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9: Atheistic Faith

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Enjoy! — KMO

The genesis for this episode came in the form of a Wired Magazine cover story: The Church of the Non-Believers: A band of intellectual brothers is mounting a crusade against belief in God. Are they winning converts, or merely preaching to the choir? by Gary Wolf.

Excerpt:

The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there’s always a chance we could turn out to be wrong.

Wired put out a podcast follow-up to the article. You can find that podcast here: http://sonibyte.com/audio/raw/1569.mp3

I also read from a Time Magazine article. You can find a summary here: http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/11/05/cover.story/index.html

Subscribers of the now defunct C-Realm Thought of the Day, as well as long-time readers of my blog will recognize the William Finnegan quote I read to Peter Christ:

The central ideology of “mainstream culture,” the belief system that
most of us share, is liberal consumerism–a secular, individualist creed that essentially adds more shopping hours to the old exaltation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our children are being raised in this tepid faith with what amounts to fanatic zeal: the average American child, by the time he or she leaves high school, has been subjected to more than 380,000 TV commercials. The role of advertising in our daily lives has grown so immense that it has become difficult to remember what it was like before the subliminal flood of “brand synergies” came to fill every corner of public space. Billions of dollars and fantastic amounts of energy are, after all, devoted annually to the creation ex nihilo of new desires–anxieties that, by design, only more consumption can console.

The quote comes from Finnegan’s book, Cold New World: Growing Up in Harder Country (Modern Library Paperbacks).

Lorenzo mentioned Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. I haven’t read it yet, but check out the reviews on Amazon.com.

Music

Polymorphic Convolutions

Download “Somptin Happnin’” (mp3)
from “Polymorphic Convolutions”
by Various Artists
Electronic Soundscapes

 

Deep Breakfast

Download “The Oh Of Pleasure / Ray Lynch” (mp3)
from “Deep Breakfast”
by Ray Lynch
Ray Lynch Productions

 

Tempting the Muse

Download “Closer to Heaven” (mp3)
from “Tempting the Muse”
by Mysteria
Intentcity

 

On 3 July 2007 I moved this episode from Podomatic to the Internet Archive, deleting the following user comment in the process:

at 01:36PM Tuesday on December 05, 2006, Cannabistourist said:

i love the 30 second afterlife!

November 29th, 2006 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: C-Realm
  • http://sutut.livejournal.com/ sutut

    Viewing podcasts online

    Ok, I’m stumped.

    I don’t know right off how to view “Podcasts” online with a PC computer. I do have the latest “Quicktime” plugin, but it doesn’t seem to work even when I enter in the URL directly.

    Any advice?
    Thanks!

  • http://david_lucifer.livejournal.com/ david_lucifer

    I found your podcast “Atheist Faith” frustrating to say the least. I know you are a smart and knowledgable frood so I’m struggling to figure out why you are condemning the “new atheists”.

    Your guest Peter Christ is welcome to define “faith” however he likes but let’s not pretend that hist definition has much to do with the faith that the new atheists are criticizing. Peter says he defines faith as when you believe in something that can’t be proven to exist or don’t believe in something that can’t be proven to not exist. That’s fine but in that case we all have faith because nothing can be proven to exist or not exist. Here I am assuming he meant “prove” as in 100% certainty which can never be achieved with empirical claims. On the other hand if he means proven beyond a reasonable doubt then he is incorrect to say “you can’t prove a negative”. Obviously that happens all the time in courtrooms where people prove beyond a reasonable doubt that “he didn’t kill him” or “she didn’t steal that”. I can also prove beyond a reasonable doubt that “New Zealand is not in the northern hemisphere” and (closer to the existence of God) “there is no element between carbon and nitrogen in the periodic table”. The question is not what you can “prove”, the real question is how much and what kind of evidence supports your claims.

    Is it my imagination or was Dawkins accused of being a fascist? Yes, he wants others to believe as he does, but in the sense that he wants to educate people about science and share his joy and wonder of knowledge of the natural world. If he’s a fascist than so is every great teacher and educator. So is Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and even Jesus for working to enlighten those around them. Obviously I think you are way off base here. Nobody using just words to influence should be accused of fascism.

    Perhaps there is something wrong with what theists believe. Wouldn’t you agree something is wrong when the president of the USA announces that he invaded Iraq because Santa Claus told him to? Don’t you think something is wrong when people all over the world are killing each other depending on whether they side with vampires or werewolves? Isn’t something wrong when people with PhDs in the study of unicorns are invited to participate in ethical discussions because of their special insight? If you think the reality of the world in which we live differs in any essential way from my examples above please explain.

    • http://c-realm.com/ KMO

      Thank you for this

      I just wanted to let you know that I wrote a long (too long to post here in a comment thread) reply to this. I haven’t had the time (at wifi hotspot) to get it marked up and posted as a new journal entry. If I don’t get to it by Wednesday, I’ll just email the whole mess to you. I do very much appreciate your comments. Thank you for posting them.