Rationalism in a World of Alternative Facts

Video Statistics and Information

Video

Captions Word Cloud

Captions

this talk was going to be was originally planned for another venue a few months ago I was invited to speak on a college campus in East Texas and the invitation came not from a student group but from a member of faculty and this isn't surprising because a lot of the atheists in Texas do happen to be teachers I remember going to a an atheist meetup in Dallas where there was a dozen people that were all all of them teachers and I was the one exception if this college asked me to take part in their program for learning and community engagements focusing on science and technology and the invitation to speak said they were reading Sagan's demon-haunted world in order to raise awareness from a number of different perspectives so this is very progressive for East Texas and they were interested in me as a science education advocate with expertise and skepticism in biology which I thought was a very kind description and I said I'd be happy to talk about politicized science denial which is something that our Texas schools have become famous for and once we agreed on that and all the other necessary arrangements the next message I got was that I was scheduled to speak on November 2nd and you know looking forward to meeting you see you then and that was the end of it that was the first week of June so three weeks ago I posted a video announcing where it would be this month because my videos reach a lot more people than I'm connected to on social media and within 24 hours of that announcement I got another email from a faculty member who had been included in the previous series of emails and she said that no such arrangement had ever been made even though because she was included in those emails she knows that we have a written record of that conversation but now the story is that certain members of the faculty have made clear they do not want me there and if you've ever been to East Texas you could probably guess why I have some experience with this because this isn't the first time I was deep platformed over there years ago I was asked to debate a local minister in a rural East Texas town and apparently it was supposed to be some high school group wanted to debate theism versus atheism and I don't have a lot of the details just what emails were telling me so I'm speculating a bit here I'm thinking that it was suppose to be originally a couple of students debating in their classroom and that one of them wanted to contact me to help them prepare but then someone decided since I wasn't that far away just have me come down into the debate myself and somehow the school was okay with that but of course it meant that I couldn't debate another student I had to debate an adult so they were in contact with a number of Ministers it would be available for that and we set a date they wanted me to debate the source of morality and Matt Dillahunty had already told me that no matter what the topic of the debate is that he's on that what it's advertised to be it always devolves into that so I knew that I had to be prepared for that inevitably anyway and the thing is this this high school was located in a little rural town in East Texas and as bad as sort of religious as the big cities are the tiny communities are much much worse they get away with a lot more and they're harder to oppose because they can exert an awful lot more pressure on everyone in their tiny communities there are churches out there teaching that dinosaurs never existed and there are public schools out there teaching that Moses inspired the Constitution and I saw a video of a student play from one of these East Texas schools and it had all the students singing praises to Jesus and Moses thanking them for our God blessed America and of course in god we trust' was plastered all over the building whenever I told other Texas where this to where'd this debate whenever I told other Texans where this debate was to be held they said encouraging things like dude you're gonna get yourself shot if anybody saw Easyriders you remember the scene where Jack Nicholson gets his head clubbed in while he's sleeping that was a rural town in East Texas so the next report that I got was that there was so much interest in this debate that they couldn't hold it in class anymore they were gonna hold it in their gymnasium Stadium after school because there were parents and such that wanted to attend and I'm guessing that it was one of those small our gymnasium stadiums and high schools typically had because the next email that I got said that there have been so much buzz about this that the stadium wasn't big enough and they were gonna move it to a church because the sanctuary was bigger than the high school stadium think about what a shame that is now think about the fact that this was originally supposed to be a classroom assignment to students in a debate class but the instructional classroom exercise has now been moved off the school campus on to a church removing the students and the classroom from the lesson it's not even a lesson anymore because they're not learning how to debate they're just watching a debate and by this point the event had been reported to me as though it were a championship game or something because the whole town was going to be there and it was going to be covered by local media as well apparently in this town there's not much that happens and I was looking forward to it and determined to give him a good show then things started to unravel the next message I got was that the three ministers that were available to debate me looked me up and they all dropped out saying that we need a professional apologist now for those of you who don't know an apologist is someone who makes up excuses to rationalize or justify a religious doctrine or to systematically dismiss or eliminate any and all evidence against it it reminds me of how Mill Brooks describes stand-up philosophers as bullshit