Skeptical Atheist Secular Humanism in Canada.

I identify as an atheist primarily but I'm also a skeptic and I say that because I know atheists who are not skeptics it's an embarrassing Association but I know atheists who believe in homeopathy mystical healing subluxations and reincarnated extraterrestrials infiltrating the Illuminati not everyone who doesn't believe in gods has a good reason not to there are religions that don't believe in gods look at Scientologists druids or aliens so just because you're an atheist doesn't mean that you're rational or skeptical or scientific and that's where the Atheist collective's includes so many GMO alarmists anti-vaxxers 9/11 truthers and you know libertarians but the reason that I'm atheist is because I'm a skeptic that's where skepticism leads it is the inevitable eventual conclusion if you want to understand things if you're honest with yourself and you apply skepticism consistently throughout your life not everyone does not even all of the self-proclaimed skeptics there are religious people who call themselves skeptics and also call themselves free thinkers that pretend to be rational and some of them even call themselves rationalists but they're really only rationalizing they've joined the various skeptics group so they can be skeptical of Bigfoot ghosts UFOs and magnet therapy but they won't critically examine the elephant of the room they won't look at the man behind the curtain to see what George Carlin described as the all-time champion of fault exaggerated claims and false promises this is usually because I've been raised in an environment where everybody shares particular religious beliefs and where they've been culturally conditioned or inculcated such that they can't question that so they don't even recognize that they believe the most insane ravings they need to lose an ax lunatic ever imagined and that they will believe these unsupported assertions of indefensible nonsense without reason without reservation and without question without any doubt you shouldn't leave anything that isn't indicated by evidence and you shouldn't believe any completely either complete conviction should be reserved for when the evidence is both overwhelming and indisputable otherwise wherever there could be reasonable doubt there should be because if you really want to understand something then it matters what the truth is only accurate information has practical application so the only value any information has is how accurate you can show it to be and if you can't show that it is accurate at all then it has no value at all now which believers would understand that it doesn't matter what you believe all that matters is why you believe it and if you can't give me one reason to believe you then I have no reason to believe you and not having a reason to believe something is a pretty good reason not to believe it philosophy professor Peter Bogosian says that faith is pretending to know what you don't really know and to some extent he's right because knowledge is demonstrable with miserable accuracy knowledge is testable if you know it you can show it but if you can't validate your claims to any degree at all by any means whatsoever then you can't honestly know that no matter how convinced you are and trivialities may be uncontested here we're talking about extraordinary claims and there's a sliding scale for that it doesn't matter how loudly you shout that whatever you believe is the truth truth is defined as that which is concordant with reality meaning that reality itself is not truth but statements about reality can be if they're true if you can show that they're concordant with reality so I take faith to me whatever you say so long as you can show that it's true the truth is what the facts are if you want me to believe you have to show me the facts show me the truth of it but there is no truth to any religion nothing anyone can actually show to be true there are only empty assertions of impossible absurdities not indicated by anything but contradicted by everything and thus beneath serious consideration unsupported claims no more credence then disputed claims you can't just say the Andy thing is possible either because it's not that would mean that monkeys might fly out of my ass but we know that that is impossible just like the cow jumping over the moon and I know there are people when they hear that they're thinking how they could how they could say that that is possible but the only way to determine whether something is possible is whether there's a precedent or parallel or at least some verified phenomenon confirming that such possibility exists scientists can't even say that something is probable until they can indicate a probability but if you've got nothing at all no evidence to support your conclusions that we're done come back when you've got something to show I won't give you the benefit of the doubt because there isn't any if you can't show that you're right you're not that is a logical conclusion and it is effectively correct because what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence and it shouldn't be skeptical only of certain things and stop theory if you're religious you can't be a free thinker because religion is a belief system belief system has required beliefs and prohibited beliefs you have to believe that there is no god but Allah and thou shalt have no other gods before him unless you think that the only way to get to the father is through Jesus Christians don't realize that the Jews wrote the first edition of their holy book and then if the Jews are right then Christianity is in direct contradiction with the very first commandment but as God Sutton hasn't clarified who's right then neither one can really claim that either there is no other God before God or sitting beside God as God said himself in Isaiah or Jesus is yet another magical anthropomorphic immortal magical