Blogs Jan 6, 2011 at 2:42 pm

Comments

1
I suppose you heathens can even come up with a "scientific" explanation for the rising & setting sun instead of Helios pulling it across the sky with his chariot.
2
O'Reily is rude and religion is, indeed, a scam.
Free speech is what religion hates most. And I sincerely believe religion is on it's way out and they are frightened.
3
"I know I'm not the smartest guy in town" --Bill O'Reilly

4
They must have looked for a guy who can't hold his own against O'Reilly. My first impulse, when they got to the tides, was, "the moon and gravity, duh" but the best response to that would have been "You can't explain it either, so what's your point?"

But really, smart people who do not share O'Reilly's views stay away from him. That was five minutes of "you INSULTED everyone!" "No I didn't!" "Yes you did!" Silverman couldn't get his points across without looking foolish, which is the point of having him on the show.
5
lol, not the most convincing spokesman for Atheism, but this lil dude did pretty well. You can tell he is pretty nervous, as I would be in that situation
6
God invented science! This proves everything!
7
wait i retract my statement, this dude did horrible upon second viewing
8
"Invisible man in the sky." What a douche.
9
This is a texbook example of poor "journalism" and debate. Bill is assuming all sorts of negative things about what the AA is saying (not that I necessarily agree with them or their tactics) and he is dodging the real issue. Instead, his entire MO is to get ginned up about imaginary battles and problems. I can destroy a paper tiger, too! Let's see him take on a real one and not have his mic set at a higher volume than his guest...
10
I dont know why that guy didnt just grill him over the power of the moons gravity. He just kind of smiled and moved on. Joke on an interview.
11
Shorter O'Reilly: Fuckin' magnets, how do they work?
12
Have we all forgotten about our noodle overlord? the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
13
Listening to that gave me a nosebleed.
14
@8- Especially the Old Testament version of the invisible man in the sky, total douche.
15
Sigh, that guy really just... didn't do a very good job.
16
@12:

Of course not. In fact, I partook of his holy, noodley communion at Vito's last night.
17
Going on FOX News to try to prove a point is a waste of time because they will never let you win. And even if you do, the FOX News viewer will just be in denial.
19
Yeah, who cares that we can predict what the high tide level will be an when it will happen 2,000 years in advance but religion can't explain why men have nipples?
20
The tides come in when faggots get married and the baby jesus starts crying. I predict rising sea levels in the future.
21
"Water, fire, air and dirt
Fucking tides, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed."

--ICP (Insane Catholic Posse)

22
Athiests seem to forget that a lot of folks crave spirituality and use religion as the vehicle to it. That's why religion is NOT as scam in that sense.
23
@22- I never forget it, I just lament it.
24
This is yet another example of why I don't tell anyone I'm an atheist.
25
@22: a lot of people also crave easy money and use fraud and other Ponzi type schemes as a vehicle to it, we call those things a scam; why is there an exemption for truth in labeling when it comes to things "spiritual"?
26
@25: Wow, if you have to ask a question like that there's no way I could provide an answer that would satisfy you.
27
@26 --- yeah, the "it's just different, reason does not apply at all" clause.

sorry, forgot myself there...

28
@25: But, there's this. Santa Claus and the tooth fairy are scams too, so should we then prohibit little kids from believing them? Meditate on that.
29
@27: np :-)
30
The billboard and that guy is a douche. A "you can be good without god" is a perfectly non confrontational way to ease a theistic nation into accepting atheists as a emerging and non vilified component of the population.

It's the difference between a "come to our church" billboard and "All non catholics are going to hell"
31
Sheesh. O'Reilly's thing about the tides is ridiculous, but this guy has to be the worst spokesperson for atheists ever.
32
Bill O'Reilly is an ignorant douchebag. News at 11:00.
33
@28: think on this, perhaps not prohibit Santa Clause & the Tooth Fairy but instead discourage parents from actively lying to their children and maybe let them know it is okay to have real discourse and share in the beauty of exploring the natural world all around them. and all that other tra-la la crazy ass shit.
34
@28- Prohibit children from believing? No. Nobody has said anything about prohibiting anyone from believing anything. Put down the straw man and walk away. Of course, when my daughter asked me if Santa was real, I told her the truth, but that's entirely different from prohibiting her from believing what she wants. She just knows her dad doesn't believe in Santa. When we talk about religion, I refer to everyone's beliefs (accurately) as "myths." She's free to make up her own mind, but she knows what I think.