artists because that's essentially what it apologist is mind you at that time I had never had a formal debate in front of a live audience this was gonna be my first time yet I've already beaten three ministers we haven't even started yet then I get another email saying that they found a professional apologist okay good that was followed by another email saying never mind he looked you up now we need another professional apologist who isn't scared of you and again this was to be my very first formal debate and now I've beaten three ministers and a professional bullshit artist and we've got the date we've got the venue and now they can't even find somebody to debate me on their topic of choice so I wouldn't by default right eventually they found someone who wasn't afraid of me but by the time they did the town had looked me up suddenly the church said they were no longer willing to host this debate and neither would the school fearing political backlash because suddenly they remembered the First Amendment which they never do until it's convenient now I'm not sure what all happened behind the scenes just going on with the emails were telling me but what I got was that they were fine hosting the debate as long as they were sure the Christian would win but they didn't want to risk having me change anyone's mind or make them look bad this they were afraid of because as the Roman philosopher Seneca recorded religion is regarded by the common people as true by the wise as false and by the rulers as useful and of course it's the rulers I'm concerned about today who are only sometimes wiser than the common people because we all know that religion is a means of manipulation of the masses but it's not the only one I remember when I was a little boy that the tobacco industry was going to court trying to prove that smoking doesn't really cause cancer or heart disease or emphysema or any of a dozen other things that they eventually did prove tobacco companies did their own apologetics trying to save their image for the sake of sales they knew that what they were doing was addictive and that it was killing people but that didn't matter compared to how much money they were making especially when you remember that this is the reason that America became the world's richest nation we were the dealer that got the world hooked on one of the most addictive drugs known a man and this goes all the way back to Pocahontas which is another point of alternative facts if you saw the Disney movie you saw John Smith dive to catch a bullet for Pocahontas father bahattin no Smith put the bullet in patent and then captured Pocahontas when she was a twelve-year-old girl and he kept her you know obviously wouldn't get 12 years old from the image the Disney portrayed but he kept her as a slave until she was 18 and then he sold her to William Ralph founder of the American tobacco industry and why is it that grossly distorted fabrications like Disney's versions of Pocahontas always sell better than true stories the tobacco industry went to court in the 1960s to defend a billion-dollar racket that they had enjoyed for over 300 years because money is as addictive as cigarettes and just like any excuses that smokers give for why they're still smoking it's the same sort of excuse as they gave in court that smoking doesn't really do all of the things that it does and smokers will say I'm fine I won't get sick or I'll quit before I do and in the meantime I need it to so I need to soothe my my nerves and some smokers still believe that smoking is sexy because of some old movies they all know that that's not really true these are just excuses to hide their own weaknesses and I know this because I was once a smoker and I'm glad about that only because the memory of that gives me compassion for addicts had I never taken up smoking I would have wouldn't have understood addiction at all I would have had unrealistic expectations and no sympathy for people in that situation but I know their humiliation now because I made those sorts of rationalizations when I realized that it wasn't that easy to quit or that I wasn't ready to try the whole world was hooked on and America was the pusher yet the tobacco industry was also like a junkie addicted to the money so they were ready to lie and deny any and all scientific evidence against their financial interests and they weren't the only ones at the same time the tobacco industry was being exposed as the poisoners they were or are so was the American oil industry over the issue of unleaded gasoline built out of automotive exhausts our cars raised level lead levels everywhere they went which was everywhere people lived LED is damaging to the brain our most damaging to the brain especially the development of the brain and young children are the most susceptible demographic so there are debilitated cognitive problems accessor baited by developmental problems again pertaining primarily to the brain even the most myopic willfully ignorant oil executive should have known where they were leading the human population in just a couple of generations yet they bought their own scientists to fudge the figures and stand trial with fake science which they hoped would protect their profits what about everything else eventually the court revealed that the intended deception was was deliberate so these oil executives knew that what they were doing was worse than what the tobacco industry was doing because leaded gasoline would poison everyone everywhere even themselves and their children the whole of humanity would be continually degraded and deformed in future generations along with all other life-forms there was no escape from this but they tried to keep doing it anyway just because it was easy money easier than any of the other safer options that wouldn't have cost that much to switch to so how is that conscionable to any thinking person how do you classify that is this merely delusional is it also evil is it stupidity is it another form of insanity do we need a new