The Atheist Watchmaker Argument

Proving Atheists Wrong with… Science…?!

Taken from the atheist reddit. Hard to believe that even a fundie could be so miserably bad at math, but there you have it…

Pro-life atheists? A question for you.

If you are a pro-life atheist, I’d like you to help me out for my upcoming series on abortion. I am having a very hard time contacting pro-life atheists, and I’d like your answers to one question:

How do you justify in a secular manner the pro-life proposition that “life/beingness/personhood/etc begins at conception”?

I welcome any answers from you in the comments. I am not interested in debating who’s right or the details of what you believe: just an answer to this question would be fine. Thank you.

The uselessness of polling…

We already know that polling is basically useless because specific wording, the nature of the questions and the accepted answers, the context, all drastically change people’s answers. But Disinformation elaborates further:

The ‘public opinion’ that is manifested on the front pages of newspapers is a pure and simple artifact whose function is to disguise the fact that the state of opinion at a given time is a system of forces, tensions, and that nothing more inadequately expresses the state of opinion than a percentage.
…
There is, then, powerful evidence to suggest that public opinion has been deployed as a weapon of class warfare by capital since the 1930s; that the use of propaganda techniques by economic elites has continued, increasing in its sophistication and volume, to the present day; that the techniques and measures of opinion polling which are deployed by political, business and media elites are fundamentally flawed at a conceptual as well as a methodological level.

I maintain that, in this context, the tendency of those on the left to accept the terrain of ‘public opinion’ at face value, and to triangulate tactics in the fight against austerity in terms of how they might affect public opinion, hands our opponents a huge advantage and ensures that the campaign is played out on territory which they largely control.

A strange life.

Someone is living a very strange life.

He has caretakers who threaten him with emotional blackmail and material blackmail when he doesn’t do what they want. These caretakers will even hit him when he still refuses to do what they want. It’s like they don’t think he has the right to disagree. That’s assault and a denial of free will, don’t you agree?

Not only that, but he must also believe what they believe, once again under emotional blackmail. He must self-identify as they identify themselves, even though he doesn’t really understand what the terms mean or imply.

So his caretakers take pretty bad care of him, but he has a hard time even when he’s away from them. He has to sit in a room for hours and hours on end listening to someone drone on topics about which he has little interest, and he’s not allowed to leave. They even force him to get permission to go the bathroom. This is a very strange way to treat someone (but I suppose not much worse than work).

When going to and from these rooms, he’s forced to socialize with hundreds of other people like him, who, because of being so numerous, collapse into cliques and factions which nurture dysfunctional behavior. So our friend learns how to be dysfunctional simply from having friends.

Another strange thing is that our friend not only does not have any right we take for granted, but he has no means to change that state of affairs, since he cannot vote or otherwise get any form of respect. The deck is stacked against him: the media constantly declares him to be “getting worse and worse,” a probable drug addict and without any virtue. But at least he’s not a woman, for she then would also be presented as a sexual object by the media, making her a constant victim of sexual harassment without being able to defend herself.

At least it’s better than what happened before, when our friend was treated like an animal, forced to live in a cage and strapped to chairs. Even more bizarre, this treatment was taken for granted by everyone around him.

Weirdly enough, his caretakers assume that he is of their religion, and everyone around him identifies him as being of the religion of his caretakers. The much-vaunted freedom of speech and freedom of conscience don’t apply to him. So much for human rights.

You may have discovered by now that I am actually talking about the treatment given to children. I was making the point that the way we treat children would seem absurd and disgraceful if we applied it to any other category of human beings. But that’s all right, because children are not human beings anyway; they are beasts and must be treated as such. Everything I said above must therefore be perfectly normal and natural; if it doesn’t seem so, remind yourself again that children are beasts and not fully human, until you “get it.”

Ricky Gervais on Noah’s Ark