anthropomorphic immortal who is both positioned before and beside the right hand of power these are mutually exclusive contradictions and they can't both be simultaneously correct and you'll be damned forever if you make the wrong choice but at least it's one of those two unless the Hindus are right or the six or someone else or no one which is infinitely more likely even if there is a God all of the religions are statistically wrong about something somewhere and many are wrong about everything otherwise you better hope that you guessed correctly because you're every other way Blaise Pascal did not consider every option you can't be Hina theist either you can't just say that everybody's right or you can't believe that because this is forbidden by all of the top religions along with any deviation from their orthodoxy and there are a lot of deviations to choose from they call these heresies you're not allowed to change your religion either because heresy along with blasphemy and apostasy are all damnable crimes but with punishments imposed in this life in case that next one doesn't exist in different cultures in different times you will have the respect for the dominant religion of the region beaten into you whether there is a hell or not and that's what happens whenever you're sworn to support a thorough territory indications if you're not able to reconsider your position and they don't respect your authority then you'll have to resort to violence and oppression this is the difference between a rational and an irrational position so religion is not free thought because you're not free to believe whatever you want there are required beliefs we have your place and if you believe anything on faith then you're not a skeptic either but I am or at least I try to be we can all be irrational about some things we all have biases and Prejudice and I'm at least inclined to correct mine when I notice them that's happened a few times before so they don't know that it is possible so whenever I have critics challenging me I question for a moment whether they might be right in whole or in part before I compose a reply I'm not perfect but I'd like to think that I'm improving and that's why I'm also a humanist because I don't want to be defined only by what I don't believe and it's funny that I was first labeled as a humanist when I was 11 years old one of my neighbors decided I wasn't Christian enough I don't know what I said to put her off but she accused me of being a humanist and she said it with the same distasteful sneer that we were trained to say the words socialist humanism is like a religion but it differs from religion in that it promotes the value and goodness of human beings instead of scapegoating that we're all just that all our good works are like filthy rags or no better than filthy rags and that we are all just damnable sinners who can only be saved by faith because you've got to be forgiven for being the way your infallible creator made you right so I am to understand that our current condition is all because of the fall because to supposedly perfect beings disobeyed God because they weren't quite perfect because they didn't understand right from wrong which is an imperfection and for one thing when they when they don't understand what is right and wrong what is the difference between good and evil they're bound to do something wrong so of course they did and God punished them not for not knowing any better but for learning the difference as if there's anything wrong with that and if that doesn't make any sense that's divine wisdom for you his ways are not our ways the Lord moves in delirious ways God believes in the death sentence for like everything so God's level of senseless thoughtless cruelty is enough to make humans seem humane and it always confused me how it was that God could punish someone who didn't know the difference between good and evil it didn't know the difference between right and wrong and when he knew that he's the reason that they didn't and when he knew that he's the reason that they did it because if they don't know good form evil they're going to do something wrong so he set the trap and then he and then he heaped on a bunch of extra punishments on it too instead of what he said would happen so wonder why can't God keep his word he certainly wasn't looking out for our best interests learning right from wrong is a good thing and so why would he punish this for something he should be praising us for and why couldn't he just forgive us why is it a condition of our forgiveness that in before he can forgive us for doing something good he has to wait until we do something unforgivable first why does unconditional love have so many conditions and why is divine wisdom so stupid let's forget about why he put a talking snake in the dark you know garden and that we're supposed to pretend that that's the lord of lies we know that it can't be because the first time the Satan is mentioned by name is in another story chronologically after this one and Satan is said to be walking remember that in Genesis the serpent was cursed to eat dust and crawl on his belly all the rest of his days but in the book of Job Satan is walking around and chatting with God as if they'd never had a falling out and this is where God has to ask Satan where he'd come from because his invaluable omniscience somehow didn't know so if he had to ask that of Satan who was later described as the Lord of Lies and why would God believe him or didn't God know any better by then because remember the god of the Old Testament wasn't really all that bright I mean he made all the other animals male and female but somehow he forgot to do that when it came to Adam that's a little absent-minded isn't and I figured maybe it's because he was making him out of clay but still you think he would remember the female counterpart when he was forming atoms junk otherwise why God why would