Ace of Clades

I’ve been interviewed for several documentary films over the last few years, but I never saw any of them. This morning, I see that the Scott Burdick’s March of Reason has been made available on YouTube. I’ve only seen a few minutes of it, but it looks pretty good so far.

This one was filmed at the Reason Rally, American Atheists national convention in Bethesda Maryland, and Rock Beyond Belief at Fort Bragg.

There’s so much excellent content that must be shared with our atheist and humanist community, too good to cull down into just one film. So, Scott has organized your words and art into topics such as “Reason and Atheism,” “Morality,”  “Ridicule,” “Targeting Children,” “Faith,” and more. The result is not one but FIVE one-hour videos that are being placed on YouTube for everyone to watch and think about and talk about. The first two are now online and will soon be opened to the public:

March of Reason Part One:  

target=”_blank”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD-5NX_at3s

March of Reason Part Two:   

target=”_blank”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmR50JGCGcY

Everyone who was interviewed is profiled at least once in the series, and many appear multiple times depending on the topic.  Enjoy! Please watch and share with your fellow nonbelievers—and with your believer friends who might be open to rethinking their views.

Future plans:   We hope that these films will be shown by local freethought/humanist/atheist organizations, used in university courses, and shared across the internet. Scott is also in discussions with the Richard Dawkins Foundation and others to produce a 90-minute documentary film that can potentially be shown on major media channels, local theaters, and film festivals.

If you’re not in England, and someone hears you mention Wimbledon, they’re likely to think you’re talking about the pinnacle of tennis matches. What else is that city known for on the global scale? The same sort of thing might happen if you’re nowhere near Indiana when you bring up Indianapolis. A lot of Europeans might expect that word to be followed by the number 500, because that city is internationally known only for formula one racing. This is how I think it will soon be whenever an atheist hears Kamloops mentioned outside of Canada; they must be talking about the international conference called ‘Imagine No Religion‘.

Bill Ligertwood of the Kamloops Centre For Rational Thought chose his own humble little home town to host an annual gathering of rational thinkers flown in from all over the world. There are no direct flights to this place; the airport is too small. But as remote as it is, the idea works and has worked for three years running. Consequently Kamloops is becoming something of an atheist Mecca.

The town itself is rather charming in the spring, and the Kamloops Coast Hotel and Convention Centre offers a perfect venue. It’s an intimate setting. The conference centre is an elegant dinner theater only big enough for a few hundred people. Fountains and flowing streams run all through the hotel interior. The lounge, dining rooms, the catering for all diets, all very nice. I’ve been to a lot of freethinking secular humanist skeptical atheist conventions over the last few years; this was organized as well as any of them.

I understand the line-up changes every year. The hosts of The Thinking Atheist and the Atheist Experience were there last year, along with Laurence Krauss and several others of that calibre. This year the line-up of a couple dozen speakers and performers included Victor Stenger, Dan Dennet, and Aruna Papp. Her personal and deeply-moving presentation brought a standing ovation with ‘not a dry eye in the house’.

Most of the attendees were Canadian, -albeit from all over the country- and there was a surprising number of conventioneers from the UK. Otherwise there wasn’t a lot of ethnic diversity this time around, I’m sorry to say, but gender and age groups were well-represented, and absolutely everyone seemed to be having a really good time. There was no apparent drama, no one with issues to be addressed or avoided. Just a couple hundred people who flew in happy to be there and sorry to leave.

One last thing, be sure to try the local specialty brew, an opaque black chocolate stout called ‘Back-Hand of God‘. Not only is the name amusingly ironic -given the customers in question, but the beer is actually quite good!

Five loving atheist couples, where both partners are atheist activists, will match wits to decide the question once and for all. The couples on the panel include in no particular order JT Eberhard and Michaelyn Everhart (got her name right that time), Matt Dillahunty and Beth Presswood, Shayrah Akers and Daniel Moran, Adam and Amanda Brown, and last but certainly not the least adorable atheist couple Aron Ra and Lilandra(me).

How deep is your love? Because we’re living in a world of fools…

The show will start Newlywed Game style with our host David Fitzgerald. Couples will battle it out for a coveted TBD prize to show just how well couples know each other without a god to make their love magical! Hopefully David will be merciful with the questions about “whoopee”. An example question: What is your partner’s nickname for you? The partner will write it down, and wait for their partner’s answer to see if they got it correct. (My nickname for Aron was large mammal) So I will be studying Aron’s every move until the end of the week, and quizzing him on his likes and dislikes all, so we can defeat Beth/Matt and Michaelyn/JT.  They are tough competition, I know this from past Camp Quest competitions. Not as much data on the other 2 couples.

