When my debate with Joe Puckett was announced, some members of the skeptic community expressed dismay that it would be held in a church. Some said that by choosing such a venue, it stacked the deck in favor of the religious advocate because they would be speaking on their home turf in front of a friendly audience. They felt that it should be held in a neutral venue with a neutral moderator.
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I am not a soccer fan, although it is globally the most popular. My interest in the sport, like that of many people in the US, peaks in a strictly quadrennial way, rising briefly during the World Cup tournaments and disappearing soon after. Part of my lack of interest is the lack of a team to root for.
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The Cleveland public radio affiliate station WCPN 90.3 FM will be having Joe Puckett and me on their morning call-in talk show The Sound of Ideas that runs from 9:00-10:00 am tomorrow (Tuesday), with a break for national news from 9:01-9:06. We will be joined by Tim Beal, a professor of religious studies at my university, whom I have known for a long time and is a very thoughtful scholar, and a rabbi whom I do not know. The show was triggered by the debate I had with Joe Puckett but will not be devoted exclusively to the question of god’s existence but will be broader and look at the rapidly changing landscape of religious beliefs.
[Update: I have just been informed by WCPN that Tim Beal will not be on the show but Peter Haas, another thoughtful scholar of Judaic Studies from our department of religious studies, and Craig Bauman, President of the University of Akron’s Secular Student Alliance, who will be calling in.]
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As we have seen, the Iraq warmongers are like zombies, returning from the dead to once again fill the media landscape with their wrongness. Stephen M. Walt gives an excellent analysis of why the neoconservative leaders of the push for the disastrous war in Iraq continue to be welcomed into the debate. The list of reasons includes their enablers in the media and the liberal interventionists who are helping to try and rehabilitate the neoconservatives in order to distract from their own culpability in assisting them in the push for that criminal war.
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The Cleveland Freethinkers have posted videos my debate yesterday with pastor Joe Puckett where I affirmed the proposition that “God Does Not Exist”. I earlier posted my own reflections on it.
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As I have said, I am falling further and further behind in terms of technology and popular culture and I depend on the usually excellent Sesame Street parodies to give me some clue about what people are talking about, while at the same time entertaining me. Here is their effort aimed at the hit TV show about vampires.
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Mallory Ortberg has taken upon herself the task of imagining what the Harry Potter series of books might have turned out to be like if the idea had first occurred to Ayn Rand. She is taking each of the seven books in turn. Here is an excerpt of what Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban could have been at the hands of the famous proponent of the virtues of the free market, individualism, and selfishness.
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So the debate with Joe Puckett went off without a hitch last night. It was a cordial exchange of views. The church seats 800 people and I estimate that there must have been about 500-600 people there. Mark Tiborsky, the person who initially acted as the intermediary between Joe and me and who is very well connected in the local skeptical community and had advertised it widely, said that the number of people he knew who had signed up to attend numbered around 60-70, so most of the attendees were religious folk, which was what I expected. Mark recorded the whole thing and will be posting it on YouTube soon
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The Daily Show continues to chronicle the end of TV news as we have come to know it, as evidenced by the way the cable news networks covered the book tour of Hillary Clinton.
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