This isn’t really breaking news, but Pat Condell’s entire youtube collection was released as a DVD last week and is on sale at richarddawkins.net (don’t worry this isn’t an affiliate link).

Pat Condell is a very well spoken atheist among the youtube community. His accent does help him out as anything with an English accent normally sounds intelligent, except for scousers.

Here is a clip of him below addressing replies from some angry christians.

On yesterday’s Real Time, Bill Maher got the chance to interview Richard Dawkins via satellite. Maher does a good job interviewing Dawkins, who normally gets little respect from his interviewers in the states.

Most interviews of Dawkins on American tv are horrible; the worst one was on The O’Reilly Factor. It is like Dawkins is trying to argue with a 2 year old.

Anyways, check out the interview below. For those of you that have read the God Delusion, Dawkins doesn’t bring up any new big ideas, but the combo of Maher and Dawkins is funny. Dawkins does bring up a few neat tidbits. He upgrades his level of atheism from a 6/7 to a 6.9/7, and he goes on to call Francis Collins unintelligent. He admits that he plans to have a tape recorder by his side on his deathbed to debunk anyone that might claim he becomes religious there.

I am gaining respect for the CBC

I generally only watch CBC for Hockey Night in Canada, and not much else. Most of their original programming is not very good. I actually don’t watch TV except for sports. That is besides the fact.

The CBC is releasing one of their upcoming shows, Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister, over p2p networks (ie Bittorrent). While this doesn’t make me forget that the CBC didn’t resign Christ Cuthbert, a great hockey commentator, it does restore some credibility by trying something new and progressive. Hopefully more of CBC’s content will be available for download in the future, so everyone go out and download this, even if you aren’t going to watch it. If this is a success, maybe we’ll have hockey games via Bittorrent sometime in the future.[via Michael Geist ]

I have just lost all respect of Ben Stein

I used to be a big fan of Win Ben Stein’s Money, mainly for his dry sense of humour. I recently found out that he is releasing a pro-creationist movie called “eXpelled.” Respect is now 0.

Check out the trailer here. It’s horrible. The comments are being moderated, so mine haven’t shown up. They are definitely being censored. Here are a few excerpts from the comments:

“About time someone steps up.”

“A few of us from our church saw a private screening in Houston and the movie is fantastic! Tell as many as you can to go opening weekend April 18th.”

“Way to go Ben. This has been going on for years. It is about time someone exposed it. Anyone who sees how DNA works cannot help but conclude that there is Intelligence.”

“I don’t understand why we just accept both theories and leave people to their own, each side feels compelled to preach and teach. Just end it. As for people being expelled from education because they don’t agree with it, thats wrong.”

The last comment really bothers me. Many people don’t understand that intelligent design is NOT a Theory. It is a hypothesis, not a Theory. Scientifically, a theory is something that has been tested and can be used to predict things. In colloquial speech, when people say “I have a theory,” they really mean “I have a hypothesis.”

This is exactly why we need more popularizers of science such as Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan. A recent xkcd comic, “Unscientific” agrees with me and portrays my point…check it out.

I do not normally stay on top of press releases from the vatican, but boing boing alerted me to 7 new sins that the pope just added to the list.

Here they are:

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control

2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research

3. Drug abuse

4. Polluting the environment

5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor

6. Excessive wealth

7. Creating poverty

I have a few short comments to a few of these:

@1: What about all of the natural abortions that occur by themselves?

The catholic church promotes celibacy, which isn’t “natural” either.

@2: I noticed that the pope shaves. This act kills millions of cells that ALL have the potential to become a human. Benny better stop shaving if he wants to live by #2.

@3: I will not say drug abuse is not a problem, but it is not my right to tell people what they can and cannot do if it doesn’t bother me.

What about caffeine? This blog wouldn’t exist if this was the case.

@6: Excessive wealth? The catholic church evades taxes by claiming to have the backing of a glorified tooth fairy. They are just cheats like the big corporations. They are also one of the largest land owners in the world. I realize that the land is not organized in a top-down structure, with all the money flowing to the vatican, but they do still take up a lot of space. Not to mention all of the those cemeteries.

Here is the debate between Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach that took place on January 30, 2008. It is 90mins long; I am only half way through it but it is good so far and wished to share it. I really like listening to Hitchens speak. I think that he is the most well spoken of the four horsemen.

Here is the email follow up between the two that took place after the debate.

