1. Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed

Comment #163282 by poundemonium on April 18, 2008 at 6:11 am

In terms of truth-value, Stein is to Einstein what Scifi is to Science. Actually, I'm being way too generous to Stein. He should got back to hosting his laconic little show.

2. Richard Dawkins on The Alan Colmes Show

Comment #146671 by poundemonium on March 19, 2008 at 9:12 am

I placed an mp3 of this without commercials on RapidShare at:
http://rapidshare.com/files/99641264/R.Dawkins_on_Alan_Colmes_2008.mp3

I wish I'd seen your post before I listened to the interview. There was even a Viagra commercial squeezed in there.

This week I turned down a job offer in the U.S. Having listened to the drivel coming from most of the callers, I can't say I regret my decision.

3. An Open Letter to Richard Dawkins

Comment #96982 by poundemonium on December 11, 2007 at 7:51 am

In "Father" Morris I see yet another flea in the final stages of larval gestation.

4. Daniel Dennett Debates Dinesh D'Souza

Comment #94122 by poundemonium on December 4, 2007 at 9:06 pm

I don't get how Dinesh can believe in evolution AND that we're 'created in the image of God.' That means that God has looked like everything from a unicellular organism to anthropoid mammal.

5. Ayaan Hirsi Ali: abandoned to fanatics

Comment #77930 by poundemonium on October 11, 2007 at 6:22 am

I realize the following is unrelated to this thread, but it's about politics nonetheless.

Yesterday, in our provincial elections in Ontario, Canada, we roundly defeated the candidate for Provincial Parliament who proposed to extend public funding to all "faith-based" schools. What is remarkable about this collective rejection is that said candidate had made the promise to fund what I like to call "segregational" schools as a key point in his ministerial agenda and that the public voted not so much for his opponent, but against the proposal.

It's been a long time since I felt this proud to be Canadian!

6. A New Debate

Comment #75961 by poundemonium on October 4, 2007 at 6:41 am

By the way. Are you all aware that Matthew Chapman is the witty, erudite, film making great-great grandson of Charles Darwin?

Yes, he does tend to capitalize on that happy accident of birth quite frequently.

I wonder if he descends from the Darwin son who ended up corroborating his father by accurately estimating the age of the sun, then thought to be only around 500 million years old. What is really interesting about this is that the son at first told Darwin he was wrong, only to retract upon further study. Ah, the beauty and humility of science. I have yet to hear a preacher condemn the killing of 42 children for mocking a bald prophet in the bible.

7. A New Debate

Comment #75957 by poundemonium on October 4, 2007 at 6:35 am

There is, of course, a chance that some of the candidates would refuse to attend, but an RSVP in the negative would beg the question: why on earth would a candidate turn his back on the opportunity to learn more about science?

Please, please, do let's use the phrase "beg the question" appropriately. I may sound like a pedantic curmudgeon. But what hope do we have of convincing the world of the intellectual superiority of non-belief if we can't master basic philosophical terminology? I won't patronize my intelligent readers to explain what "begging the question" really stands for.

Otherwise, the article is superb.

8. New Noah's Ark ready to sail

Comment #35778 by poundemonium on April 28, 2007 at 8:44 pm

What a waste of cedar and pine. From I recall, Holland isn't exactly covered in forests, making this colossal fantasy-ship an affront to global reforestation efforts. But then again, someone who cheers the fact that the creator of the universe killed off most of life on the planet probably couldn't give a shit either way.

9. Atheists split on how to not believe

Comment #34076 by poundemonium on April 23, 2007 at 6:23 am

Dawkins did not respond to requests for comment.

Can you blame him? It must get awfully tiresome to trudge the same old, muddy path over and over again because of asinine assumptions made by theists and their ilk.

It never ceases to amaze me just how patient Dawkins is when confronted with such specious claims. Frankly, I blow my fuse often enough for much less than that!

10. Sam's Flea!

Comment #32797 by poundemonium on April 18, 2007 at 9:08 am

The_Pun_King: I, for one, am responding to the fallacies inherent in the points Wilson raised against Harris in his radio interview (I posted a link to it above).

There is nothing "irrational" about that. What is irrational is Wilson's assumption that morality can't exist without a Sky Daddy wielding his mighty stick at hapless humanity.

11. Sam's Flea!

Comment #32795 by poundemonium on April 18, 2007 at 9:04 am

jrizziii: Good point.

Your observation reminds me of a radio interview Dr. Dawkins gave while in America. A Christian caller to the show, when asked by the host whether without religious prohibition of murder he would kill his neighbour, replied without hesitation: "Yes!"

12. Sam's Flea!

Comment #32774 by poundemonium on April 18, 2007 at 8:29 am

Smith, Jessie provides a spot-on synopsis of the interview.