Now if I was speaking to a grown adult who told me they believed in Santa, I'd worry about them.
35
@28 No one's advocating prohibiting anyone from believing in anything. We're not the thought police, we disdain the idea of thought police, unlike cultists. What I advocate is if an adult still believes in Santa, the Tooth-fairy, or Magic Jesus, and routinely makes decisions based on the supposed existence of any said fictional characters, that you should (as politely as possible) point out to that adult that they're a fucking moron. The Santa & Tooth-fairy myths actually make for good critical thinking exercises for children, who eventually come to the realization that just because someone's a trusted authority figure, doesn't mean they won't ever try and convince them of some illogical, unproven, idiotic but nice sounding idea. It's when parents then say "But don't apply that same train of thought to Jesus, because (insert bullshit here)!" that I have a problem.
36
I had to watch a video of Christopher Hitchens hitch-slapping someone to get the bad taste out of my mouth.
38
If I were trying to convert reluctant Christians to atheism, I wouldn't groom myself into a caricature of a common depiction of the Christian devil.

I wonder if that's the way he always looks, or if Fox helped him dress?
39
We don't know how tides work? I'm aghast that someone said that on national television. Bill O'Reilly should never ever be able to live this down, but I'm sure he will.
40
@35: I should have said "discourage" instead of "prohibit."
41
I can't watch 5.5 minutes of O'Reilly. Anybody got the relevant timepoint?
42

David Silverman's mom must be disappointed.

"Oy, why can't he just go to temple?"
43
AGH. These are the athiests that make the rest of us look bad. How is telling religious people that what they believe is a scam any better than them telling us that we are going to hell? What ever happened to the idea of respecting others right to their faith or lack thereof?
44
According to O'Riley, the religious people were insulted. Hmmm. Has O'Riley ever insulted Liberals on his show? Has he ever said anything insulting about Nancy Pelosi? Or Barack HUSSEIN Obama? Seems to me he thinks insulting people is just fine and dandy, as long as it's people he doesn't like.
45
Religion poisons everything. It seeps into everything and destroys it. This is true of all religion but primarily, in the modern age, of organized religion, and in particular, the monotheistic cults widespread today. They are evil. They are pure evil and the representation of humanity's ultimate wickedness and ultimate stupidity.
46
"Maybe it's Thor on top of Mt. Olympus making the tides go in and out!"


Dude. DUDE. Atheist you may be--and I'll forgive the fact that you're attributing control of the tides to the wrong deity in that particular pantheon (because there's like a half dozen different sea gods)--but how can you confuse Norse and Greek mythologies?

I'm kinda disappointed he didn't rebut O'Reilly on the tides thing (maybe he just doesn't know or was nervous), but even if he did, it wouldn't have mattered. O'Reilly just dogs his guests on an unimportant point (like the part about where these billboards are) until you don't know the answer offhand. Unless of course they're a guest he agrees with, and he lets any random bullshit that spews from their mouth go unchallenged.
47
Yes Bill, you are a moron.
48
I got to the end of the part about the tides and gave up. I can't watch this crap...it's so stupid it makes my brain hurt! We learned who the tide works in the second or third grade. What a moron!
49
I can't make it through the whole thing; O'Reilly makes my brain start leaking out of my ear.

@28 (and continuing): Yes, yes, we should discourage parents from lying to their children about things. I get that you want to create a sense of wonder and magic for children, but those things aren't real, and grooming that mindset can really dire consequences e.g. organized religion. Santa Claus is especially insipid: it establishes a coercive relationship centered on materialism whereby children must be "good" (as in, "Do what we say without exercising critical thinking skills regarding what we tell you") in order to get presents and candy. That's really fucked-up (though it can get a lot worse, like the versions that use Black slaves, not elves, though the elves themselves always seemed to be slaves, or the ones that beat you if you're bad). Are we really so unimaginative that we think children can't have a sense of wonder about the world without our perpetuating coercive cultural myths, claiming that magic is Real, and making straight-up lying part of the first X years of our children's lives? How about celebrating the Winter Solstice as the point where days start getting longer, where Spring and the growth of the plants that sustain us are on their way, where we celebrate camaraderie among our family and friends because, as a social species, we've managed to survive together to a turning point in the season?

