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.