Showing posts with label debating. Show all posts
Showing posts with label debating. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

It's Been A While...


I haven't blogged in months and it's mainly because I've gotten tired of refuting theism and religion. I just don't have the time and interest for long-form blogging anymore, so I'm taking an extended break. I might occasionally post an argument I think of, but I don't know how often I will do that. If you want to follow me in any capacity, you can follow me on Twitter, because that's the only place I'm still active. Just click on the Twitter link over to the right.

I recently made a simple argument there:


What this argument demonstrates is that the Christian god's intrinsically trinitarian nature is not logically necessary, and therefore the Christian god's existence is not logically necessary. Since it is logically possible a different (non-trinitarian) god could exist, such a god is not necessary. This is the same logic theists use when they claim the universe could have been different, and therefore is not necessary. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander!

One could claim god is not logically necessary but is metaphysically necessary, instead. But I could make the same argument about the universe. (And I have.) Once you acknowledge god is not logically necessary, you can't argue its metaphysically necessary without allowing the atheist to make the same argument about the universe. I really hope most atheists and theists come to understand this, since most currently don't.

Saturday, August 10, 2019

Quote Of The Day: A Neural Network Framework For Cognitive Bias


A particular question comes up for me when debating god's existence about why we homo sapiens would have so many cognitive biases built into our thinking if it is the case that god created us for the purposes of knowing god's existence and the truth (as many theists claim): Why would god design us with so many flaws hindering our ability to know the truth if our very purpose was to know the truth?

For example, why would god give us a confirmation bias that makes it difficult for us to notice contrary evidence? Can this all be swept under the rug with the ol' "God has morally sufficient reasons for this" explainer? If that sours the theist, one attempt to deny all this is by saying our cognitive biases are not hardwired. But, here's a paper demonstrating A Neural Network Framework for Cognitive Bias.

I leave you a select quote from it (emphasis mine).

The brain (like all neural networks) functions in a highly associative way. Correlation and coincidence detection are the basic operations of neural functioning, as manifested in, e.g., Hebb’s rule (Hebb, 1949; Shatz, 1992), the ‘Law of Effect’ (Thorndike, 1927, 1933), Pavlovian conditioning (Pavlov, 2010), or autocorrelation (Reichardt, 1961). As a result, the brain automatically and subconsciously ‘searches’ for correlation, coherence, and (causal) connections: it is highly sensitive to consistent and invariant patterns..........Examples of heuristics and bias resulting from associative information processing are the control illusion (people tend to overestimate the degree to which they are in control (Langer, 1975; Matute et al., 2015), superstition (Skinner, 1948; Risen, 2015), spurious causality (seeing causality in unconnected correlations), the conjunction fallacy (Tversky and Kahneman, 1983), the representativeness heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman, 1981a), and the previously mentioned story bias......In line with the Hebb doctrine (Hebb, 1949), the neural network framework contributes to an explanation of these phenomena by the way (the weight of) connections between neurons are affected by covarying inputs. Synaptic strengths are typically altered by either the temporal firing pattern of the presynaptic neuron or by modulatory neurons (Marder and Thirumalai, 2002). Neurons that repeatedly or persistently fire together, change each other’s excitability and synaptic connectivity (Destexhe and Marder, 2004). This basic principle, i.e., “cells that fire together, wire together” (Shatz, 1992), enables the continuous adaptation and construction of neural connections and associations based on simultaneous and covarying activations.

I'm not sure one can fully deny that cognitive bias has any neuro-biological basis at all.

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

An Argument Demonstrating Why Arcane Knowledge Is Wrong About Special Relativity And Eternalism


There's a website called Arcane Knowledge written by a Catholic named Daniel J. Castellano that includes several articles on Special Relativity that try to argue that the theory doesn't entail eternalism (the view that all moments of time have equal existence). Now if you've read my blog at any length, you know I'm a big proponent of the view that Special Relativity does necessitate eternalism. So naturally, I disagree with much of what is written on the site.

Many of the theists I've debating eternalism with have cited this website and its arguments against the reality of a 4 dimensional spacetime block universe. (Not surprisingly, they've all been Catholics subscribing to Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics).

Through a year long debate with a Catholic who frequently cited Arcane Knowledge in an attempt to deny Special Relativity entails eternalism, I've constructed an argument below showing how the arguments used on Arcane Knowledge to deny eternalism forces one into a dilemma: either (a) affirm you are the only thing that exists at any given present moment for you (literally deny the existence of everything else), or (b) be forced to agree events in the past and future exist (effectively affirming eternalism).

Over on the site, Daniel argues that from any event considered present, no events in the absolute future or past will have any objective ontological status, but any events in "elsewhere" could physically exist. In Special Relativity, "elsewhere" is a term given to all the places not in an event's absolute future or past (which are its future and past light cones, respectively). In other words, elsewhere is the totality of spacelike separated events. According to Daniel, one cannot say whether any events in elsewhere exist when one is at the present moment, seen below in the spacetime diagram as a green dot (the coordinates of this dot at (0,0) on the X and Y axis). It is physically possible, according to this view, that any set of events can possibly exist in elsewhere.