God go to the trouble of creating testicles if Adams not going to use them of course I have to wonder why Adam has nipples too but that's another matter see back then God wasn't quite infallible yet that's when he that's why he lost when he was wrestling jacob even though he touched him in the hollow of the thigh so another way of saying that he hit him below the belt this is a Bronze Age way of just driving a crotch shot because God wasn't yet in his spirit form either back then he was he was just like the gods of any other Pantheon just a magical man walking through the garden slaying his flaming sword around remember these stories are written by Jews not Christians they didn't believe in Jesus and these stories are not about Jesus this is God the Father Yahweh who walks talks eats sits waves his hand turns his head shows his backside and cheats at wrestling in those older stories God also laments the mistakes that he's made like when he created people and then things didn't turn out the way he foresaw what's that say about prophecy so he kills everybody and starts over again and we turn this into a charming story to tell our kids the floating zoo - bye - well God destroys everything with no exception with no excuse for his exceptional cruelty and better more importantly no better reason than that to compensate or have no better plan to compensate for a complete lack of foresight and he was gonna do the same thing with Sodom and Gomorrah except that Adam or Abraham rather bargained him down and this is when God the Lord Jehovah physically appeared on Abraham's doorstep and the to set under a tree eating veal in the book of Genesis God appears a few times in human form but in Exodus the next book over from this when it says that no man may see my face and live so here we have a contradiction which is really just a different interpretation because these these sources there's not one author here it was not written by God it was written by multiple different people from different cultures and different religions that didn't agree with each other and then some later editor came in and threw out the parts they didn't like and taped the rest together and that's where you get your theology I've seen Christians so desperate to defend the idea that that God exists only in spirit form that there's a cartoon about this scene with Abraham talking to God where Abraham is talking to a twinkling star and the twinkling stars supposed to be God but the Bible's pretty explicit that God showed up hit his doorstep he opened the door there's three guys there and Abraham calls one of them God now the other two continue their journey they go on to Sodom and there the angels supposedly that had to worry about being anally raped in Lots house you know when lott was the most righteous guy in the whole town so that's why he handed over his virgin daughters what a great guy no wonder God saved him so then the Bible records as always make sure I'm in the right place here yeah then the Bible records that after these two guys left that you know what God says to himself in that moment that he's left alone how do we know what he said who's writing this down God's standing there alone talking to himself which is already worrisome now if he's giving dictation to ascribe later on does he tell describe I was only talking to myself at that moment and then it also says that you know when the other two guys left that Abraham was still standing before the Lord right and that this is when Abraham drew near to the Lord to talk to him how do you draw near to a star to talk to it especially when the Bible is pretty explicit that you God is the third guy still standing there so do you wonder how Christians don't notice things like this I've noticed an important rule when you're reading scripture you have to read it in the spirit meaning which you kind of have to read between the lines and not so much the lines you have to read what you think it means and not just what it says because the Bible said people tell you that the Bible says things that it clearly does not say and they say that it doesn't say things that it clearly does and it's funny to argue with them too because you know that's not what it says then you show them and I said that's not what it means of course it's not just Christians who are like this every scripture based religion is look at the Muslims in the second and largest Sura the Quran says that God is the reason that I don't believe because God has closed my eyes and sealed my ears he's also going to punish me for having done that to me but it's still his fault it also says that the serpent in the garden is Satan we know of course that it can't be the Bible never actually says that there's just one interpreter of interpretation of the story we know that that's wrong so the Quran is just repeating false interpretations of the Bible the Quran also says some people say we believe in God in the last day but they do not believe they really do not believe they seek to deceive God and the believers but they only deceive themselves though they do not realize it let me paraphrase and repeat that there are people who don't believe in God but who say they do so that they can fool God into thinking that they think he's real this is pretty much the very beginning of the Bible and or excuse me of the Quran and it has already failed with a faceplant if you say you believe in God but you don't really believe in God then how could you possibly be trying to fool God wouldn't you have to believe there's a god if you're gonna try to deceive him and what would be the deception if you don't believe in now that that's not really possible so the quran already shows sufficient absurdity to know that it can tip it author by any superior being seriously could this be any less ridiculous if it were written in arabic just as christians lose their faith or tend to lose their faith when they read