Archive for September, 2012

Yep, it’s another post about Atheism+.  Just because Jen McCreight is on vacation to take a break from being trolled and harassed, doesn’t mean the rest of us still aren’t interested. First things first: There’s a new episode of Godless Bitches.  Have you heard it?  You should hear it, it is made of win.  Beth, Tracie, and Jen were broadcasting in front of a sizable live audience at the Atheist Alliance of America national convention in Denver, along with special guest Greta Christina, who as far as I’m concerned ought to be on every week.  Tracie had some inspired commentary on how she became interested in being more than a dictionary atheist and take on these issues.  I can’t sum up in a way that does it justice, go listen. Read more

By now most of us have heard about this film Innocence of Muslims, which has sparked riots claiming the lives of several people, one of whom was no less than the U.S. ambassador to Libya. The cruel punch line to all of this — because it’s already common knowledge that Islamists are psychopaths who will riot to anything at the drop of the proverbial hat — is that there may, in fact, be no film at all. Some in the media are beginning to be a little skeptical, too. Sure, there’s a “trailer,” which you may have seen. Here it is. If your first thought was that this is some shoddy attempt at a comedy sketch shot for less than what you paid for lunch today, then you’d be surprised as I was to hear the claims that this is allegedly an excerpt from a $5 million full-length feature made by a self-described “Israeli-American real estate developer in California” named Sam Bacile. Bacile claims to have raised his very-impressive-for-an-indie budget from “about 100 Jewish donors,” and shot the project last year with dozens of actors and crew. I call bullshit. Folks, I’ve worked on a number of feature films. Sure, budget doesn’t guarantee talent. But a $5 million budget will most certainly get you an experienced AD (assistant director), DP (director of photography), grip/electric crew, sound engineers and mixers, and proper post facilities to ensure that whatever inexperience your director has will at least be compensated by technical proficiency from your department heads and their respective crews. I’ve worked on low-six-figure budgeted films that had all those things, and if nothing else, looked like films at the end of the day. Five mil also means that you meet the Screen Actors Guild requirements for their Basic Agreement, which puts you well above their Ultra Low Budget, Modified Low Budget, and Low Budget Agreement categories. You could get name talent for this. Yet no one at any agency...
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I’m writing this before coffee, so I hope it’s not too riddled with typos or grammatical weirdness. And that’s as much apology as you get. This is an open thread about yesterday’s program. However, a few points about Eric from Mesa, AZ. Read more

Guy emails us today: If we cant trust our senses, how can we know for sure whats real or not? How can we justify saying we are sure that something exists and that we arent minds in a vat? This is obviously solipsism, but I was told by a christian that unless I believe in God, I cant trust my senses. I cant trust my senses to tell me when someone else confirms my senses either. Tell him to prove that assertion. Or just mock him by saying, “All right, if that’s the case, then my senses, which are telling me that I’m standing here talking to a human being, are lying to me, and I am in fact watching a rabbit in a pink tutu dancing Gangnam style. Which suddenly makes you far more entertaining than you have been up to now.” More seriously, you could simply point out that he’s created a dilemma in his argument. How else are we supposed to believe in God, other than through the use of our senses, by making a choice to adopt that belief? But if we cannot trust our senses before we’ve chosen to believe in God, how can we trust them, when making that choice, to help us know we’re making the right one? Or is there one special moment when we say to ourselves, “I now choose to believe in God,” and our senses obligingly click into place so that they are completely trustworthy for me to employ in making that one choice? How do I know my senses are not being deceived into believing in Gus the Magic Cosmic Hippo, thinking it’s actually the Biblical God? There’s more! If a Christian tells me I can’t trust my senses if I don’t believe in God, I can’t trust him. I can’t trust anything he’s telling me about God in any way! Because the only way I can hear his message of God’s salvation is by using my senses, which I can’t trust! So I have no choice but to remain atheist. Thanks, Christian! That was easy.

This post is part of an ongoing discussion between Russell Glasser and Pastor Stephen Feinstein. Here are all the previous posts in the series. Stephen 1 Russell 1 Stephen 2 Russell 2 Stephen 3 Russell 3 Stephen 4 I’ll be disabling comments one more time in this post, as per Stephen’s initial request. However, since we have agreed that the fifth round will be the last, I’ll be opening up a post-mortem open thread with comments enabled after my next post. At that point, I’ll add links to the open thread from all of the previous posts. Stephen, I can’t help noticing that in your last post, you seem to have reimagined your role in this debate.  Here I thought that you were simply a collegial fellow participant, but you have decided to award yourself the position of judge and arbiter.  After all, you did apparently award yourself the victory about a dozen times — rather cockily, I must say — and we haven’t even finished yet.  That shift in tone will be taken into account in this response. Of course, this change of roles shouldn’t come as any surprise to the readers of our exchange.  It was obvious from the beginning that you would have awarded yourself the victory without exchanging a word if you could have.  When you said that you wanted to have a battle of epistemology, clearly what you really meant is that you wish there were no demands of support and evidence for your belief in God.  Instead, it would be so much easier if we’d both come around to accepting your God as “necessary,” irrespective of any observations we might make that confirm that the God actually exists. Read more