he?

20. The Trouble with Atheism

Comment #13868 by icouldbewrongbut on December 19, 2006 at 10:10 pm

I actually feel personally insulted by such apparently intentional misrepresentation.

21. Merry Mithras

Comment #13632 by icouldbewrongbut on December 18, 2006 at 11:46 pm

"Merry Mithramas" tshirts, ornaments and mugs:

http://www.cafepress.com/extremelysmart/2179599