the bible muslims sometimes lose their faith when they read the quran in an unfamiliar language it's like we don't even realize what it said until they hear it paraphrased because if you've grown up accustomed to it some things become too obvious to notice so now that I brought the Abrahamic religions together let's get back to Abraham in another example of what an unbiased level-headed and reliable document the scriptures aren't Adam or Abraham sees these two other characters off as they continue their journey and anyway wait I was wondering because God praying to themself when he's by himself I'm just wondering why he's talking to himself so anyway God says to himself that first he couldn't he couldn't decide whether to tell Abraham what he planned to do because apparently God is indecisive but they decided he would go ahead and tell Abraham what he plans to do says I'm gonna kill everybody and Ibrahim says wait what if there's good people there and God didn't know if there were or not because he hadn't been there it's just like what the Tower of Babel story he had to come down through the clouds to go look at the tower for himself and see what the min room what are they building I don't know cuz I'm not omniscient he was neither omniscient nor omnipresent yet those exaggerations don't occur until later editions so God changed his mind and said okay if there's 50 righteous people then I won't destroy the city but then Abraham says what if there's only 40 and got back down again this is well what if there's thirty do I hear 20 ten going once sold to the deity and this isn't the only time that human negotiators have changed God's mind they remember the story about Zipporah his wife you know when God was going to try to kill Moses because apparently Moses was such a badass that God has to make an attempt to kill him and they have to do a face-to-face combat for this to happen and that his wife was able to save his life by chopping the tip of her son's penis off and throwing the bloody penis that her husband's feet and that God thought was so amusing for whatever reason that he decided not to kill him after all what we said about divine wisdom so there was another time when Moses told God you can't kill all those people because you gave them your word regarding the promised land you promised so Moses convinced God to change his mind and repent of course the new Christian interpretation is that God knows everything and that he can't change his mind but if either of these points are true why would you pray to it but that is exactly what the Bible says it says that God repented no one takes the Bible more literally than atheists because we don't have to make excuses for what it really does or doesn't say and some translations say that he changed his mind other translations say that he repented and the Christian interpretation of that is that neither of these two interpretations or translations of the supposedly infallible Word of God is correct even though the word that was used for repent means to feel sorry for so no matter how you spin it the Bible says that God changed his mind repented and was sorry the same passage that says that God can't change his mind also says that God can't lie either it says that many times but it also repeatedly shows God lying to people that he put a lying spirit into the scribes we're into the prophets God put a lying spirit into the prophets and they rate the but they wrote the Bible and there's a later passage that says how can you trust the Bible because lying prophets wrote it and they've made it into a lie nobody pays attention to that part they're not that they're not entirely that literal and God has he hardens someone's heart he sends a strong delusion so that they will believe a lie or should believe a lie the Christian interpretation of that contradiction is to keep repeating that there are no contradictions until they can't see it anymore and while you're thinking about how many times God lied remember that the serpent of the garden isn't the one who lied in that story either God did because God said that in the day that you eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you will surely die but the serpent said no when you eat the fruit you must really not die and God knows better God lied to you because he knows that when you eat of that fruit your eyes will be open and you will be like God because you will know good from evil and that's exactly what happened so the serpent told the truth and God lied about it and then got really vindictive about it too so God said they would die in that day but they didn't the story says the Adam died like 900 years later and now remember the biblical literalists say that a day in the Bible is a 24-hour period not a thousand years that's the case and they're going to be consistent which we know they're not then the only way to justify this or the only way to defend it is to say that this is the day that Adam became mortal but that doesn't work either because there wasn't just normal fruit and cursed fruit in that garden there was also the fruit of the tree of life and the Bible said that if Adam had eaten of the fruit of the tree of life then he then he would live forever and that's why God kicked him out of the garden and put a flaming sword to stop him from getting to the fruit of the tree of eternal life so remember that Adam always had to eat right from the very beginning which he wouldn't have to do if he were really immortal if you were created that way because what would that what would happen if Adam it hadn't eaten from either tree or from any tree what do you eventually have starved to death when we expected he would have at least eventually go old so Adam didn't become mortal on that day he was already mortal always had been or else there wouldn't be a tree of eternal life and again however you spent it God lied now the Bible repeatedly mentions the