Most Sundays I get in my truck and drive over to a friends house for some good ol’ geek fun. It is about a 6 mile drive and along the way, I pass by no less than 10 churches. Most of these churches are huge, multimillion dollar businesses. Inside these buildings are thousands of people listening to lies and preparing for their afterlife. That is what religion is all about after all, not this life but the better one that will come after this one. I always think to myself… how much better would this country world be if, rather than obsessing over their mortality for an hour or more every Sunday, they started working on solutions to problems like this? I swear, I can hardly stand the thought of 3, 9, 15 & 16 years old children having to live in conditions like that.
I love The Atheist Experience TV Show. It is a weekly local cable show in Austin, TX. I’ve seen (or listened to) every episode. The show may be taking a 3 month hiatus due to construction and upgrades on the studio that it is broadcast from but they are going to try to continue to do live shows from a home studio. We’ll just have to see how that goes, I hope it works.
At any rate, the point of this post is to say that I thought it was getting a little stale lately. As their popularity has grown and more people from outside Austin started watching them via the internet, there were just too many “I just wanted to say I love your show and tell you a personal anecdote of mine” types of calls. The best calls are the ones where a theist calls to point out where they believe the show’s host is wrong or to give their reasons for their own beliefs.
This past episode (#607) was the best episode I can remember. It had lots of calls from theists who, although desperately wrong, seemed to have a decent grasp on reality. In other words not the kind of crazy that calls in every now and then and ask questions like “why don’t we die when the sun goes down?” These calls are funny but that’s about it. You can’t have a serious conversation with them.
I’m including the video for anyone interested in watching it. I may post about some of the things that are brought up by the callers but really, Matt is such a master at handling these people that I’m not sure I could bring anything new to the table.
A recent argument had me defending assumptions in science. It’s one of those interesting things how theist will defend their untenable position by attempting to show that your position is also untenable.
Sure science makes assumptions. We don’t have any eye witnesses from 65 million years ago so when we find dinosaur fossils, we have to make some assumptions about it. To me, there is a very clear distinction between these assumptions and the assumptions that a Christian must make.
For instance, we assume that the bones were connected together and covered with muscle and skin. On the other hand, a Christian assumes that Jesus had the magical power to walk on water. Those two assumptions are incredibly different. Every creature on this planet with bones, has muscle and skin covering them. It is reasonable to assume that creatures in the past would have a similar design. However, we have never witnessed a human being walk on water. It’s not possible as far as we know. So to assume that someone did it is an incredible leap that is unjustified and in no way comparable to the assumptions that science makes.
The point is this, when science makes assumptions, those assumptions are based on what we already know. Religions like Christianity make assumptions that are completely unfounded and sometimes, even, beyond our ability to verify.