This interpretation of Special Relativity is problematic in several ways, and I will show how. If an event's absolute future and past objectively doesn't exist, this would have to apply to all other events that exist, since there's nothing special about any given event we make the center of a spacetime diagram. Given this rule, no other events can exist in elsewhere that are in the absolute futures or pasts of any other events in elsewhere. For example, in the diagram below, it is possible events A and B can exist, since they're not in each other's absolute future or past.

But in this diagram below, it cannot be the case that both events A and B exist, since event A is in the absolute past of event B, and event B is in the absolute future of event A.
A quick side note of what is meant by the absolute future and past: The absolute future and past of an event are all the areas relative to that event's location where all inertial frames would agree are objectively in the future or in the past if they were all in that event's location, even if they're moving relative to each other. They are the future and past light cones.

Friday, November 9, 2018

Quote Of The Day: How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail


It's been a while since I've done a "Quote Of The Day" series on this site, probably because I've put blogging on the back end in recent months due to other projects taking precedent. As a result of course I just haven't been churning out posts as frequent as I used to, which used to be at least 2 per week. So I'm going to try to pepper the long periods in between the more detailed longer posts with shorter QOTD or random thoughts style posts, and hopefully that will remedy (at least a bit) the eerie silence.

Since this blog is mostly about making arguments that are designed to help convince people of various different views, I came across this article on Scientific American about how to convince people when facts fail. It has 6 steps to take:

If corrective facts only make matters worse, what can we do to convince people of the error of their beliefs? From my experience, 1 keep emotions out of the exchange, 2 discuss, don't attack (no ad hominem and no ad Hitlerum), 3 listen carefully and try to articulate the other position accurately, 4 show respect, 5 acknowledge that you understand why someone might hold that opinion, and 6 try to show how changing facts does not necessarily mean changing worldviews. These strategies may not always work to change people's minds, but now that the nation has just been put through a political fact-check wringer, they may help reduce unnecessary divisiveness.

I've violated all 6 numerous times. Guilty as charged.

Thursday, October 11, 2018

"God: Eternity, Free Will, and the World" Refuted — Part 1



A few months ago over at the Catholic apologist's site Strange Notions, where I sometimes debate theists (but am now banned from), a post was written by Catholic philosopher Dr. Dennis Bonnette that was almost entirely addressed at some criticisms I've made on the site in the past year.

The post, entitled God: Eternity, Free Will, and the World, tries to defend the scholastic notion of god as coherent, with free will, and timelessness, yet able to interact with time. I had argued that such a god is incoherent, can't possible have free will, and would be causally impotent if timeless.

In the the following series of posts I shall refute every section of Bonnette's post, paragraph by paragraph, where ever I see a fallacy or incorrection. So let's get right to it.

God's Immutability and Eternity


Dr. Bonnette starts the first section arguing for god's divine simplicity.

As has been shown previously, a key inference of St. Thomas Aquinas’ proofs for God’s existence is that God is the Uncaused First Cause. Since God is uncaused, he cannot be the subject of motion or change, because whatever is moved or changed must be moved or changed by another. Hence, God is immutable.

Let's take god's simplicity for the sake of argument: God can't be the subject of motion or change. OK. So what about Jesus, who is god incarnate, and a person in time? If the response is that Jesus has a human and a divine nature, and his divine nature doesn't change, how does the divine nature enter a female womb? Bonnette doesn't mention Jesus at all in his post, but this is an inconsistency left unanswered that undermine's his Christianity. Also, as I like to remind Thomists, the Aristotelian principle, that "whatever is moved or changed must be moved or changed by another" necessarily negates free will, since humans would always be moved by something outside them (ie. by another). I addressed this in more detail in my post on how Thomists like Edward Feser fail to defend free will. Bonnette continues,

Moreover, the Uncaused First Cause must be pure act, since change would require moving something from potency to act. But, if no change is possible, God must have no potency to further act. Hence, he is pure act, which means pure being. In fact, as the absolutely simple first being, God is not even composed of essence and existence. He is pure act of existence without any limiting essence, that is, the Infinite Being. Only one such being is possible, since if there were two, one would limit the infinity of the other.

Of course, there's no need for an uncaused first cause to the universe, since the universe exists as an eternal block that never comes into or goes out of existence. Hence, to borrow Thomistic terminology, the explanation of the universe is in the nature of the universe, because something eternal can't fail to exist. And it hasn't been established (and certainly not from Bonnette's post) that god is not moving or changing. The whole argument that tries to deduce god as unmoving and unchanging is predicated on movement and change in the universe in the sense of things coming into being, often referred to as becoming in philosophy. But as I've argued numerous times on this site, this presupposes the A-theory of time, also known as presentism. If one can't defend the truth of that presupposition, the argument is begging the question. Bonnette on Strange Notions has tried to defend the falsity of eternalism before, which is the antithesis of presentism, but he makes a fool of himself misunderstanding the very basics of the debate. He naively assumes (like almost all people do) that eternalism means timelessness—as if all events would be happening at the same time. This is of course wrong.