fruit of in different places where it clearly referring to the results of a given practice or policy and these are all analogies which is exactly what's going on in the genesis - these have to be analogies but no everybody sometimes some people take this literally the way that is supposed to be read you can either you to the fruit of the tree of eternal life and live in childlike innocence forever or you can eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and you will become aware your eyes will be open you'll grow up and you'll realize that the tree of knowledge of good and evil is not a literal tree it's not made out of wood you can't chop it down and build a boat out of it this is clearly a parable it can't that's all I can be but no people take that literally even though this was obviously metaphorical and none of that even could be literally true but you know if you wanted to interpret this literally it says that in the day that they ate of the fruit their eyes were opened and they saw that they were naked so shouldn't we understand that before they ate of the fruit their eyes were closed they never saw anything just think about when Adam and Eve ate the fruit and their eyes were open and they saw each other and realize that neither if they're more white we know whether there was no adam oni but we know that the first people lived in tropical areas and that people living in the tropics developed dark skin same thing happens with white people moved to the tropical areas if they live outdoors for many generations their children who were born with darker and darker skin same thing happens when dark-skinned people move to the northern lands this is a balance between absorbing enough vitamin C or vitamin D from the Sun light and not absorbing too much ultraviolet radiation we understand that now but they didn't know that when we were making up religions I was raised in a Mormon family and I was taught that God had marked Cain the mark of the devil branded mark or branded Cain with the mark of the devil and that that mark was black skin now the Mormons taught me this in 1977 I was 14 this was just one year before they changed their policy to allow black members into the Mormon Church and I heard from another religion that Cain got his mystery bride from among the Apes and that that's where the other races came from there are people who believe this and you find more and more of them the further south you go another group believes that the Jewish race began when Eve was seduced by the serpent and since they believed that the serpent was the devil in disguise a common misconception then the Jews in their view are just the bastard spawns of Satan and amusingly all of these groups complain that teaching evolution promotes racism but if you believe in Adam and Eve then you got to believe in the flood - and what does that do to all of these stories because none of these people would have survived the only survivors in the flood were the sons of Noah so one of them must have been black right I'll leave it to you to figure out how that happened I remember it's because the Bible is complete it's a contradictory compilation of fairy tales that doesn't make any sense because it was written by bigoted superstitious savages who obviously didn't understand anything and that's why the Bible has magic spells and talking animals witches wizards Giants and Dragons that's why it says the Bible is a flat disk standing on columns like a table and that it's covered with a giant crystal dome with windows in it to keep them to let the that's why it says that the Sun in the moon were rather it implies that the Sun and the moon are both the same size that they're equal to each other in that sense that they're both lights that they're bigger than the stars more important to that's why it says that the stars can be trodden on when they fall out of the sky after being blown out of the sky by a storm the sacred scriptures oh wait there's another thing to remember how the Sun of the mover created by God on the fourth day so that they would be signs and seasons so that you can tell the passage of days but you did it on the fourth day so how do we know exactly how long that took the sacred scriptures are all equally silly because they're endorsements of embellishments of the fables of ignorant primitives who obviously had no concept of the true nature of the cosmos nor Earth's relation to it and I know that there are religious people who call themselves humanists and I don't fault them for that even though humanism contradicts religion by only seeking rational solutions religion is by definition irrational because it is no logical and unreasonable but as I say I don't fault anyone who despite their indoctrination into whatever religion considers secular solutions and respects humanity I don't think your religion is a significant problem until it interferes with that another label that I wear that is relevant here is a piston ax stand it's a new word for those who reject faith we see faith is an unsupported assertion of unreasonable conviction assumed without reason and defended against all reason being inherently Auto deceptive it is dishonest to assert as fact that which is not evidently true yet that's what all religions do and they use apologetics to rationalize away any evidence that may ever arise against them such that no amount of proof will ever change their minds consequently faith is the most dishonest position it is possible to have yet religious believers will still pretend in their position as reasonable as if subjective impressions of logical fallacies and questionable anecdotes should count as evidence and they'll project that my position is somehow based on faith as if I believe in the religion of no religion ISM they say that you have to have faith that a chair won't collapse if you sit in it as if faith were synonymous with trust but that's not true either