After the game, we will the talk about answering apologetics concerning love. We will kill that C.S. Lewis tired and oft referenced apologetic with fire.  Other discussion topics include the differences between Biblical relationships vs. secular relationships. Tune in to The Nones podcast this Sunday May 26th at 12:00 PM CST. It will livestream from youtube at www.youtube.com/user/th3n0nes.

Show us some love on facebook for updates…www.facebook.com/then0nes

I happened across a blog which criticized me for saying that empirical scientists and rational skeptics care more about truth than religious believers do.

Interesting thought.  Especially since Mr. Ra also believes that those who believe in God have no interest in the truth.  But is the truth rational skeptics, as Mr. Ra identifies himself as, care about the whole and complete truth, or is any partial truth ok?  Or is it that since, in Mr. Ra’s estimation, Christians have no real care for the truth that any care for the truth no matter how small or partial , would be more?  Somehow I get the impression that neither of these is what he meant.

What I meant is that scientists only care about how accurate their position can be shown to be, and not whether they’ve convinced anyone else. Meanwhile religious believers only care about how convinced they appear to be. Since nothing they believe is in any way implied by any testable data whatsoever, they have no reason to believe what they do. Yet somehow it doesn’t bother them that none of their beliefs are verifiably accurate to any degree at all. Thus they have virtually no probability of being even partially correct, and no possibility of being completely or certainly correct.

Many times theists have made public statements to the effect that whether they believe matters more than whether any of it is true, because they think there are consequences to believing differently or not believing any of it at all.  They imagine their god will punish them simply for not believing. According to their interpretations of man-made mythology, that is the one-and-only thing their god seems to care about. This to me is an indication that the god in question was created in the minds of people who really really want to pretend that they’re more important than they are, and that they have some destiny beyond what could really be due to them. I find it sad to see people in such a state.

The only thing that really matters is that we find some way to determine where and how we ourselves are wrong, what are the flaws in our position, and how do we correct them? Because that is the only way our understanding can improve. Faith prevents this. Even though it is an unsupported assumption asserted without warrant, faith makes the erroneous claim of certain knowledge of absolute truth, and often insists that it cannot even be wrong. This is just part of the reason why faith is the most dishonest position it is possible to have.

But my critic continues:

So if Mr. Ra is so committed to truth why does he have such an aversion to it?  While busily stating over & over , I suppose in the hope that repetition will make something true, that evolution has been proven, he steadfastly avoids calling evolution a law, the scientific proclamation of true, provable, and reproducible fact.  Fair enough, part of scientific law requires a theory to be reproducible, ie: standing on Earth, let go of an object and it will fall to the ground.

But here is where Mr. Ra’s statements start to break down.  At 10:01 of his recorded lecture at Eastern Illinois University “Because it’s called the theory of gravity”.   Yes that’s right the theory of gravity.  Do you find it interesting that it is now the theory of gravity.  Has gravity been “Plutocized” from a law to a theory?  My guess is that the hope is by reducing certain laws of science to theories it will help elevate the theory of evolution in the public eye.

Creationists are typically pretty wriggly and hard to pin down. So when I argue with them, I don’t often get the ‘corner-and-kill’ moment. I usually can’t get them into that position where it becomes obvious to all listeners that the quarry knows he was caught in a lie. It’s always interesting when your opponent realizes that he can’t defend his position, and is forbidden to concede some academic point that was clearly lost, but escape isn’t possible either because you won’t let him change the subject. If you can get him there, and press him to hold him accountable, you’ll either witness a psychotic episode, or a lie so blatant that it counts as an admission of defeat.  That’s what I got last night on the Dogma Debate podcast with creationist rapper, ‘Destiny Lab’.

I’m just relaying a tragic story. Hundreds of thousands of activists gathered in Dhaka Bangladesh last Friday, protesting against blasphemy laws and the severe penalty associated with them.

“Atheists must be hanged” shouted scores of armed Islamists who descended on the demonstration, assisted by local police. Violence erupted with cudgel canes and rubber bullets. Dozens of people were killed or maimed in an attack by the religion of peace. Ironically the activists were only protesting religion’s long-standing practice of inhuman oppression of dissent, and the Islamists reacted the way religion has always reacted, the only way it knows how -senselessly and without reason.