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.

Thursday, January 4, 2018

Quote Of The Day: Hitchens On The Fair Test


Happy New Year!

Whenever an atheist articulates any sort of expression to the effect that religion as it is traditionally understood should disappear, the theist will quite often predictably respond with the insinuation that getting rid of religion will result in gulags and mass slaughter. It's as if to say, godlessness necessarily leads to such atrocities. I heard it just the other day on Twitter. Well it's obviously false. Atheism cannot be conflated with communism. And I think Hitchens had one of the best counter points to show why that was so. From his Google talk:


Now you might be saying, "Wait, weren't they all believers?" Well, some were pantheists, and some were deists, but they were all products of the enlightenment and critical of traditional organized religion and its role in society and government. They were secularists. That was especially true of Voltaire, Paine, and Jefferson. A culture founded in secular enlightenment values—which the Soviet Union was not—is not going to end up anything like what most theists think a godless society will be.

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Can Metaphysical Claims Be Falsified By Science?


One frequently touted claim by Thomists is that metaphysical claims cannot even in principle be falsified (and perhaps corroborated by) scientific data, because metaphysics and science lie in two completely separated domains.

This is easily shown false. I claim that some metaphysical views make claims or assume things about the nature of physical reality, and such claims or assumptions fall within the purview of science. Here is why using AT metaphysics as an example:

1. AT metaphysics claims act/potency causality distinctions are real.
2. Act/potency claims that A will actualize B's coming into existence.
3. This requires a true ontological coming into existence or "becoming" of effects by their causes.
4. Such a claim presupposes the view on time known as presentism is true.
5. Presentism says that only the present moment exists and does so universally, and that the past and future do not exist.
6. Presentism's claims about time fall within the purview of scientific investigation.

I could stop right here because I've demonstrated my claim: Some metaphysical claims make or assume things about the nature of physical reality, and such claims fall within the purview of science. However, I can go a step further:

7. Scientific theories and experimental data have falsified the view known as presentism via special and general relativity.
8. Therefore, AT metaphysics assumes a view on the theory of time that falls within the purview of scientific investigation and that has been falsified for 100 years.
9. Thomism would be false as a result of this.

Now I'm not particularly interested in 7-9 right now. I'm more interested in 6, since dogmatic Thomists insist that nothing about AT metaphysics can in principle make a claim that can fall within the purview of scientific investigation. But a recent article on the Catholic Strange Notions site by a philosopher well acquainted with Thomism, Dr Dennis Bonnette, would seem to contradict this as he makes it explicit that a presentist ontology where things begin to exist ("becoming") is required for Thomism's metaphysical claims to survive.

Friday, December 29, 2017

Discovering Religion


About seven years ago, when I was still in my early years of discovering YouTube atheism, I came across a channel called Discovering Religion. It contains a few dozen well produced videos critiquing religion from various aspects that aided me in my journey of becoming a more active and more knowledgable atheist. From the YouTube description:

"Discovering Religion" is an original, documentary-style series on YouTube that explores a variety of topics within the framework of religion, science, philosophy, history and politics. The aim of this series is to objectively examine the fallacies propagated by religious doctrine through an entertaining, educational, and thought-provoking medium.

Sadly, the channel is no longer active and the videos seem to have been part of an extended documentary that is now over. But if you haven't seen any of the videos, I highly recommend them. Transcripts of videos can be seen here. Here is the first video and one about the founders of the US. Check out the channel page to see all videos.



Enjoy!

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Watch This High School Student's 3 Minute Explanation Of Special Relativity


For science fans out there of special relativity, this high school student from the Phillipines made an easy to understand 3 minute video explaining the theory. She won $250,000 for college for this video. Amazing! I'm still debating special relativity with several adults on my site who just can't get it, and yet this high school student does. Says something.




From the website it explains how she made the video: "The process never formally started because I've been passively looking for topics since last year. Summer was the time I actually started building the script. After a lot of tentative topics and drafts, I finally managed to fit it into 3 minutes! Then I had to shoot the video (~5 hours), edit the footage (~17 hours) and animate (~120 hours). I used Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017 for editing and Adobe After Effects CC 2017 for the animations and compositing." Music: "Quirky" by Falconshield Music and "The Science" by Alexander Rufire."

Sunday, December 24, 2017

Remember The Pagan Origins Of Christmas


You know, YouTube really made it harder to embed videos from its site onto others sites. They used to allow you to easily change the dimensions, now you have to manually do it.

But anyway, it's important every Christmas to remember its pagan origins, especially when the "Why do atheists celebrate Christmas?" question comes up. Just like how we can celebrate Halloween, even though originally the costumes were worn to scare away demons no one believes in any more, the tradition remains. Remembering the pagan origins of Christmas might also help us understand the pagan origins of Christianity as well. But that's for another day.



I'd prefer the original idea of a month long festival of debauchery if you ask me. Merry Christmas!!

Friday, December 22, 2017

Why Ben Shapiro Is Totally Ignorant On Atheism


I've been meaning to refute Ben Shapiro for months now and just haven't gotten around to it. I've only heard of him from within the past year but I've since learned he's been making ignorant utterances publicly for more than a decade.

Ben is an orthodox practicing Jew, and a pretty conservative one at that. He defends religion and belief in god quite often, usually while he's attacking atheism, and when he does so he can always be counted on to make a fool of himself.

Way back in 2008 he wrote a peice for TownHall.com entitled Why Atheism Is Morally Bankrupt where he made several predictable and already refuted absurd arguments that claim god is needed for morality and free will and for society to function:

Theres only one problem: without God, there can be no moral choice. Without God, there is no capacity for free will.*

This is based on the fallacy that souls can give us free will. Whether or not we have a soul is irrelevant to whether we have free will, and that's because the concept of libertarian free will (which is what Ben really means when he says free will) is completely incoherent. This has not trickled down into the masses yet, even though almost 90% of philosophers know this.

Thats because a Godless world is a soulless world. Virtually all faiths hold that God endows human beings with the unique ability to choose their actions -- the ability to transcend biology and environment in order to do good. Transcending biology and our environment requires a higher power -- a spark of the supernatural.

But where does your soul inherit its traits? Don't souls bare some resemblance to your parent's souls? If not, what gives your soul its apparently unique characteristics if they aren't inherited from biology at all? Are people born with a soul that is a particular way? If so, then how do you transcend the tendencies of the soul you had no choice to receive? It's the same problem Ben thinks the body has with biology: if we inherit our biology without a choice and can only transcend it with a soul, then if we inherit our soul without a choice how can we transcend that? The answer can't be free will, because clearly our souls don't have all the same capabilities.

Gilbert Pyle, the atheistic philosopher, derogatorily labeled the idea of soul/body dualism, the ghost in the machine. Nonetheless, our entire legal and moral system is based on the ghost in the machine -- the presupposition that we can choose to do otherwise. We can only condemn or praise individuals if they are responsible for their actions. We dont jail squirrels for garden theft or dogs for assaulting cats -- they arent responsible for their actions. But we routinely lock up kleptomaniacs and violent felons.

The Cartesian style dualism commonly referred to as a ghost in the machine prejortively, makes scientific claims that have absolutely no basis in science. In fact, this is one of those things science has unambiguously refuted. (See here too) And you can't say free will is true or that we have a soul because our legal system is based on it. The legal system assumes free will is true and can easily operate under false assumptions. That's one of the reasons why it's so bad. Legal responsibility on no free will is more complex and nuanced. It's generally based on a quarantine model for those who are dangerous and deterrance against future law breakers with an emphasis on reform instead of punishment in prison. No libertarian free will is required for that.

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