because there are qualifiers both in prefix and suffix faith is a complete trust that is not based on evidence we are the trust and evident probability or passed into past experience or we choose to believe on faith meaning that we believe whatever we want to believe simply because we want to believe it I won't do that I will not accept the accusation that I believe anything on faith every belief that requires faith should be rejected for that reason because faith offers no way to know what is really true but it's a great way to stay wrong for ever and never realize it I'm often asked what X what evidence I would accept that there is a God I'll accept anything that qualifies as evidence any body of objectively verifiable facts which are positively indicative of and exclusively concordant with that one conclusion over any other consistency or consistently and without contradictions just so that we can show the distinction between religious claims and the illusions of delusion but they do appear to be the same thing and there's no way to show that God isn't just a creature of the edge something someone just made up and can't even possibly be real I realize I usually criticize creationism which is a form of religious extremism because it requires a degree of reality denial and they admit this proudly in their own statements of faith whenever you argue with them they always use the logical fallacy of false equivalence trying to create the illusion of an equal playing field as if science requires faith as if religion ever cared about evidence and everybody on both sides of this argument knows better but it always comes up every time know now every claimed religion ever made falls into one of two categories not evidently true and evidently not true there's been no religious revelation that ever turned out to be evidently true unless that religion also contradicts that same revelation everything we know to be true we learned by way of reason and this is why I say that science doesn't know everything the religion doesn't know anything the next most common tactic when countering creationists is that they redefine everything such that accurate predictions of demonstrable facts are reduced to unintelligible gibberish in a contest of how many logical fallacies can be employed in a single increasingly desperate mind game I had a moderated debate with an evangelical minister and I wanted to preface that debate with a list of definitions so that we didn't have to waste time arguing about what we mean because I didn't want the audience to think that evolution means something coming from nothing or life from non-life or one kind of thing turning into a completely different kind of thing every relevant word in that discussion can be twisted around this way and they are in every such discussion but my opponent refused to allow definitions and refused to participate if I include them instead he said let's let the audience decide what they think these words should mean which reveals the whole facade that his his belief perspective is an illusion of misrepresentation pretending to believe what he knows is not really true he also by the way added that he knew that there were transitional species in the fossil record but that he wanted to teach students there were none because he said it was important that they believe there are none no I understand that there are people who believe what they do because they don't know any better and some of them care about the truth and they can be taught or it can be helped if they're taught but if you've got somebody whose identity and income are inextricably intertwined in a belief system of nonsense they have to defend for irrational emotional reasons they don't care what the truth really is they don't want to understand it and won't admit it they want to pretend to believe something else and this leads me to think that we're both using the word believe differently if I believe something is because reasons have compelled me to be convinced it has nothing to do with whatever I want to believe if I could believe whatever I want I wouldn't believe what I do I'd be a Jedi I used to be a Jedi I mean that sincerely that really was my religion for about 15 years and it was no joke because I honestly believed in all of the psionic powers everything that the Jedi could do and everything that Spock could do in fact I was so gullible I once believed everything required to be a Ghostbuster I believed in UFOs astral projections mental telepathy ESP clairvoyance spirit photography telekinetic movement full trance mediums the Loch Ness monster in the theory of Atlantis I bought it all and I was such a New Age hippie that I once even believed in the psychic power of animals and bought a book with the same title I thought there was evidence for all these things because they always allude to studies that someone supposedly did on the other side of the iron curtain or something they discovered in some for you know some forsaken place you can't go to places you can't verify this is all before the internet were all that became all too easy but as I started and wanted to understand these things I thought they were real and as I started looking into the more and more one by one all of these things just collapsed I show that there was no truth to any of it much to my disappointment if you're going to teach people it should be something we can show to be true right otherwise I don't see how I can qualify as teaching but that's not what happens when you go to church is it before I took any classes on biology I once believed that life was material components being animated by a spiritual life force I like the way clay is only malleable when it's wet and then when something dies its spirit dissipates in Evanescence just the way that water evaporates out of clay to rejoin the hydrosphere it's just like we imagine our spiritual form doing and a lot of people