Sunday, April 1, 2018

Twitter's Policy Violations Are A Joke And Biased Against Atheists


When you're losing a debate with someone on a social media platform, a common tactic is to report them as being in violation of the platform's policies. Recently this happened to me as I engaged in a debate on whether Islam is a sexist religion with a "Sunni Supremacist."

We went back and forth for an hour and I hit her (or him) with devastating facts that her cherished religion is chock with sexism, to which she initially denied, then accepted, but then said it isn't sexist if men can dominate women. Well there's Islam for you. Then right in the middle of the debate she reports one of my tweets as violating Twitter's stated policies. Twitter's policy is:

You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.

And here is the tweet that she found so offensive:


And Twitter agreed with her despite my protest. This is sheer lunacy and anti-atheist bias on the part of Twitter. At worst, I called a person retarded. But that happens every second on Twitter and clearly this person is not actually retarded, although their fanaticism could suggest otherwise. The tweet is referring to a verse in the Quran in chapter 2 verse 228. It says that when it comes to divorce, "men have a degree (of advantage) over them [women]." This women actually used this verse to try and argue that Islam is not sexist when it comes to divorce and all I simply pointed out was that this is simply not the case. The verse demonstrates my point that Islam is sexist.

So because she couldn't accept the fact that her own evidence against my view actually affirmed my view, like a typical person who loses a debate, she reported my tweet as being in violation of Twitter's policies, and Twitter stupidly agreed. She by the way called me a moron, and espoused anti-atheist, anti-Western, and anti-American bigotry in several of her tweets, calling atheism a "mental disorder" numerous times. I reported her in retaliation because that is my only option and it does not appear Twitter has done any temporary blocking since she's still tweeting.

This opens up a question. If theists (or anyone for that matter) use insincere tactics like this to try and shut someone down on a social media platform, should atheists do the same? Should we be reporting all anti-atheist bias out there—which by the way is rampant online, especially among Muslims? I would like to say no. But if companies like Twitter and Facebook and others are going to have a double standard against atheists who criticize religion while they turn a blind eye to theists who regularly demonize atheists and atheism, then I think we should.

So please find an anti-atheist, anti-gay, and sexist tweet by this "Sunni Supremacist" (which will be very easy) and report this person to Twitter to give them a taste of their own medicine. And please voice your concern to make social media aware of their biased double standard against atheists.

Friday, January 5, 2018

The Atheist Conference Is Dead



As some of you may have read, here or elsewhere, I was co-organizing an event this upcoming summer called The Atheist Conference, or TAC for short. It was supposed to be the first major atheist event held in New York City.

I was supposed to participate in two events there. The first was to moderate a debate between atheist Justin Schieber, and Christian David Wood on the existence of god. The second was to host a panel discussion called Make Atheism Great Again, about how atheists can respond better to the arguments for god, and improve their critical thinking skills. It was to be shared with Justin again and the Counter Apologist. It would have been a fucking awesome panel.

But none of this is going to happen now because the event has just been canceled. The reasons why are complicated, but it started out difficult enough. The atheist community has splintered into a million shards in recent years. There are the atheist feminists and the atheist anti-feminists, the social justice warrior atheists and the anti-social justice warrior atheists. The pro-PC atheists and the anti-PC atheists. There are pro-Trump atheists and anti pro-Trump atheists. Atheists are split over gamergate, elevatorgate, whether we should organize, or whether we should even call ourselves atheists at all. The divisions go on and on.

Early on we invited atheist YouTuber Steve Shives to speak at TAC on a panel about YouTube atheism. We gave him the ability to control who's on the panel, as he wouldn't participate on it with anyone who strongly disagreed with him. Naturally, he picked people whose ideology was very much in line with his own. And immediately we got slack by the anti-SJW wing of the atheist community who all told us that our speakers were very one sided in the pro-SJW direction.

There is no doubt about it that Shives's panel was very pro-SJW. No doubt. But it would have been moderated by Lee Moore, TAC's founder, and the plan was for him to be the sole voice of criticism against some of the shadier tactics Shives is guilty of. Also, Shives's panel was just one event at the conference. It wasn't all we were about. We weren't going to put on a social justice warrior conference. Social justice issues weren't going to be the focus of the conference. Trying to patch the atheist community's rifts to focus on getting us united on what we agree on was. There were going to be panels with secular politicians, speeches about critical thinking and the problems of group think, speeches about science, a comedy show with Mike Lee, and of course the debate between Schieber and Wood, which would have been our opening night special.

Saturday, December 2, 2017

Sacerdotus Too Scared To Debate Me


A known charlatan and fake "philosopher" who goes by the name of Sacertodus tried to challenge me to a debate online recently. He made a list of unwarranted demands, like to see my full ID with my name and birthdate (apparently to prove I'm not a minor, because he's a Catholic and Catholics are known pedophiles).