A humorous side note to Wilson's "argument." He prides himself on how the physical design of his book mirrors Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation, as if mimicking tit-for-tat (unintelligent design?) somehow puts his ramblings on a par with Harris' unassailable logic.

13. Sam's Flea!

Comment #32752 by poundemonium on April 18, 2007 at 7:04 am

I neglected to post the link:

http://www.americanvision.org/radio/tgds/default.asp

Find the interview on the right-hand side window (April 11).

14. Sam's Flea!

Comment #32751 by poundemonium on April 18, 2007 at 7:03 am

For a view of Douglas Wilson's intellectually-impoverished response to Harris, listen to his radio interview with Gary DeMar. I only wish I'd listened to it live so that I could phone in and demolish the army of straw men raised by this predictable scat. Fundamentalists seem utterly incapable of even realizing how their arguments fail the dorm-room test of logical consistency. Nothing but innuendo, misrepresentation, non sequiturs, and outright lies.

15. Militant atheists: too clever for their own good

Comment #30375 by poundemonium on April 7, 2007 at 11:01 pm

This just in from an article on Ratzinger in the New York Times. It says volumes:

"This is the face of European Catholicism — of Christianity in general in Europe — that we have come to expect in recent years as studies and news reports back up the notion of a continent that has seemingly outgrown its ancient spiritual practices: the splendor and majesty of the Western tradition reduced to a geriatric, art-filled echo chamber."

To that I say, Hallelujah!!!

16. Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created from Nothing

Comment #28154 by poundemonium on March 28, 2007 at 6:52 am

The Wee Flea. First, it's spelled "ex nihilo." If you're implying that science is converging with deistic creationism you couldn't be farther off the mark. The singularity that occasioned the much-misunderstood "Big Bang" wasn't "created," in the traditional sense of the term. I'll refer you to comment #28153 by Yorker for the theoretical underpinnings.

17. The Moral Necessity of Atheism

Comment #27707 by poundemonium on March 26, 2007 at 8:20 am

pmquay1: Your dismissive and patronizing comment on Hitchens misses the point. The fact that this gadfly of our time challenges received wisdom with such cavalier cynicism and irony shouldn't make his musings any less thought-provoking. After all, all intellectual discourse builds on pre-existing discursive formations (as Foucault so memorably puts it). I don't know what you mean, exactly, by Hitchens' alleged dearth of "content or new information we can actually use," but I'd argue that his clear-thinking alone rejuvenates the spirit of rational inquiry in our time. Your argument seems to have a whiff of anti-intellectualism and vulgar utilitarianism to it, a dangerous trend in the current rise of theistically-muddled thinking.

18. Lonely Atheists of the Global Village

Comment #26428 by poundemonium on March 19, 2007 at 9:11 am

kkant:

I would add further that some of these "ex-atheists" are in fact believers who simply come across a rough patch in life and "challenge" their deity to make itself known to them (with the feeble threat of disbelief if said deity fails to deliver). Invariably, of course, they interpret the faintest, remotest, most ambiguous and undefined "sign" as confirmation of their "doubting Thomas" stance, at which point they giddily revert to their unquestioning belief and attempt to convince others of the universal validity of their experience.

It's a little game that liberal Christians love to play with themselves. I like to call them the "15-minute atheists." Sadly, for most, those 15 minutes are all that they will ever experience of a mind stripped of the evil twins: hope and fear. The terrible beauty of reality (as Yeats might put it) is just too much for their fantasy-addled psyches.

19. Lonely Atheists of the Global Village

Comment #26415 by poundemonium on March 19, 2007 at 6:56 am

Wait a minute, is it just me or is Novak wallowing in the very sort of contradictions and "chancy-"ness with which he seeks to indict atheists?

First, he writes disparagingly of atheism as supposedly advocating the following:

[...]at bottom, everything is irrational, chancy, without purpose or ultimate intelligibility.

However, we soon come across this gem:

The world of His creation is riven through with absurdities and contradictions, species that die out, and the teeming, blooming, buzzing confusion of contingencies and chance.

Ergo, how is this theistic world different from the a-theistic one (apart from the "existence" of a deity in the former, who/which in any case does not seem to mind the reigning chaos)? What saddens me is that this kind of convoluted, tortured discourse passes for genius among the believing flocks. I've witnessed in more than one occasion in my past life as a believer, a barely-literate lay preacher mocking evolution in the same way that Novak speaks of Christians being tempted to "burst out laughing." I read through the entire article with an increasing sense that this is a man who loathes reason and rationality (or at the very least, who mistakes absurd beliefs for the same), hence his tireless knack for holding forth suspension of disbelief as though it were a statement of truth-value.

My quest continues to find one reasonable refutation of Dawkins/Dennett/Harris. I just no longer hold my breath...