Month April 2013

On the ‘I Believe In One Fewer God Than You Do’ Meme

By Notung • • 10 comments

My co-SINner Damion has a post up criticising this familiar atheist meme:

“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” – Stephen Roberts

His criticism is this:

THE REASON THEY DISMISS ALL THE OTHER GODS IS THAT THEY’VE BEEN TRAINED FROM BIRTH TO ACCEPT ONE RELIGIOUS DOGMA AND NEVER EXAMINE THOSE BELIEFS CRITICALLY.

I think this is true in many cases, but I’m sure Damion is aware that this is an over-generalisation – there are some who converted later in life for instance. But let’s assume that even in these cases the reason for not accepting the existence of, say, Donner* is because of His incompatibility with the worldview of the religion they converted to. Damion adds:

Let us not pretend for a moment that theists made a survey of all the gods and then picked out the ones with the most evidential backing.

Right. Of course, we shouldn’t rule out the idea that they came to their beliefs by weighing up the evidential basis of each position, but this probably applies to the vast majority of theists. So should we, therefore, ‘stop using this meme’, as Damion requests?

I think not. I’m not a fan of spouting memes and slogans to defend my position (it’s rather lazy and can get very boring after the first ten times you hear each one), but I think there’s at least some value in the ideas contained in this one. I’ll divide the meme in half:

Winged Horses and Respect

By Notung • • 2 comments

Yesterday, on the academic symposium Twitter, there was a bit of drama when Richard Dawkins (with his usual commitment to dispassionate inquiry) started questioning our treatment of weird beliefs.

I think the question he asked is an interesting and reasonable one, even though I think it was gratuitously personal, and so a little out of line.

SINergy!

By Notung • • 2 comments

  Today, I discovered that the bloggers on this network aren’t just intelligent machines that generate text on a page…

I Still Don’t Understand What Skepticism Is

By Notung • • 15 comments

I was recently prompted to think again about the meaning of ‘scientific’ skepticism after reading Daniel Loxton’s recent article about skepticism and atheism (also see fellow SINner Russell Blackford’s discussion). I have a slight confession to make – although I’ve been a fan of the work of skeptics, and have read books and articles on the subject, I still don’t really understand exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about ‘skepticism’.

The Criminality of a Schoolgirl’s Silly Tweets

By Notung • • 8 comments

The police and crime commissioner for Kent, Ann Barnes, recently appointed, as she pledged during her campaign, (now) 17 year old Paris Brown to the role of youth PCC so that she can represent younger people and offer insight into the problem of youth crime.

Yesterday, she resigned under pressure, as a result of media scrutiny over her Twitter activity. You can read some of the tweets here. Yes, they’re silly and obnoxious. However, they were sent by someone no older than 16, and while it’s easy to criticise them, I wouldn’t want anyone looking over my text messages I was sending when I was 16.

Still, there’s a valid concern over someone who is in a position of such responsibility, presumably on merit, conducting herself in that way. She’s young and has a lot to learn (as most 16 year-olds do). I’m not really interested in her suitability for the position – and it seems there are arguments on each side.

What really got my back up was this decision; for Kent Police to investigate her tweets for ‘criminal’ content.

The ‘Atheist Skeptic Dialogue’ Will Fail

By Notung • • 37 comments

Many people are becoming increasingly fed up with what I will call ‘the Rift’ that has occurred in atheist and skeptic communities. Largely, the Rift is confined to online spaces, but seemed to originate around mid 2011 in the conference scene. It seems to only affect a subset of atheists and skeptics, as when I speak to atheists I encounter in my ordinary life (and by far most people I know are ‘non-card-carrying atheists’), they have no idea that it even exists. So the problem, albeit something we should try to fix, is not really something that affects atheists or skeptics as a whole, but just those who inhabit one corner of the internet.

Michael Nugent, of Atheist Ireland is one of the people fed up with the Rift. He would like to move beyond it, and has admirably taken the trouble to propose a dialogue to try to sort things out. I strongly believe that it won’t work, for two main reasons:

In this situation, a dialogue is in principle non-workable.
The dialogue itself is not structured in an appropriate way for its purpose.

I want to start with the second reason, as it is the weaker of the two.

The Issue of Hate Speech: III. Offence and Harm

By Notung • • 1 comment

What about the Stacey case? There seems to be a stark difference between his actions and those of Malema, in that Stacey did not seem to be trying to spread an idea or influence others to carry out any action themselves. We may, following Yong, describe Stacey’s hate speech as ‘targeted vilification’1 as he was directly addressing those he was stigmatising on the basis of their race. Unlike in the Malema case, it does not seem as though there is any clear case of incitement. Rather, his words were hurtful or offensive to both those he was abusing, and other onlookers. His conviction was for a “racially-aggravated public order offence”, but since his comments were directed at only a small number of people (and only became widely-seen as a result of those offended by it reproducing his remarks) it does not seem that, aside from merely causing offence, his remarks caused any indirect harm.

Conscience

By Notung • • 5 comments

I’ve recently changed my mind over some important questions after encountering some new arguments. This is a good thing – we should always be willing to alter our opinions in proportion to the evidence. In this post, I will attempt to circumvent the intellect and appeal to your sense of conscience, to convince you of the new things I’ve learned.