I said sure, but on the condition that he provide his ID so that I can verify who he is and find out if his supposed degrees in philosophy and science are real, because anyone can fake a screenshot. I'm positive he has no degrees because he is so insanely ignorance on both science and philosophy it's impossible he can have a degree. Impossible.

For example, after 3 weeks of debating via our blogs he still doesn't know the difference between presentism and eternalism, and is still confusing eternalism for the steady state theory. He still doesn't know eternalism is derived from special relativity, and that it's just the philosophical name for the ontology of spacetime. On top of that he makes dozens of errors on ethics (asserting Catholic dogma as fact) and evolution (asserting that there was a genetic Adam and Eve who lived at the same time who we all descended from). There's no way someone with even 1 year of college education can be so ignorant on this.

And so because I didn't send him my data he claims I forfeited the debate. Please. I don't debate pathological liars (which he has a reputation for). I would easily whoop his ass in a debate and eagerly look forward to it. He'll be a piece of cake. All he has to do is email me his ID information and I will send him mine. He refuses to do that, and so he forfeits the debate. I have standards too. I don't waste time with charlatans.

If Sacerdotus isn't too scared to debate me, he can send the information any time. Or if he refuses, then he must drop any requirements for me to prove who I am. Ball's in his court.

Here's some links to my latest refutation of him showing how I easily refuted him without any effort:


https://disqus.com/home/discussion/atheismandthecity/sacerdotus_is_even_more_stupid_than_previously_thought_pt_1/#comment-3640605405

https://disqus.com/home/discussion/atheismandthecity/sacerdotus_is_even_more_stupid_than_previously_thought_pt_1/#comment-3641821038

Saturday, November 11, 2017

Sacerdotus Is Stupid



A gay theist (gaytheist?) on the internet attempted to refute my recent post explaining why I'm an atheist. He claims it was "easy" and that I show a lack of understanding of science and philosophy! Ha! Nothing can be further from the truth. It's he who lacks in-depth understanding of physics, philosophy, religion, and atheism, and a refutation of his "refutation" was really easy for me, albeit just time consuming.

But since I'm off work for the next few days and I'm bored at home (it's freezing outside!) let me for the record refute his pathetic attempt at a refutation.

Here's his attempt at a refutation of my argument number 1. My original arguments can be read here.

1) The traditional notion of god isn't coherent


He responds:

The author here runs on a strawman argument. He simply does not understand the concept of God. The author assumes that God is subject to his terms or the terms of the understandings of man; that is to say, how we perceive and understand everything. He claims that theists resort to special pleading to address what he claims to be contradictions. However, he is doing exactly that. He argues that change requires times and fails to back this up. We know from cosmology that there was no time prior to cosmic inflation. Time is a product that came into existence after the "big bang." Despite this, a change did take place. If change did not take place, there would have been no "big bang" event. Moreover, the author fails to understand that God is a being, not a mere concept. This being is beyond all, transcends all. No theist, no atheist, no theologian or pope can ever truly understand God or explain Him. St. Augustine tried and experienced a vision of his angel as a young boy who was at the shore trying to put the ocean in a small hole in the sand. The boy went to and fro collecting water in a shell until St. Augustine stopped him and inquired as to what the boy was trying to do. The boy said he was trying to put the entire ocean in the hole he dug. St. Augustine brushed it off as a something that came out of a babe's mouth and explained that it was not possible for the ocean to be poured into a small hole. The boy replied that neither can he put the entirety of God into his mind.

Every time I'm told that a person has "refuted" atheism I'm sadly disappointed. This is one of those times. Here I'm clearly saying god is subject to logic. As I clearly wrote in the post, "god cannot do the logically impossible or be the logically impossible." These aren't my terms and conditions, or the limitations of human intellect, this is our ability to be logical. Deny this, and you throw all of logic out the window. That includes your ability to logically "prove" atheism false - or anything else. That change requires time is obvious and certain. To change requires two states of being that cannot exist at the same time, otherwise you'd get a contradiction: A = ¬A. This is logically impossible. That this guy doesn't understand that means he fails logic 101, and that means his assessment of the rest of the argument fails. This is why I like to get all theists to agree beforehand that god is not beyond logic. I do this because - exactly as I predict - theists resort to special pleading to explain away god's inconsistence. When he says god "is beyond all, transcends all. No theist, no atheist, no theologian or pope can ever truly understand God or explain Him," he is resorting to special pleading. If you can't coherently explain god, you can't coherently say god exists. This guy fails to do that. His response to argument 1 completely fails and did exactly what I predicted.

Sunday, September 3, 2017

Thomism Can't Even Stay Consistent With Its Own Principles


I've been embroiled in several comment threads over at Strange Notions, a Catholic apologetic site, on a variety of issues related to metaphysical first principles and brute facts. There, I've tested out my argument that brute facts are unavoidable to the many Catholic apologists on the site, including Dr. Dennis Bonnette, a retired professor of philosophy who now teaches free classes at the Aquinas School of Philosophy, and is contributing author on the site.