category for such callous calculated self-destructive selfishness that's not just willful ignorance that's not just lying to you're lying to the populace it's finding a way to lie to yourself to pretend that harsh realities aren't really true or don't really matter so that you can just believe in some other fantasy future you just made up out of pure imagination instead isn't that exactly what religion is every religion universally accepted as such is a faith-based belief system holding the notion that some supernatural essence of self somehow survives the death of the physical body to continue on in some other form but religious faith is an unsupported assertion of an impossible conclusion assumed with unreasonable conviction one which ignores all the important data and will not be reasoned with in the case of these oil company executives raising lead levels in every inhabited area around the world it seems they believed that the inevitable inescapable result of their actions was something they could just dismiss or ignore and pretend that they'll survive it somehow again without any defensible evidence of this a belief based on faith of course I first became an activist on the issue of creationism in public schools and I was convinced that people had the same commitment to truth as I do that regardless whatever we may rather believe we can't deny the facts and we certainly wouldn't continue to teach something that was false or biased or unsubstantiated because children are vulnerable and dependent on teachers to provide actual factual information so it would be immoral to mislead them in this way and of course that would be against every teacher's code of ethics - right yeah I was so naive not only our teachers but certain people on the State Board of Education were determined to mislead and deceive sequestered students and to deny them important information - i testified and debated before the board of education a number of times and each time i saw that certain corrections were never going to be made I even got one guy to admit that he knew that there were transitional species in the fossil record but he wanted to teach students that there were none because he said it's important that they believe there are none so clearly it doesn't matter what the truth is the only thing that matters is what you can fool the class into believing so he thinks it's okay to lie to other people's children to convince them of what he already knows can't really be true where is the benefit in that especially given his excuse that he has a moral reason for lying to these children and it wasn't just about science either my wife and I had to testify to the board a couple of times over what they were doing with abstinence only sex education don't try that at home kids and what they were doing with politicized social studies - because of course they're trying to push their prudish morality and religious dogma in both of those classes as well for example our history books credited women's suffrage not with the atheist activist susan b anthony but with the protestant reformation which they also credited with the foundation of our nation they said that religious culture of the religious culture of the Puritans established American law is that right Richard they want us to believe that the founding fathers motivation foundation and inspiration was their judeo-christian values even though the truth is that some of our founders actually hated Christianity our originally secular government was modeled to be the very opposite of the theocracy commonly associated with Moses and Moses would have objected to the concept of democracy the very idea of freedom of religion is disputed by Mosaic law that's why the first commandment contradicts the first amendment they want everyone to think that our Constitution was based on the Ten Commandments even though they know that only a couple of those Commandments are consistent with American law and those murder and theft were already illegal everywhere in the world even before the time of alleged or the alleged time of Moses otherwise American legislation has no parallel with the commandments and most of them are unenforceable and unconstitutional yet our history books our history books lists Moses first among the inspirations of the founding fathers for the Constitution our history books say that Moses was a real person that he was born around 1200 BC even though most of the people who believed in Moses can't agree on when he was supposed to have lived and critical biblical scholars no longer believed that he did thinking now that he was never a real person Texas textbook authors have no idea what the biblical scholarship is all about because again they don't and they wouldn't report this that they did because they don't care what the truth is I testified to our State Board of Education that Moses was not a historic character that he's a strictly religious character who can only be believed on faith in lieu of evidence and sometimes even in spite of it and this of course generated a lot of hatred both on the board and in the gallery but that's the truth that's something we can show to be true and that's what we ought to teach our social studies textbooks created or credited Christian belief for every social advance that actually came about despite that doctrine for example they said Christianity became a religion of hope and resistance to enslaved people not mentioning of course that it forced upon them and that they were expected to submit to it and obey their masters as the Bible commands in both the Old and New Testaments and they weren't just trying to promote their religion either they tried to promote their racism as well and I don't mean that lightly I know some people use that word too often and it doesn't stick to anyone because most racists deny that that's what they are David Duke the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan says he's not a racist if he's not a racist then nobody is it's obviously just another