Radio Interviews Today
14.12.09 | simon | 
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This morning (a little surprisingly early) I had an interview about the campaign on Kiwi FM…
Following this I also had a chat about the campaign on the Breakfast Show with Spanky on Christchurch’s RDU station…
December 14th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Oh there we go again! We are fundamentalists,radicals, extremists etc..etc…No mr.radio jokey. People who say they not only know how the universe works but can tell what happens to you if you dont believe them fit those words. We are just standing up and calling their bluff. Get it? And yes if I was to choose one god over all the other I would choose ‘the flying spaghetti monster!’ Wait whts that you dont believe it? keep it to yourself you fundamentalist prick!
December 14th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Will you be on Good Morning?
December 14th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
I love the questions…
“so what is an atheist?” …
its like its a brand new concept to the misled….
December 14th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I like how Simon broke away from the straight-faced seriousness after some prodding by the radio host. When asked which God he would choose, Simon almost went the typical OTT serious route of “none, there’s no evidence blah blah blah”.
I was pleasantly surprised to see a break in the seriousness when Simon chose Thor, because thunderbolts do it for him everytime.
Bravo, Sir! I think too many people are getting WAY too serious over this.
I myself would’ve said, “I choose myself as my god, because it’s most likely that if I pray to me, something will happen.”
Or Loki. Tricksters are awesome.
December 14th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Thanks Jon. But I actually love Zeus…Thor doesn’t exist, have you not learnt anything?
December 14th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Praise be to Zeus, Whose lightning is more powerful than any hammer! May electrical wrath fall upon all ye unbelievers! Repent! Repent I say….
December 14th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Oh shit, Zeus! What the hell… I must’ve be stuck on my Norse mythology there!
December 14th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
The inability to go back and edit what you’ve submitted means my pet peeve, Typos, slip through unimpeded.
Spose it’s good that people can’t edit the dumb crap they’ve just said and have to deal with the consequences
December 14th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Was he serious about atheistic charities? heres a quick round-up on it
Fred Hollows Foundation.
share
habitat for humanity
the american cancer society
planned parenthood
project gutenberg
secular student alliance
rethink
how many do you need? Why is it that every time thr r some plans for atheistic hoardings these nut jobs have to point to the same old clichés about charities and atheistic dictators. Yes stalin might have been an atheist so what? he also had a moustache!
And what about the tax exempt status any religious organization gets? Why doesnt the salvation army or the catholic church openly show their accounts…and they get away with it? I mean c’mon are u being serious here.I would definitely let people believe whatever they want to if they dont get thr religious beliefs to control others lives.
December 14th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Watch a BBC documentary called ‘Hardcore Profits’ where they look at who profits from the hardcore pronography business in the States. Aside from hotel chains and cellphone providers, the Catholic Church actually invests in it. Who woulda thunk it, huh?
December 14th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
One way to answer Spanky’s question about eastern religions is with the same touchstones the Skeptics use: does it make testable claims? If a religion says “our practice will make you one with the Universe”, you can say, “if you can tell me how that unity can be verified outside the practitioner’s sayso, I’ll tell you whether I disbelieve it.”
December 14th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
And when he got tangled about what atheists believe, I think he could have been gently introduced to “strong” and “weak” (or should that be “hard” and “soft”?) atheism. Hard/strong atheists firmly claim there are no god/dess/es (I always put it that way to knock the high ground out from under the monotheists), while soft/weak atheists just say they do not believe that there are. Obviously the latter is not “a belief as much as religion is”.
December 14th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
I have created a set of free atheist resources (pamphlets and posters, etc) that clearly explain things like “What is Atheism?”. See http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~edmin/Pamphlets/
My “What is Atheism?” pamphlet includes a summarised rebuttal to the Stalin argument.
Tell me what you think.
December 15th, 2009 at 10:27 am
In the instructions, by “set it to flip on the short edge” do you mean “print as landscape”?
The first one looks very good. I would challenge “Basic human morality is actually innate.” (I won’t say dogmatically that it isn’t, it would depend, among other things, what you mean by “basic”, but I don’t think it’s been shown.) I would say “Basic human morality – not to intentionally harm others – is generally agreed by all people, regardless of religious belief. Religion can get the details – such as slavery – badly wrong.”