As a reminder, that argument is:

  1. The traditional notion of god in classical theism is that of a timeless, changeless, immaterial mind, who also must be infinitely good, infinitely wise, and can do anything logically possible.
  2. All of god's will and desires must exist timelessly and eternally in an unchanging, frozen state.
  3. That would mean that god timelessly and eternally had the desire to create our particular universe, and not some other universe, or no universe.
  4. Our universe is not logically necessary; it didn't have to exist, and god didn't have to create it.
  5. The theist would have to show that it was logically necessary for god to create our particular universe in order to avoid eventually coming to a brute fact.
  6. There is no way to answer this question, even in principle, with something logically necessary.
  7. Thus at least one brute fact must exist even if god exists.

I think my argument is irrefutable, but I'm not so cocky that I'm unwilling to debate it. In fact, debating it is exactly what I need. I wish to put it up against the best minds in Thomism to see how they respond. And after a week of debating the argument back and forth with Dr. Bonnette, I basically got him to tacitly admit that god's eternal desire to create our particular universe, and not any other universe, or no universe, is a brute fact. He didn't acknowledge it's a brute fact of course, and he denied that it was, but he had to ground his explanation in circular reasoning.

First, one of the metaphysical first principles that Thomists like Dr. Bonnette argue cannot be denied is the principle of sufficient reason, which states that everything must have a reason, cause, or ground for its existence. Furthermore, this reason will either have to be contingent or necessary. That is, it's either going to be dependent on something else for its explanation, or its explanation will be contained within itself, meaning, it's logically necessary.

Dr. Bonnette's view is that god's substance is identical to his will. This means that a god with a different will is a god with a different substance, and in effect, is a different god. So god with eternal desire A is a different god than god with eternal desire B. For simplicity I said let's just call them god A and god B.

There is no logically necessary reason why god A exists, rather than god B, since both are logically possible and neither is logically impossible (assuming god is not incoherent). So Dr. Bonnette's metaphysics (if granted) only covers one aspect of this: that there needs to be a god. But it doesn't demonstrate why there needs to be god A vs god B, or any other god with a different eternal and unchanging will (which again, will be a different god).

Since there is no logically necessary reason why god A has to exist, the reason why god A exists and not god B/C/D/E... etc, cannot be based on a logically necessary reason. Hence his metaphysics fails to explain why we have the particular god we have. Given this, only non-necessary, contingent reasons can explain why. They will all necessarily be reasons that could have been otherwise, and ultimately when drilling down to why any particular answer explains a non-necessary aspect of god's will (and therefore his substance) he must terminate in a brute fact at some point since there is no logically necessary reason available to him.

A few comments later he says,

The reason why God A exists and not God B is because God A does exist and God B never did. God B was never a real possibility because the only God that exists is God A. You are again trying to go back in time and think of two possibilities. God is outside of time and there never was an actual possibility of any God but him.

The explanation in his first sentence isn't a logically necessary one, and so he's admitting god A is not logically necessary. And saying that god A exists simply because god A does, can be applied to the eternal universe: The reason why our eternal universe exists and not another eternal universe is because our eternal universe does exist and another eternal universe never did.

It makes the logical grounding of god A no more justified than the atheist's grounding for the universe. The Thomistic theist in this sense has no edge over the atheist.

Thursday, August 10, 2017

Atheist Vs Accutheist Dialogue


In an email thread, a person who describes himself as an "accutheist" is debating several other atheists and I on the existence of god. He's a pantheist turned theist who created the term accutheist to mean accurate theist, or one whose idea of god is accurate. I wrote to him about how his logic for his belief in god is weak and filled with dogma and how one cannot see their beliefs as dogma when they believe it. Here is a section of that email below where I summarize what our lengthy 2 and a half week debate was basically like:


You see, no one can tell they're being dogmatic when they sincerely believe what the dogma is about. Then, it appears as "logic" to the dogmatist. 
Example: 
Accutheist: God is defined as everything.
Atheists: That's your definition, most other theists disagree with you.
Accutheist: No here's a wikipedia article saying this.
Atheists: We've checked, wiki doesn't say that. It says pantheists define god as everything, not all theists.
Accutheist: But the Bible says god is everything.
Atheists: No it doesn't, and even if it did, it wouldn't prove god is indeed everything because you cannot define something into existence.
Accutheist: You don't understand logic, God is defined as everything.
Atheists: Again, you're just defining god as everything, you need to prove god is indeed everything.
Accutheist: God is defined as everything. Everything exists. Therefore god exists.
Atheists: THAT DOESN'T PROVE GOD EXISTS, NOR DOES IT PROVE GOD IS EVERYTHING. You cannot just assert god is everything and claim you've showed it is.
Accutheist: This is the definition everyone knows.
Atheists: No it isn't. It is a particular pantheistic definition you are asserting is true.
Accutheist: You don't understand logic, God is defined as everything.
Atheists

Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Debate: Has Political Correctness Gone Too Far?


Well, it turns out that I forgot to upload my debate on political correctness from a few months ago. I thought I had published it, but I guess I forgot when I went on vacation. So, here it is: Has political correctness gone too far? What do you think? Who made the better argument?


