Skeptical Sunday: Refuting “Materialism”(?)

Here’s another SS post that I began back at the beginning of the year and which subsequently lay fallow until now. A young man named Ethan posted this comment on my post about the YouTube apologist murder-suicide:

Hello, Mr. Dorkman. I recently happened upon the RvD videos on Youtube and they are very nicely done. Through a chain of events, I found your blog.

I am a Christian, and as such disagree with this. I think you might be interested in my blog post on Materialism. Feel free to check it out and any other parts of the blog if you so desire. Nice to have met you. The link is below:

http://edsnotofthisworld.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/materialism-and-the-reality-of-god/

Take care,
Ethan Stech

As you’ll see, I commented on his post at the time and intended to post a response here…and then didn’t. I started writing one but never got the chance to finish.

So here’s me finishing. We have to grant that the original post is over seven months old at this point, and written by quite a young man. It may no longer represent his level of rhetorical skill or, in fact, his actual opinions. But I promised a response and here it is.

The Value of Ideas

Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) put up a blog post today addressing essentially the same point we’ve been talking about this week:

You’d be hard pressed to come up with an idea so bad that it couldn’t succeed with the right execution. And it would be even harder to imagine a great idea that couldn’t fail if the execution were left to morons.

Must be something in the air.

Happy Everyone Draw Mohammed Day — First Annual!

My Skeptical Sunday posts (which I will get back to, promise) occasionally got comments like “Why are you only picking on Christianity?” This one’s for you guys.

Okay, so short version. South Park was going to air an episode with a depiction of the Muslim prophet Mohammed, in a bear suit. Even though they’d depicted Mohammed back in 2001 in the episode “Super Best Friends,” after a bunch of radical Muslims got butthurt and rioted over Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed, everyone’s been gun-shy of depicting Mohammed and getting death threats from said radical Muslims.

Which is exactly what happened when it was announced that South Park would be depicting Mohammed again in this episode — a terrorist organization sent them a death threat. And while Matt and Trey apparently didn’t blink, Comedy Central did and the episode was altered.

You see, in Islam it is forbidden to make a depiction of Mohammed, which is all well and good for Muslims. The problem is, they want the rest of us to have to follow the rules of their religion. Which only makes sense — they believe their religion should rule over everything and everyone. And they use threats and intimidation to try to limit free speech and force a de facto conformity to Sharia law by ranting and raving and making a bigass stink any time someone does something that they aren’t allowed, by their religion, to do.

YouTube user Thunderf00t — a long-time champion of free speech — explains it pretty well.

There are other blogs that are collecting cartoon depictions of Mohammed today. One is Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor. Another, the aptly-named Everyone Draw Mohammed.

Me? I can’t draw, and stick figure Mohammeds are everywhere. So I made a loldog.

It’s not just offense for the sake of being offensive. It’s an important reminder that just because something offends you, doesn’t mean you have the right to censor or silence it. And you are especially not entitled to attempt to silence the free speech of others while enjoying the benefits of such speech yourself. Not in a free society. Not in the 21st century. And not on our watch.

Celebrate your free speech, today and every day!

The 20-Year-Old Fogey

The other day, my father tweeted a link to this article on the New York Times website. It basically argues that with the advancing pace of technology, “mini generation gaps” are springing up with higher and higher frequency.

I was intrigued by the title of the article, since it coincides with a thought I’ve been having, but as is often the case the title is misleading.

Skeptical Sunday: A Glorious Dawn

I’ve watched this many times now, and each time I’m overwhelmed with awe at the magnitude of the universe, and how we, through the power of our collective intelligence, might experience it in yet more incredible ways. This video has literally moved me to tears more than once. It sums up Carl Sagan’s passion for scientific knowledge and possibility, providing us with both a promise — “we will, one day, venture to the stars” — and a warning — “if we do not destroy ourselves.”

Without a single appeal to the supernatural or divine, a three-and-a-half minute rationalist meditation that, if you let it, will nonetheless give you a vibrant sense of the numinous.

Skeptical Sunday: Putting Faith in its Place

YouTube user QualiaSoup has produced a number of fantastic videos, which clearly explain — with entertaining visual aids — the scientific method and the skeptical perspective. I’ve previously posted his treatise on the concept of open-mindedness.

He’s been away, but he returned this week with a fantastic video titled “Putting Faith in its Place.” It actually answers a number of questions that come up on this blog about the subject, from the proper application of faith to “why do you need to prove God doesn’t exist?” It also addresses an overall issue with Case for a Creator.

I highly recommend taking the time to watch all his videos. They are well-thought-out, easy to follow, and will clarify a lot of questions you may have about reality-based worldviews.

Enjoy.