Is the low rate of divorce in Scandinavia necessarily a good thing? Maybe it means people are staying in abusive or just unhappy relationships.
But those are small quibbles and your tract
looks good and reads well.
December 15th, 2009 at 11:02 am
I would agree to a point with Cyberguy but I’d exchange the term “morality” with “ethical behaviour”.
“The divine command theory (DCT) of ethics holds that an act is either moral or immoral solely because God either commands us to do it or prohibits us from doing it, respectively.” (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/divine.html)
The above quoted passage and the link, if you should wish to visit it, has a good overview of the problem inherent when we try to say that thigns are good merely because God says so.
When a religionist says that without God, how can humans behave good towards one another, I always whip out the ol’ DCT argument
December 15th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
This is all good stuff, but one point that isn’t being pushed is this: Religion plays such a large role in politics and in the establishment of rules set for our society. Religious groups have huge influence in determining policies on such major matters as abortion and same sex marriage just to name a two. Yet these beliefs are in the minority in society. There needs to be a bigger voice pushing the interests of the majority….. Why should we feel embarrassed by not believing in god?
I would also like to say to those religious folk that are “offended” by this initiative, that these phrases are no more offensive than the many hundreds of church slogans in our faces every day.
Provo to the group for going ahead with this & good luck!
December 15th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
“Provo to the group”?
I know “props” but what is/are “provo”? Goggling it reveals only a city in Utah and a Dutch resistance group.
December 15th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
@Hugh7 – “In the instructions, by “set it to flip on the short edge” do you mean “print as landscape”? ”
Both of those. Landscape for obvious reasons. Flip on short edge, so the reverse page is not upside-down compared to the front.
On the subjecy of morality being innate, I could not fit any more text into the document without it going to three pages. But studies show that both chimps and pre-verbal human toddlers show spontaneous altruistic behaviour for no reward, proving altruism (the foundation of morality) is innate.
For a non-technical description of the study see: Altruism ‘in-built’ in humans http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4766490.stm
or google “altruism human infants Warneken Tomasello”
December 15th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Thanks, Cyberguy. Both good points. I guess if a behaviour is present in chimps, we can call it innate in humans. I was thinking of “Lord of the Flies” (assuming it is true to life) as a counter-example, but you could counter that they had already been corrupted (or primed for corruption) by “civilization”.
December 15th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
@Hugh7
“Lord of the Flies” is fiction, as you know, so not a good source of factual information.
By the way:
Beelzebub, Beelzebul
ba`al zebub (Hebrew) (from ba`al lord + zebub fly)
December 16th, 2009 at 11:08 am
I found a review in New Scientist, 9 May 2009, p44, of a book called Wild Justice: the Moral Lives of Animals by Mark Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, U of Chicago Press:
“…the authors propose that other animal species possess empathy, compassion and sense of justice – in other words, a moral code not unlike our own.”
“In one lab stody of Diana monkeys, for instance, the animals had to put tokens into a slot ot receive their food. Whenan elderly female couldn’t manage hers, a neighbouring male inserted the tokens for her. In a different kind of experiment, rats refused to push a lever for food when they realised their action meant another animal got an electric shock.”
The first example convinces me: if “lower” animals have it, then it’s innate to humans. But rats? I’d look for a simpler explanation, like, the distress-cries of the shocked rats put the lever-pushers off their food.
December 16th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Other studies that show the foundation of another moral sense, namely fairness, is innate in dogs and chimps.
See “Dogs Understand Fairness, Get Jealous, Study Finds” – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97944783
December 16th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
About rats – they also have a sense of humour. They can laugh, but it is outside of the human range of hearing.
See “Studies Show Rats Enjoy Tickling – Understanding What Makes Rats Laugh Is Shedding Light on the Evolution of ‘Ha-Ha’” – http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=626264&page=1
The last common ancestor that humans share with rats lived about 75 million years ago. So laughter runs deep!
And that, boys and girls, is why we like to laugh at religion! It is innate.
December 17th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Blasphemy is a victimless crime