I would highly recommend watching this:

These charts were inspired by indexed, a site that tries to make sense of life primarily by venn diagrams. The ideas in these charts are by no means new or my own, but I thought it would be neat to be able to visualize a few ideas I have in my head.

I think they’re pretty self explanatory:

re·li·gu·lous – adjective

1. When religious ideas, beliefs, claims are patently absurd, comical, ridiculous.

Religulous is not just a new word to rememberize, it is also the name of the upcoming Bill Maher documentary. It is slated to be released on easter, but IMBD is reporting that it won’t be released until June in the US.

I am not quite sure what to expect from religulous. I really don’t know Maher that well, apart from some his atheist monologues on youtube (if you haven’t seen them, check one out here; it’s a gooder). With directing from Larry Charles, the director of Borat, I am expecting it to be more of a comedy than a serious intellectual movie. Bill Maher is too well known to pull off Borat type humour, but I think that he will be able to achieve Michael Moore style comedy, even though Maher denies this.

Here is Maher on Religulous:

“We talked to everybody. We went everywhere. We went to every place where there is religion. We went to Vatican City. We went to Jerusalem. We went to Salt Lake City. And I think I’ve insulted everybody!”

Apart from Maher’s interview on Larry King (embedded below), there is little information about this upcoming documentary. I hope that it actually makes it out by easter. It’ll be a good laugh.

A two page spread in the National Post on Jan 7th ‘07, by Damon Linker criticizes the ‘New Atheists’ of Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and Hitchens. Here is the online version of the article. Linker is the author of The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege. Mark Twain said, “never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” I am disregarding his advice and taking on a newspaper anyways.

Linker tries to discredit these recent atheist books, while trying not to upset anyone except for real atheists. In trying to keep the readers of the National Post happy, he attempts to shoot down some valid arguments that, although blunt, are true. As I have not read any of Linker’s books, I only know him from this article, which portrays him as an agnostic. Agnosticism is a fence sitting stance and is a huge cop out of atheism, based on flawed logic. Agnostics generally view the probability of there being a god and not being a god as in the same realm, where atheists view the probability of god existing to be unimaginably small.

Linker’s main arguments are that these “New Atheists” are not new, that they are not liberals, and their political goals are not clearly defined.

Central to Linker’s article is the idea that these ‘New Atheists” are not new. Advocation of atheism has been around for centuries. There is nothing wrong with regurgitating historic ideas with a modern twist. If old ideas were never revisited, they would fade away into history. In the past, true atheists as seen today were hard to come by; deists were more common than atheists. These deists of yesterday would almost definitely be atheists in today’s world.

It is also worth noting that none of these authors have given themselves the title of “New Atheists.” The term new atheist is just a term constructed by the media.

Linker claims that the new atheists are “brutally intolerant, proselytizing faith,[and] out to rack up conversions.” Obviously, they are out to get conversions. That is why they wrote their respective books. I fail to see the problem with trying to get converts. The world would be a better place if people removed faith from their lives. Also, Dawkins et. al. are not trying to convert people to their faith, because an atheist’s world view does not involve faith. They are simply trying to get people to rid their life of faith and to think. Having faith is a dangerous mindset that does not achieve predictable results in most areas of life. For example, imagine what would happen if plane manufacturers had faith that their planes were safe without actually testing them.

<off on tangent> Here is a quick exercise. Go back and read the previous paragraph and replace the word faith with blind faith. There is no difference between the meaning of these two phrases. Remember, every time you see the word faith, think blind faith. </tangent>

Linker finds these authors to be illiberal because traditionally, liberals should be tolerant of any faith and “take no position on theological issues.” Linker defines a liberal as someone who will “accept intellectual variety.” The problem is that religion does not have any intellectual merit. I do agree that these atheists do not fit nicely into the liberal category. This does not matter. It is a waste of time to plot these authors on an outdated, one-dimensional political scale.

On politics, Linker criticizes “the sloppiness displayed by all of the authors in discussing their political aims.” He is unclear whether these authors want to achieve secular politics or a completely secular society. I am quite confident that all of these authors would be happy with a completely secular society in which religion has been forgotten. In this case, religion would not have been abandoned because it was taken away by a secular, totalitarian government, but society as a whole would have replaced archaic religious dogma with science and reason.

In this article, Linker has missed the main point of these authors and clumsily tried to shoot down some of the trivial aspects of their books. The new atheists of Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and Hitchens are just trying to get people to think. If people actually thought things through instead of taking things on faith, these authors would be satisfied.