Relaunched and Rebranded: Introducing Skeptical Sundays

So it’s been a while since I wrote…well, anything here, much less a Secular Sunday post. I’m hoping to get back in the groove of things, but as I do, I wanted to put a new face on it. 

A few commenters have made the point that my focus with Secular Sundays has been a little bit narrow, and having taken some time away, I have to agree. I want to broaden the focus out from religious nonsense, to encompass all manner of weird and unsubstantiated claims and beliefs. Secular Sunday doesn’t encompass UFOs, or homeopathy, or 2012 predictions, or the Zeitgeist movement, and I want to be able to talk about all that and more as it comes up. 

Additionally, I’ve determined — like others before me — that I don’t wish to be defined solely by what I don’t believe. “Atheist” implies that “theist” is a baseline from which one deviates (when in fact the reverse is true, we are all born without god-belief and must have it taught to us), and only expresses one particular claim I do not currently accept. Instead, I prefer to define myself by something I do hold to be true: I am a skeptic. 

Being a skeptic doesn’t mean doubting everything and never holding a solid belief, as seems to be the popular connotation (weirdly, the same connotation is applied to the word “agnostic” and in neither case is it appropriate). What it means is that I have a certain standard of evidence that must be met before I will accept a claim as true — and, more importantly, I apply this standard consistently across all aspects of life. I cannot accept a claim just because I would like it to be true, and I cannot dismiss a claim just because I would not. The claim must stand or fall on its own merits. 

I considered rebranding this to “Scientific Sundays,” as usually an unsupported claim crumbles when confronted with science and so there’d be a lot of that. I also want to be able to post about scientific discoveries that have nothing to do with debunking false claims — other than the fact that every success of science proves the efficacy of the scientific method, and implicitly debunks any claim that the scientific method is empty or unreliable. Not being a scientist, however, I feel that calling it “Scientific Sundays” would be hubris on my part. 

So, the best catch-all name that maintains the alliteration on which I’ve become fixated is “Skeptical Sundays.” 

To kick things off, I wanted to share this video of scientist Richard Feynman, expressing, with elegance, the rational view of the universe.

More to come!

And for our next trick…

Like many people of my upper-middle class 1990s Californian upbringing, I ran through a number of hobbies/fads growing up in lieu of having friends. And amid the pogs, Tamagotchis, Nintendo systems, ventriloquism and yo-yos, I had a long period immersed in the world of magic.

Every time a magic show was on TV, I watched. Every time a variety show that had the possibility of including magic was on TV, I watched. I wanted to be the next David Copperfield, the next Lance Burton, the next famous illusionist.

Unfortunately, my parents couldn’t afford giant fans and levitating cars. I had to make do with decks of Bicycle cards and silver dollars. When it came to high school, and then especially college, I had to prioritize my time. My magic books went into boxes, and my skills first got rusty and then corroded completely.

But I never lost interest in the idea of showing the audience something amazing — or at least, creating the illusion of showing it to them. So it’s no wonder that filmmaking in general, and visual effects filmmaking in particular, captured my imagination. I like to think of myself as still working to fulfill my dream of being a big-time illusionist, but one of the screen instead of the stage.

Talent vs. Skill — Round 2

I wrote about this topic in the very early days of this blog. In that post, I asserted my belief that talent is an inborn thing, you’ve either got it or you don’t, but you could learn a particular skill with reasonable success. And that passion might be a more important factor than either one.

I spend a reasonable amount of time assaulting other folks’ firmly-held beliefs with off-the-wall concepts like reason and evidence, so it’s only fair that I should occasionally have my own beliefs so assaulted. I was browsing the Kindle store (“Do you have a Kindle, Dorkman? You’ve hardly ever mentioned it”) and saw as one of the recommendations in non-fiction a book with the provocative title Talent is Overrated, and subtitle “What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else.”

Interestingly, the title which I found provocative actually understated the case a little bit. The book could easily have been titled Talent is a Myth, because that is essentially the book’s thesis.

It’s important to note that Colvin uses the word “talent” in the same way that I did in my post — not to mean just general ability in some particular field (I delineated that as “skill,” something entirely separate), but to mean specifically an inborn ability that cannot be acquired by any means other than sheer luck of birth circumstances. According to Colvin, the research and facts simply do not support any such thing.

The Case for a Creator: Chapter Three, Part 1

It’s been a while since I had the stomach for this book — and given I only got through discussing two chapters and reading the third, that’s saying something.

But with the holidays looming and the religious right braying about the imaginary “War on Christmas,” and with the blog and much of what I have to do either having slowed or taking lots of render breaks, I thought I should come back to this and try to get at least another chapter out of the way before the end of the year. I do still intend to get through the whole book. Eventually.

If you missed the previous two chapters, you can find them here:

Chapter One
Chapter Two

And now we move on to Chapter Three: Doubts about Darwinism.