Here's my buddy Zthustra again, being the lovable charming atheist that he is.

Airborne is Bullshit

Bullshit in My Own Mind

There was one pivotal event in my road to eupraxsophy.

In case you have ignored the blogs I've written that were entitled eupraxsophy, eupraxsophy is the practice of being an activist for the scientific worldview who uses the scientific worldview's foundational philosophies in that activism.

Eupraxsophy is the use of science and philosophy in the marketplace to improve the world.

One day I was with my mentor, the social psychologist Jeff Larsen, and we were discussing a psychology experiment. He asked me what I thought would happen.

I told him.

He asked me how I knew that.

I told him, "thats just how people are."

He responded with a stern talk on the power of experimental data and how much of experimental psychology has rendered our intuitions false.

It was then, that for the first time, I learned to distrust my own mind.

The mind does a pretty good job of getting us through the day. Don't get me wrong, but the mind makes some common predictable mistakes.

For one, the mind is a pattern recognition machine. Which by default often makes it a deception machine.

We humans are hard-wired for a perceptual phenomena known as paradolia, which causes us to see faces in visual patterns. This is why so many of our Catholic brothers and sisters see Jesus and the Virgin Mary in normal objects.

Depicting the Prophet Muhammad

*To my muslim readers, please understand that I do not mean this as an insult personally, but that I am opposed to your religion, as I am opposed to all supernatural religion. There are theologies of Islam which I consider better than others. Work by Irshad Manji, and Amina Wadud reveal Islam to have the potential to be the wonderful religion I once thought it was. If you are a muslim and I cannot persuade you to abandon all supernaturalism, then these two authors should be in your future. These wonderful women make Islam into a religion a thousand times safer for the thinking person than christianity is, and if it became the most popular religion in the world under their theological lights, I would have no complaints.
My first time to depict the prophet muhammad for the intention of ridicule was done long before the Iraq war and the tragic contreversy of the Danish cartoons of the prophet.

Eupraxsophy: The Word of the Future, Bee-acthes!!!

Don’t forget that on Saturday April, 12 I will be speaking at the North Texas Skeptics meeting on the mind-body problem. Or whether or not a soul exists. If you live in the DFW area, this will be a bad ass meeting.

Its at 2900 Live Oak Street in Dallas.

Please come.

With that said, lets get to business.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Journalism

Sometimes you get really lucky and you get to have a truly life-enriching experience.

You get to meet some folks and do somethings that really get your blood pumping and make you feel really alive.

Those two folks whose image you see, are Shane and Amy Bugbee. They run an amazing website called

A year at the Wheel identifies itself as true citizen journalism and that is exactly what it is.

Lifted from Eupraxophy.org

What it is


In ancient times, when the great minds of western civilization inquiried into the nature of our world and its meaning, science and philosophy were treated as one, as a common source of inquiry.

Over the last two millenia as we have specialized our understanding of the world through ever more precise means of defining the elements that make up our reality, the knowledge we have gained has become splintered to the point where even among the most knowledgeable there is ignorance of how all these bodies of knowledge relate to the make a whole..

The link between the uses of this knowledge and its ultimate meaning have become separated.
Eupraxophy exists to re-connect the links and make new ones.


Eupraxophy is an idea reconstituted from those ancient times, based on three concepts.

Eu:                 Good, Well
Praxis:         Practice, Conduct
Sophia:         Philosophic and Scientific Wisdom

In essence it is an emphasis on whole understandings and not partial ones...it's purpose is to creat wholes of parts and peices.

To reconstitute a whole from the many and apply the wisdom that has accumulated over the ages, informing ourselves in what we should do with the whole, making better choices in life and understanding its meaning.

To put it succinctly:

This is a rap video which states the creationist position on famous atheists. The video is hillarious, and extremely clever. But to me it is a clear critique of the atheist movement. Phil Plaitt says he doubts that the filmmaker is a creationist because he is to clever. I agree that it is clever, I think its memecraft, memetic engineering, and exactly what we have to contend with:

Speaking at North Texas Skeptics: There is No Soul