I am interviewing the host of this awesome podcast :

Quackcast



The host of this show is Mark Crislip. Mark Crislip is an infectious disease physician who has taken it upon himself to provide free educational resources on alternative medicine and what is going on with alternative medicine vs. science based medicine.

I won’t lie, this show is not often nice to alternative medicine, I think the biggest pass I’ve ever heard Dr. Crislip give alternative medicine is that something might be a good idea in some situations.

Of course, that is incredibly valuable information.

I am of the belief that all we have is our bodies. For my atheist readers, you should also agree with this statement.

Your body, enclosed in its epidermis, controlled by the nervous system, and sustained by water, air and food.  You have nothing else, when this thing dies, you die.

When you die, there is no afterlife.

When you die its the end of everything for you.

So with that jolly message, I remind you that your personal health is possibly the most important thing in your life.

It is very important that you take good care of it.

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

Third Law Of Thermo Dynamics (For The Stardust Child)

what do i say to the child that asks me

who put the sun in the sky

what do i say to the child that asks me

who made the moon brighter than the stars at night

i say to the dear stardust child

the sun aint so far away

the universe hides inside your mind

now stretch your vision and listen to what i say

CHORUS:  no one causes what you see

                   there's no need for a causer if the universe has always been

                   no no no  no one  causes what you see

               there's no need to worry bout a causer if the universe has always been

what do i say to the child that asks me

where's the magic without a wizard for our oz

what do i say to the child that asks me

where's the wonder without a maker of our stars

i say to the dear stardust child

just follow the gold brick scientific way

the magic is the universe that gives you your life

now open your ears and listen to what i say

CHORUS

what do i say to the child that asks me

what's so special bout creation if there's no creator in heaven

Airborne is Bullshit

A nice simple, easily dismissed argument, right? No problem here, it's simply a matter of pointing out that a lot of people can be wrong just as easily as one or two, right?

Wrong.

No, wait, it is easily dismissed. The argument from popularity holds about as much water as a broken buckyball: none.

That's all, see you later!

... Okay, okay. I'll write some more.

First, what is the argument from popularity? Basically, whoever uses this argument says that there must be a god, because there are/were/will be so many people who do/did/will believe in at least one god, if not more! Various customizations of this argument include over tallying ("literally hundreds of billions of people believe in SOME god" is a direct quote from some random pastor with whom I have debated), narrowing the focus (i.e. specifying geographical constraints, time constraints, deity constraints - only this country, or that era, or these gods) and mixing in an appeal to authority for good measure ("Just think of all the preachers and clergy throughout history, could all of them been wrong?!" Well, yes!).

For this, my first blog entry, I would like to strike to the heart of why atheists are speaking out now more than ever in the past.  Why do we sound off with so much vitriol in our condemnation of religion?  Where does this deep seated hate come from?

I will admit in being quite angry in many of my debates against primarily Christians on the forums.  For this I can not in good conscience apologize.  The anger in me is not directed at the individual so much as at the hateful and fear based religion they cling to and perpetuate.  A religion that demonizes those who do not adhere to the teachings of the bible and retains its followers with threats of stark terror and punishments for those who dare to challenge its message; I will not excuse it, defend it, or rationalize it away.  I will attack it.  It is a primitive dogma that speaks out of ignorance to create barriers and to fuel justifications to hate.

The bible is truly one of the worst possible contrivances of the human mind.  In no other way can any movement hijack an intelligent person’s thought processes and propagate intolerance and unswerving allegiance to hate.

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
—Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

So let us explore the hatred and intolerance that the bible perpetuates.

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.

 I found stool before the old Remington at the hipster coffee shop to start creating the ultimate artwork. The prose was purple, and not illustrative; so I took to it with a fountain pen, massaging the words into shapes, but the words were no longer legible. Someone cried out that my movement was stilted and unexpressive, so I leapt up from the paper, and flung it at them in anger. The chords, another said, were repetitious; but, I said, "There are no chords, at all!"

Hello,

I've posted to new blog-entries. The first is about homeschooling and the second about parenting.

The most recent article: WOTMR: Spanking Authorities

is about modern parenting. On his program Todd Friel defended the spanking and slapping of children as means of parenting. I disagreed with him on that. As I said in one of my earlier entries that teachers and parents need to be authorities to their children I had to harmonise those with my refusal to accept spanking.

"Therefor spanking authorities are most of all spanking their own authority."

The second oldest article AMP: Good Luck! deals with the Albert Mohler program.

I'm always proud when I realize that the shows I'm writing about are reading my blog. And obviously Dr. Mohler did. In the last article I pointed out that the Christian Right shares its passion for homeschooling with the far left. But it shares it for different reasons. So last week on his program Dr. Mohler said that he sees very new political alliances coming.

I felt the need to point out that those alliances won't certainly come and to ridicule Comrade Mohler a bit for his suggestion.