Showing posts with label Zeitgeist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zeitgeist. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Peter Joseph On "Economic Calculation in a Natural Law"


Peter Joseph is a popular documentary maker with a strong online presence. He's mostly known for the Zeitgeist documentary in 2007 which went viral in the early days of YouTube. It featured a section on Jesus mythicism which wasn't well cited and many of its claims have since been for the most part debunked, but nonetheless became very influential and caught the attention of virtually the entire Christian community.

But this post is not about that. Peter Joseph's main focus is on creating a new cultural paradigm in terms of how we live, where we get our energy, what we do for a living, and the structure of our economy. He argues that we phase out our market based economy and replace it with a resource based economy. The current market based economy is unsustainable and is designed to fail. It is a train wreck waiting to happen. And educating the public on this while promoting his alternative, is his main agenda. Too often however, his criticism of Christianity is all people hear and some people just shut out all his ideas based on that.

Regardless of whether or not you're a believer, I think his ideas are worth listening to. They are concerned with the dangerous direction humanity is headed towards and how we need to change the current system for the better and achieve the energy and resource stability and abundance in order to avoid the cliff that we are headed towards. I'm not saying I agree with him on every point, or that I'm endorsing all his views, but we need to explore alternatives to the current paradigm, which is poisonous.


Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Confirmation Bias Goes Both Ways



We must all always be mindful of our confirmation biases, especially as atheists. Do not be quick to let a piece of evidence "confirm" your position without having done some investigation as to whether its claims check out. In fact, you should be even more skeptical of the evidence that supports your position because your argument is riding on its veridicality, and if you don't do your homework and fact check its claims, your opponent will. So make a concerted effort to be skeptical of all the evidence for and against your position. Don't find yourself doing the very same thing that all too often we find many theists doing. Look up criticism of the evidence that supports your position and do the very same thing that your opponent will do to try and refute it. You might find that the "evidence" does not check out or you will find that it makes you better prepared to deal with the faulty arguments against it if it does. Either way, you should strive for making the most informed case possible, and that may mean getting rid of certain bad arguments.

Having spent the past several years debating theists, in my personal experiences their confirmation biases are often blatant. They fail to make an effort to look into the evidence against their evidence. And atheists are no exception. Back in 2007 for example, when the documentary Zeitgeist came out, it made a bunch of historically inaccurate claims for the argument that Jesus never existed, and millions of atheists jumped on it with out having fact checked anything. Even scholarly mythicists like Richard Carrier denounced it. This was a clear example of atheists falling victim to the inherent confirmation biases that we ALL have.

But we're better than that.

We are the skeptics, we are the rationalists, we are the ones who base our worldview on evidence and reason. We must not find ourselves doing the very same thing that our opponents do without regard, because then we will be no better than them, even if we're right.


Friday, August 13, 2010

Zeitgeist


A close person to me told of this documentary that I must see. Zeitgeist a documentary by Peter Joseph has 3 parts to it: part 1 about the astrological and pagan origins of Christianity, part 2 about the 9/11 conspiracy, and part 3 about the Federal Reserve and its true characteristics that many aren't aware of. I'm not a big 9/11 truth-er, if fact I believe the planes took down the towers, but I am deeply interested in the origins of organized religions. Zeitgeist has an excellent chapter explaining how natural astrological phenomenon centered around the Sun's movements in the sky led to the creation of the myth of Horus, an Egyptian God, who was a precursor to the story of Jesus.

Horus was born on December 25th, around approximately 3000 B.C. His birth was accompanied by a star in the east and 3 wisemen. He was baptized at age 30, had 12 disciples, and performed miracles. There are too many similarities between Horus, and Jesus to be a coincidence. Horus gives us insight into where the Jesus myth originated from. I'm not sure as to whether Jesus was made up entirely or was an actual person whose life was mythologized. Either case involves a re-tinkering of the Horus myth to accommodate it to a new audience. Check Zeitgeist out and learn.



For a deeper look into our monetary system and all its ills take a look at the second documentary by Peter Joseph. It has many interesting points:

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