Saturday, July 29, 2017

Back From Vacation...


So, on Monday I got back from my vacation in Europe. I went to London, Paris, and Amsterdam, and spent a few days in the Dutch countryside too. Overall the trip was a success, and by success I mean that I achieved my goal of getting a cultural feel for Europe in a way that helped me understand it, along with having some fun of course.


London was amazing. I did many of the touristy things, but I also went bar hopping and talked with locals, and I went to an all day philosophy conference that showcased several talks by philosophers on the arguments for god. Afterwards some of us went for drinks and talked religion and philosophy, and they were buying me drinks all night long! Amazing.

After 5 days in London I took a train to Paris. I actually missed my train because I got lost in the St. Pancras train station, but I eventually made it. Paris is beautiful. It's every bit as beautiful as they say it is. I rented a bike to get around town easier and made my way to the Eiffel Tower, only to find that the line to go up was too long. So the next day I went to Tour Montparnasse, which has an observation deck and was almost empty. I took some amazing photos there.


Sunday, July 9, 2017

Christopher Hitchens vs Larry Taunton | God or No God? Debate


I had gotten to the point where I thought I'd seen every video of Christopher Hitchens talking or debating about religion. But just yesterday I discovered a new one that I hadn't seen. Not long before he died, Hitchens had debated a Christian named Larry Taunton in 2010 who he'd become friends with in his last few years. The debate was never uploaded to YouTube, or at least was not easily findable. Recently, Taunton's company that hosted the debate and produced the video of it, Fixed Point Foundation, uploaded it to their YouTube channel for all to see.

I've actually had to do some studying on why religion is harmful to society because of my upcoming debate on it, and I needed to watch some classic Hitch as a refresher. So here it is, one of Hitchens's last debates. He will surely be missed. Enjoy.



Saturday, July 1, 2017

Drive By Blogging: Atheism Grows, Church/State Violations, 10 Commandments Destroyed, & A New Public Debate


As I've mentioned in previous posts, lately I've been much busier than usual. To make things worse I'll also be travelling in Europe for the second half of July. I'm going to London, Paris, and Amsterdam. In addition to that I'm still working on several side projects, like our upcoming atheist conference, and so I really haven't been able to blog at the frequency I used to.

That being said let me do a rapid "drive by" blog post on several issues I could have been writing about but haven't had the time to.

First, there was some recent big news that the number of atheists might be much higher than previously reported, which usually was down near the 3-5% range, even though PEW has recorded the number of people who do not believe in god at 9%. A new study claims that the real number of atheists in the US may be as high as 26%. The trick, it seems, is all about the questioning. Asking someone directly on a questionnaire if they're an atheist will lead significant numbers of those who are atheists to say that they aren't out of the stigma surrounding the term. So instead, two groups were shown a bunch of innocuous statements like "I own a dog," "I enjoy modern art," and were instructed to answer if they were true. But the test group had an additional statement: "I don't believe in God." When comparing the test group with the control group that didn't have the atheist question, the researchers conclude that about 26% of Americans do not believe in god.

This number seems closer to me to the real number. I meet so many atheists that the 3-5% range seems awfully low. It's well known that many atheists are in the closet. Atheists continue to be among the most disliked group of people in the US. That's why we have to fight the stigma, so that atheists aren't ashamed to openly express who they are. The study's results, although encouraging, has its critics. Even if the real number is less than 26%, if it's only 20%, I'd still be happy with the results. The trend is headed in the right direction after all.

In other atheist news, the Czech Republic continues to be one of the most atheist countries in Europe, if not the world, with only 29% believing in god according to a recent PEW Research survey. 66% of Czechs do not believe in god. The country is however, an outlier among Eastern Europe, where large majorities profess belief in god.

I plan on updating a rebuttal to the kalam cosmological argument with new refutations....eventually.

Saturday, June 17, 2017

It's Been A While...


So, it's been a while since I've written any blog posts. It's been nearly a month actually. That's the longest amount of time I think I've ever had in between posts. So what's been going on? Well, I've been really fucking busy.

First, last month I had a public debate on whether political correctness has gone too far and I finally managed to actually film this one. I just finished editing the video and it will be up online soon. I also participated in two panel discussions at the annual Left Forum where I spoke about combating the Far Right, and how we need to have honest conversations about Islam. Both of those events were filmed and I am currently editing them, with the hopes that they will be uploaded online by the end of the month.

I'm also going to be travelling through Europe this summer for a week and a half. I will be in the UK, France, and then Holland. I had wanted to do this trip for years with friends but every year plans kept falling through. So this year I was like fuck it, I'm doing this without anyone. So I will be travelling solo for most of the trip and then I will meet my sister in Holland for a "spiritual retreat," before flying back to New York.