still believe something like this and it's funny whenever we whatever something is complex people would argue that that indicates God but biology is crazy complex and that's an art actually an argument against God because when you study biology you see that there is nothing that seems deliberately designed rather than accidentally or incidentally improvised for example if you ever studied photosynthesis as a science major you'd have to wonder how an intelligent designer could concoct something so convoluted as a Rube Goldberg process like that yet people think that God can just wish things into being that magical things happen through the power of positive thought and that's how religion works it's literally make-believe the power of pretend two examples that I think show this best I'll show the religious mindset as I see it our two TV or two things I saw on TV one of them is an episode of Amazing Stories called the mission anybody see that one good all right in the mission there's a there's a gunner and the bubble turret in the belly of a world war two bomber everybody saw it okay and the turret is jammed because an enemy fires disabled it and so he can't get out because of the gym and the landing gear is dm2 so that it can't come down so when the plane has to land it's gonna land on its belly but the bubble turd is below the belly so this gunner is going to be crushed and scraped along the runway and there's nothing anybody can do about it but he's an aspiring cartoonist with a powerful imagination so he gets out his paper and pencils and he draws his airplane with the landing gear down and he stares at that paper and he convinces himself that this is reality and he believes so hard that when the plane lands it does have wheels and there the cartoon wheels of his imagination and his startled crew break him out of the cut out of the turret and he's in a trance so they get him away from the airplane and he slap him to snap him out of it and once he awakens the wheels disappear because he literally dreamt them up and the plane crashes harmlessly onto the tarmac this is what it means for dreams to come true if you believe hard enough and I've actually seen this episode used to promote faith on an apologetics blog the next example is an old Christopher Reeve movie called somewhere in time yeah one maybe two people in this movie Christopher Reeves character falls in love with a portrait from a woman from the past and so he gets a room in this hotel that existed at her time dressed in the fashion of her day and as he's going to sleep he hypnotizes himself today is June 27 1912 your mind accepts this absolutely it is 1912 so that when he has adequately convinced and he awakens he is back in time and he meets the object of his obsession and the fun is over when he pulls have forgotten penny out of his pocket and he sees that the date is 1979 upon glancing at that he's yanked back into his own original time for the rest of his natural life however in his unnatural afterlife he and his past life lover are reunited in heaven reinforcing the power of pretend only when you remove all doubt and make yourself believe absolutely will miracles like this happen this is how religious faith is often presented at that you have to believe with your whole heart if you believe in fairies and clap your hands and Tinker Bell will be alive again if there's a will there's a way so if you believe if you really believe that the power of your conviction can change reality by sheer will of mind over matter and even if it can't because it can't you still believe that it can and that's all that matters it doesn't matter if it's really real all that matters is you believe that it is and that's what counts and that's why it doesn't make any sense it doesn't have to if it sounds crazy because it literally is according the National Alliance of mental illness a delusion is a persistent false belief that has maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary to falsely claim something though there is evidence otherwise you don't have to have an actual mental illness to be able to simulate these symptoms religion does it what makes it delusional is that the belief doesn't change when the subject is presented with conflicting information that disproves it amusingly that same page from the psychiatric board also describes psychosis as a loss of contact with reality but with the stipulation or caveat that it is not the subjects cultural belief system so apparently according to psychiatrist there are two reasons for delusions or psychosis you're either religious or you're insane either way sounds crazy to me and I heard one evangelist say that to convince people to believe he has to circumvent the intellect and speak to the emotions which again is irrational Benjamin Franklin said something similar when he said to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason so someone who is determined to keep believing will have a very different approach than someone trying to evaluate something to understand it and the analogy that I like here is a court trial where the litigators have to defend their client even when they know he's guilty because they have to maintain that illusion but the investigators don't care about the verdict or the sentence so for them the truth matters they just want to know what really happened so a favorite hypothesis should it fail because it does either contradicted by the evidence or is simply not supported by the evidence in either case it is discarded like a useless piece of trash exactly like the fables and the Bible should be also and for the same reason thank you very much you

Channel: AronRa

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Keywords: Regina, Edmonton, Calgary, atheists, secularism, atheism, apistevist, secular, humanism

Id: hZhaycQu3BQ

Length: 43min 53sec (2633 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2016