alternative fact of reality denial and my accusation of racism against the Texas State Board of Education is based on this in the last decade or so we've seen our social studies literally whitewashed as all references to black Hispanic Native American or other non-white non Protestant influences on our history have been minimized or eliminated and this prompted at least one non-white member of the board to start to storm out of one of their meetings in disgust at what the majority the moral majority was was voting on because our schoolbooks now give students the impression that the only people in our history who ever did anything important were white Protestants for example they tried to remove any mention of the Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall because they didn't want there to be any black role models in positions of authority for another example there was a cultural reference to hip hop music that the board had changed to country-western because they want to promote what they think they want to promote what they consider to be an all-american culture not African American culture the most glaring evidence of racial prejudice was when the chairman of the board said that the civil rights movement had unrealistic expectations of racial equality they also altered the lessons to promote an exclusively right-wing political perspective with no liberal counterbalance and they tried to promote Confederate President Jefferson Davis as equally important with Abraham Lincoln so of course they had to misrepresent the Civil War to saying that it was fought over states rights as opposed to slavery forgetting that Jefferson Davis himself and his vice president both said that the Civil War was all about slavery and Texas letter of secession makes that clear also but as long as we're repeating alternative facts we may as well build an alternative reality around them complete when they revised bleached white and cleaned up history because there's Texas State Board of Education believes in teaching American exceptionalism meaning that we can't let students know that this country ever did anything wrong because that would be embarrassing and they wouldn't feel patriotic as one proponent put it and I wished I remember to write his name down when I heard him say this the United States of America must always be seen as a shining beacon of what it means to be God blessed you have to talk like that to get on the radio in Texas our board our board members knew that their lessons were biased they admitted that openly yet they challenged my wife during her testimony to explain to them what was wrong with that the chairman of this Texas State Board of Education even admitted on television that his goal was to impose his religious and political views on other people's kids and he said that his constituents elected him to that position for that purpose so they were unabashedly shameless in her unconstitutional agenda thus our history lessons have become political propaganda so of course they denied that the great state of Texas ever endorsed a slavery in fact one of our textbooks referred to the slaves as immigrant workers until someone was sue is someone sued them over that only the publisher corrected the deliberately deceptive distortion it's not that the US isn't a great nation but the biggest problem with being fed lies about how great we are is that people won't be prepared for how evil this government has already been and therefore can be again when I was a boy I was proud that my country would never negotiate with terrorists would never torture prisoners that it doesn't tolerate discrimination nation and that it allows immigrants a chance to achieve the American dream then after the turn of this century we learned that it's not that way anymore if you want to know how bad things can get you only have to know how bad things have already been it was only a hundred years or so ago that the US would as was at its lowest point ever in terms of human rights and the quality of life this is when children didn't have compulsory education and worked overtime without benefits in grossly polluting dangerous factories with air that was unfit to breathe and food that was unfit to eat when they were at risk from infection from polio cholera and smallpox and living in deplorable conditions otherwise because the economic system divided the rich from the poor the haves from they have nots and they're virtually eliminated the middle class this dystopian nightmare has become a republican wet dream because those are the good old days they want to go back to where there were no federal regulations on industry no employee benefits no environmental protection no Food and Drug Administration no Housing Authority no public schools no unions and no state required vaccinations it was a time when everything sucked for everyone except white cisgendered Protestant Christian men rich white cisgendered Protestant Christian men who were the only ones who had equal rights they didn't learn from history because they won't learn from history so they're working on an orwellian revision of it instead but it's important that our students know about the injustice is done by this country against its own citizenry blacks Hispanics Chinese and Japanese immigrants Native Americans women Mormons and so on even within the last hundred years because without these lessons people won't understand that the Constitution can't defend itself our offender in chief swore an oath to defend the Constitution which like the Bible and the art of the deal is a document he's clearly never read because he seems determined to undermine or nullify it he specifically attacked every provision of the First Amendment from the state's establishment of religion to the freebie prohibition of the free exercise thereof to the freedom of the press and freedom of speech he understands none of it yet despite everything he does wrong every single day his supporters will never admit any mistake unless they can