Also, what do you mean by "spirituality", particularly as something valuable? I can think of all sorts of problematic forms of "spirituality" that are harmful to human populations, but not any helpful ones (and don't say comfort: comfort in the face of a hideously unjust world is a really bad thing). Wonder? That's fine, but there are non-destructive, non-religious paths to wonder, like learning how two cells with only half of the information needed to make a creature can combine and reduplicate and differentiate in such a short period of time WITHOUT a guiding consciousness nor "plan" of any sort. Cell differentiation in developing fetuses is so fascinating because its mechanism is so simple but as a process it is so very complex that it can appear that there MUST be a consciousness guiding the process. The lack of a god involved in processes like this is the most fascinating thing in the world, far more wondrous than a petty sky-pixie who's obsessed with which body parts which people rub together in which ways, or how you address it. There is no afterlife, no god; the dead live on only as memories, but they do live on as memories, something that I find far more powerful than the idea of some sort of agent self that continues to exist forever. The fact that people, people, made the machine on which I'm writing this message and created and interconnected, globe-spanning system to distribute that message floors me. The fact that we've been modifying our environments and entire other species through agricultural husbandry for tens of thousands of years is amazing. Even more incredible is that other species do this too (like ants farming aphids or bees farming flowering plants). I don't know if this qualifies as "spirituality", but if not, I fail to see what spirituality has to offer over an understanding of the incredible world in which we actually live. Santa Claus ain't got shit on hormone signaling or convergent evolution.
50
This video hurt me because I couldn't help but agree with O'Reilly and think the other guys was a completely incoherent atheist zealot.

O'Reilly was certainly disingenuous when he denied seeing the Hell is real billboards. That was a poor moment for him in this interview, but his general point that the atheist stance is a belief and not a fact is true. Science cannot disprove God. It just can't. Religious people do not KNOW that religion is a scam. I happen to believe a lot of organized religions are scams, but not because the spirituality is invalid, but because they have become money making schemes instead of spiritual institutions.

This isn't helping the atheist cause. They need to accept that they believe in the absence of God is one of many beliefs. The negative is not in the presence of belief, it is what they happen to believe, and as such they have no more or less standing than any other belief system. This kind of zealotry bothers me from all believers, Athetist and Religious.
51
"Science cannot disprove God. It just can't."

It's not up to science to disprove the existence of God. It should be up to religion to prove the existence of God.

But they can't, because he/she/whatevs doesn't exist. Period.

You can certainly choose to believe whatever you want, but it remains your personal belief & faith, which I can find just as ridiculous as someone believing they can fly.
52
@50
This isn't helping the atheist cause. They need to accept that they believe in the absence of God is one of many beliefs. The negative is not in the presence of belief, it is what they happen to believe, and as such they have no more or less standing than any other belief system.
So would you say that a person who doesn't believe Santa Claus is real is just one of many beliefs? And that the belief that Santa Claus does not exist has no more or less standing than those who believe Santa does exist?
53
"So would you say that a person who doesn't believe Santa Claus is real is just one of many beliefs? And that the belief that Santa Claus does not exist has no more or less standing than those who believe Santa does exist? "

Sigh, oh I do love questions that are specifically designed to trap people, because either there is always some basic logical piece missing from them. I will address two issues with this question.

1) You cannot disprove the existence of God or prove the existence of God because the current belief systems put him outside of any parameters we have a way to measure. You CAN disprove the existence of Santa because there is a physical location where he in theory has a big ole workshop, it's a location we CAN get to and see that it's empty.

2) So assuming you had come up with an example that didn't have such a huge obvious hole in it I would say yes. You seem to have quite nicely captured the essence of what I'm saying. It's nice to see you get it.

The Atheist in this video list all my respect when he said everyone knows religion is a scam. He is the definition of presumptuous when he claims to know more about anyone's belief than they do. O'Reilly is scum, don't get me wrong, that's why watching this hurt me. Atheism is the belief in the absence of a divine presence in the universe. Religion is generally the belief in some form of divine presence in the universe. They are equal and opposite, and denigrating because of your absolute belief in the other makes you a zealot. That is by definition the truth.
54
Cigan is right, and that is the truth.
55
@53,
Fine, replace "santa" with any deity... zeus, ra, the christian god, shiva, whatever.

You're asserting that belief in any supernatural entity is the exact equal and opposite of disbelief in said entity. That it's just as likely that any of those exist as not exist. Further, the impossibility of proving or disproving the entity actually makes a stronger case for it, because then, since it's impossible to verify or discard, a person isn't supposed to be denigrated simply for their (unverifiable) beliefs.

You may buy that, but I don't.

If someone tells me they believe invisible and immaterial fairies live in their garden, I'm going to tell them I don't believe them (or in your words, I apparently have "an absence of the belief of fairies in the garden"). That makes me a zealot?
56
a timely quote from the recent ricky gervais msg on newsweek:

"The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts."

and the rest is a bloody good read, too.

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