I really want to assess the political climate in Europe and see the people and experience the culture. I keep hearing that Islamism is so much more widespread and pernicious there when compared to the US, and I'm curious if this is really true. So I'll be spending a few days in London, Paris, and Amsterdam to explore the situation. I really want to go to several local atheist meetings to see what's going on. And I'd love to attend a taping of the UK show The Big Questions where they debate moral, ethical, and religious issues facing the country.

And lastly, I've been working with my local atheist community to put together the first ever atheist conference in New York City! Amazingly, there has never been one in NYC before, and that's about to change. It's simply going to be called The Atheist Conference, and I'm going to be hosting a panel discussion on how to debate atheism, how to improve our arguments, spot our flaws, and teach atheists important tips on what to say in a debate. I'm talking with Justin Schieber of Real Atheology and Jeffrey Jay Lowder of the Secular Outpost on being on the panel with me. Both of them are seasoned debaters who know their shit and it will be a pleasure discussing our favorite atheist debating topics, and a thrill for the audience as well. I don't think anything like this has been done to my knowledge, certainly not from my perspective. The working title of my panel discussion will be, you guessed it, Make Atheism Great Again. I'm very exited about this, as you can expect.
The date for the conference will be July 6-8th, 2018, at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, a 4 star hotel that we got a great deal on where guests will be able to stay for $169 a night, a bargain in Manhattan for such a hotel. Tickets will go on sale in September. I will be posting much more about this in the future and hopefully get back to blogging at my regular schedule soon! Hopefully we'll still have a country by then!

Saturday, March 4, 2017

Does Government Have A Duty To Educate Its Citizens?


Last week I attended a public debate on the proposition: It is the duty of government to educate its citizens. I was and am for the proposition, but the side arguing against the motion definitely made the better case for their point of view. It was a two-on-two debate, just like my recent debate over open source information, Thankfully, Chuck, one of the two debaters arguing against the motion, whom I know and spar with regularly, put up his opening speech on his site and what I want to do here is offer my critique of it.

Chuck begins his speech arguing that "duty" only applies to individuals:

To begin, I'd like to bring some clarity to the meaning of the proposition that we’re arguing against, which is that it's the duty of the government to educate its citizens. Regarding that proposition generally, it's important to note at the outset that the term “duty” is essentially a moral term that applies to individuals. Only in a metaphorical sense can the term be applied to the government.

With the crux of the debate over "duty" it is indeed important to say what we mean by the term. I'm skeptical of objective moral duties, but as I've written in the past, I think moral obligations and duties stem from one's self in adherence to principles, in addition to our various social contracts. But this means that it's important to identify what is the purpose of government. So what is it?

The purpose of government is to ensure the rights of its citizens are protected and defended by providing a police and military force, and a judicial system to adjudicate the law. Libertarians like Chuck would agree with that. But I think governments exist for more than that. In addition to police, military, and law, the purpose of the government is to protect its citizens against the harmful natural forces of unregulated markets. If a market is like a river, you need dams to regulate against droughts and floods that naturally happen in boom and bust cycles. A completely unregulated free market will inevitably result in increased concentrated wealth in the hands of a relatively few, and will leave millions at the bottom with little ability to climb the economic ladder. Government's purpose is to recognize that and provide the necessary regulations to prevent it. This isn't to go full on socialism. This is to allow the river to flow, but implement some common sense, rational checks and balances to ensure the river flows smoothly for the largest possible number of people. The US Constitution's preamble says one of the purposes of the US government is to "promote the general Welfare". This is to ensure the society runs smoothly.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

I Would Let Milo Speak On Campus, Under One Condition




A week ago the "dangerous faggot" Milo Yianopoulos was scheduled to speak at Berkeley University in California and some students violently protested and set fire to parts of the campus in opposition to him speaking there. This was widely reported in the news, and even the president tweeted that he'd withhold federal money from the campus if the university didn't allow free speech.

Much has been said about the kerfuffle, from how intolerant the Left is, to how all this protesting just raises Milo's profile, to how hateful his speech is. But I have a proposal. If I were the head of a university making the decision on whether or not an alt-righter like Milo gets to speak on my campus my policy would be this. I would allow Milo to speak on one condition. If he wants to speak on my campus, the format will be a debate. That's right. He can spew all his nonsense talk about how "Catholics are right about everything," but not in a way that it goes unchallenged. It's a debate or nothing. That's it.

I'm sure Milo wouldn't have a problem with that. Would he? The thing is, the Left indeed has lost the ability to debate and defend their views. They rely far too much on feelings and persecution complexes. The Left needs to learn how to debate again. And I'd use this as an opportunity to find the person who can best debate Milo and make it a must-see spectacle for all.

That just brings up one question: who's the best person on the Left to debate the dangerous faggot? I'd love to debate him, but I'm unfortunately a nobody. So this is an open question for me. Anyone properly debating him must be familiar with his arguments. Some generic Leftist who doesn't "get it" would be destroyed. Perhaps Kyle Kulinkski of Secular Talk? Hmm.

Just a thought.