blame it on a Clinton - and they will lie on Trump's behalf as often as necessary such that even Kofi fey has a secret meaning that a few people close to the president understand bullshit that's just another alternative fact to deny the fact that we're dealing with someone who can never admit that he's made any mistake even though his no matter how slight even though his major fuck-ups are so frequent that they make george w bush look competent and compassionate by comparison and bush is often considered to be a war criminal and he's alarmed at trump i've seen a number of news conferences where a trump lackey is challenged on what it will take before they'll admit that something trump did or said was wrong what happened they're obliged to sing his praises no matter what so of course we're gonna sacrifice the American Dream and the quality of life that made America great and instead we're going to keep the trickle-down tax system that diminishes the middle class making us into a third world country instead we'll bring back Nazis and we'll will allow mentally deranged to buy guns and will systematically undo or reverse all the social or civil progress that we've made over the last decade at least and piss off the entire populace and all our former allies and start a global thermonuclear World War three out of the sheer arrogance of incompetence and we're going to allow factories to dump toxic waste into public water supplies frack everything and carelessly hastened the destruction of what's left of our environment because remember Donald Trump himself said that global warming was conceived by the Chinese to make us manufacturing non-product or non-competitive never mind that China is the new leader in fighting climate change creating 13 million new jobs by investing 360 billion dollars into renewable clean energy last year all of China's new energy needs were met by wind and solar sources so they erected another wind turbine every hour and they're already the world's leading producer of solar panels and they're increasing their sales on electric cars by more than a thousand percent just over Trump's predicted presidency while he is foolishly trying to reopen coal mines that will never be never provide jobs again because of automation our economy and our environment are doomed under the Mis direction of this myopic lying example of the dunning-kruger effect but Texas is an oil state and our nation is owned by the fossil fuel industry so we can never say anything against that that's why the Texas Republican party platform says that they deny anthropogenic climate change actually the word anthropogenic isn't in there because that's a five-syllable word that no one in the whole trailer park understands so they replaced it with a six syllable word that strikes fear into republican hearts line 39 of the Texas Republican party platform reads and I quote we oppose environmental ISM that obstructs legitimate business interests and private property use including the regulatory taking of property by governmental agencies we oppose the abuse of the Endangered Species Act to confiscate and limit the use of personal property and infringement on property owners livelihood listen to this part climate change is a political agenda promoted to control every aspect of our lives we support the defunding of climate justice initiatives and the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency and repeal of the Endangered Species Act unquote I believe I could severely paraphrase this paragraph as saying we're gonna do whatever we want to do we don't care who or what gets hurt by it this level of reality denial reveals that we are no longer man the wise the wise we're not even responsible adults anymore because we're living in a world of alternative facts and alternative theories for an alternative reality none of which is real and all of which denies what Israel it's all about spin the question is why as for how it seems to be another application of faith the idea that you can change reality if you believe a hard enough that certain undeniable realities and imminent issues will simply go away if you ignore them and that everything will miraculously work itself out somehow if you believe that it will through the power of positive thought so you don't have to pay attention to all the evidence around you because chances are you just push that off on to your kids you'll probably be dead by that anyway so let them work what you know let them deal with or try to live through the mess you've made of everything the truth is what the facts are but we're living in a time when it doesn't matter what the facts are cuz it doesn't matter what the truth is instead you can reject the common reality and substitute your own just make up whatever you want to believe and there imagine that there are no consequences to this willfully blind insanity neither to yourself nor to others how grossly irresponsible have we become has everyone lost their fucking minds there's a certain irony in the fact that my favorite movie of all time is a film that is as old as I am called it's a mad mad mad mad world thing is I never expected that to be prophetic because when I was a little boy I knew that things have been getting better and better all the time for a long time and I saw a intellectually in technology technologically advanced future in the original episodes of Star Trek and I knew that we were heading for that bright and shiny future because I watched the moon landing live as a little boy but 50 years later we now have a resurgence of people who say that was a hoax and who now believed that the earth is flat I don't even know what to say anymore I'm done [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Info

Channel: AronRa

Views: 81,888

Rating: 4.8857985 out of 5

Keywords: Trump, Heretics Barbecue, Heretics, Barbecue

Id: GokwaNIk66M

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 33min 6sec (1986 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2017

Reddit Comments