Richard Dawkins Interview

I am a huge fan of Dawkins, and I just watched this interview he did with Riz Khan from Al Jazeera English over on his site and thought I'd repost it.

Dan Carlin

I've talked about him once, but wanted to let everyone know that his most recent Common Sense show is a clip show. So if you haven't listened to him yet this is a great show to whet your appetite on. Here.

New Yorker Article

Found this interesting article in the New Yorker:

In the summer of 2008, the journal Nature published a short, illuminating essay that tracked the global migration of scientific research over the centuries, as empires rose and fell. The center of world science, for instance, was in France in 1740, before it moved to Germany, then Britain, and, later, America, carrying with it, in each case, a major dimension of global leadership. The authors—J. Rogers Hollingsworth, Karl H. Müller and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth—have concluded that another scientific superpower is unlikely to emerge with the same dominance as its predecessors. They have also discovered that great shifts in global scientific leadership follow a clear pattern: “Each former scientific power, especially during the initial stages of decline, had the illusion that its system was performing better than it was, overestimating its strength and underestimating innovation elsewhere. The elite could not imagine that the centre would shift.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2010/01/china-science.html#ixzz0btaE29Pk

Adam Savage on Failures

Not local, nothing to do with Atheism, but thought it was an interesting video. Also a good time to promote Fora (though can't imagine that anyone hasn't heard of it).

Colin McGinn and Denys Turner

I normally like to keep the content on here local. But I thought this was a good video. It's the theologian Denys Turner and the atheist philosopher Colin McGinn discussing morality without God.

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Here's a link to the whole video which is titled "Variety of Nonbelief".

Donald Clegg Spokesman Article

Mr. Clegg recently wrote an article in the Spokesman-Review titled “Readers ask agnostic to define a God he could believe in”.

Clegg seems to say that he could only believe in a god that wouldn’t impose indefinite life on him, i.e. when he dies that’s it, no afterlife.  He also says that he could only believe in a god who is good, just and omnipotent.

This seems to me highly irrational.  I would like to ask him “Even if there was unassailable evidence for a god you would not believe in him/her/it if he/she/it was evil or unjust?’.  That seems like a good reason not to worship/follow a god but a very poor reason to not believe in one.  If you choose not to accept something simply because you find it distasteful, regardless of the evidence than you might as well join a religion.

It also seems that if there is a god he/she/it while maybe not malevolent is at least uncaring.  As evidenced by the harshness of life, especially animal life, but it’s not walk in the park for humans either.

Whenever I’m asked what type of god I could believe in I simply state “One for which there is well established and widely accepted evidence”.

Atheist Sign at Capitol

Personally, I don’t feel strongly one way or the other, but it’s atheist news so I posted it.

OLYMPIA – A Seattle-based atheists group asked state officials Friday for permission to display a placard outdoors on the Capitol campus over the holidays.

Jerry Schiffelbein, the treasurer for Seattle Atheists and an activist in other “free-thought” groups that advocate separation between church and state, said the sign’s message is less provocative than those that the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation put up last year.

The proposed 18-by-30-inch sign says, “In this holiday season let us remember that kindness, charity and goodwill transcend belief, creed or religion.”

Full story here.