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Notes From My Debate On The Abundance Of Open Source Information


What my position is: Open source information is more beneficial than harmful to society. Why?
  1. Access to open source information is a free speech issue. Your ability to put information online and have other people freely access to it, falls under the category of open source information, is a form of free speech. 
  2. OSI can help expose corruption, it can help keep governments and businesses in check, and it allows legitimate criticism of them to become known.
    • We take for granted that we live in a country that has some of the most liberal laws on free access to information in the world.
    • In most other countries the government imposes limitations on access to information online. 
    • And in some countries criticism of the government, leaders, criticism of the state religion, and certain political views like “democracy” and OSI itself are suppressed, and information about them is restricted. For example:
      • The “Great Firewall of China,” blocks websites that are critical of the Chinese government or that promote democracy
      • Wikipedia - epitome of OSI - is sometimes banned, or censored.
      • Without OSI political and corporate corruption becomes much more difficult to expose, thereby enabling it.
  3. OSI allows for the spread of liberal values like free speech, human rights, and secularism around the world.
    • In Saudi Arabia in 2012 a blogger named Raif Badawi was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison plus 1000 lashes with a whip for the crime of starting a website forum that promoted democracy and liberal values and allowed people to debate it.
    • Saudi Arabia not alone --- In other countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia, and Iran, they have laws against spreading information online critical of the state religion Islam, which is often used by govt to brutally oppresses women, homosexuals, non-religious people, and other minority groups.
      • Woman beheaded in Afghanistan last month for shopping without a male guardian.
    • Without OSI antiquated legal and moral policies can never be criticized, which enables them to persist. OSI allows for moral progress.
    • Hope I don't have to convince you this is good but consider the question:
  4. Why do so many countries around the world fear open source information?
    • Do you think ISIS is for OSI? Or Al-qaeda? Or North Korea? Cuba? China? 
    • It’s so that governments, and in many cases, corporations can control people by controlling what information they have access to. 
    • Free speech and OSI is absolutely fundamental to having a free society where ideas can compete in a marketplace.
      • Every society that isn’t free, restricts it
    • The suppression of OSI has always been aligned with dictatorship, of one form or another.
      • Even Donald Trump's been saying he wants to "open up the libel laws" to make it more easy to sue someone for defamation - by which he really means write anything critical about him.
Summary
  • Whatever harmful effects that OSI has, like fake news, is negated on the benefits it offers. 
    • We’re either going to have a censored internet (China, Saudi Arabia) where someone or some organization censors the information you have access to. 
    • Or we’re going to have a free and open internet, with a free and open flow of ideas. 
  • Ask yourself: Who would you trust with the authority to regulate free access to open access to information? Who gets to determine what information is harmful? Or too sensitive? 
  • Would you for example trust our new president Donald Trump with that power?
Final point:
  • Giving governments the ability the regulate free speech opens up a dangerous slippery slope that I don’t want to go down & I think ultimately be more harmful than good to society.

Review Of My Debate Plus Night Of Philosophy


So, what a week it's been. President Trump has banned refugees and residents from 7 Muslim majority countries, sparking outrage around the world, he revived the Keystone pipeline, and has introduced "alternative facts" into the dialectic. Oh yeah, and I had a debate about the abundance of open source information and attended the Night of Philosophy event at the Brooklyn Public Library.

First things first — the debate review. This was my first formal public debate and I hope will certainly not be my last, but I was not as experienced as our opponents were and it showed. They were both fairly experienced and formidable debaters. The format was two-on-two, with my friend Thomas Kim, who ran the NYC debate group for 5 years on my team. And on our opponent's team were two men named Avi and Lenny. Avi is an assistant coach on the debating team of a private K-12 school, and Lenny was on the debating team in college. They did a really good job debating for their side and we made some mistakes we should have looked out for.


First, Thomas and I didn't prepare as much as the other team did, and that was generally evident. Second, I wasn't as forceful as I should have been. I was just too reserved. I held back from trying to make the other team's arguments look bad. Third, since there was no rebuttal period, the closing statements acted effectively as a rebuttal period, but I didn't use my closing statement to do that. Instead I just reiterated many of the same points I made in my opening statement when I should've rebutted the other team's arguments. On top of that, Thomas's arguments were even less forceful than mine, making our entire case much softer and less polemic than our opponent's. And as a result of all these mistakes, we lost. And I really hate losing debates. How do we know we lost? The audience was asked before and after the debate and more people switched to the other side's view from ours.

So that's the bad. What's the good? I nailed my opening statement. It was nearly perfect and much better than any of my rehearsals. I was loud. I was confident. I gave great fucking opening speech. A woman even came up afterwards and told me how good it was. But unfortunately, it was all down hill from there. I will be putting up the bullet points from my debate in the near future.

Over all it was a good experience. I learned a lot and I can definitely see what makes a good public debater a good debater. I can see now why so many inexperienced public debaters just skip to their prepared speeches. That's the mistake I made. I didn't use my time to rebut my opponent's arguments as I should have. Also, many debaters just aren't aware of the format they're in. I made that mistake by failing to recognize there was no formal rebutting period. But I will definitely be better for my second debate. Here are some pictures:

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