1. Dinesh D'Souza: Winner of the 2007 Bad Faith Award

Comment #112551 by VivaCriticalThinking on January 17, 2008 at 12:55 pm

Dinesh D'Souza is a very smart guy and an enemy who must be taken seriously.

Dinesh, and others like him, try to create a (sometimes reasonable) doubt about the absolute certainty that there is no creator. Based on that doubt, they make an illogical (but well-disguised) leap to justify all the superstitious and unsupported claims of their religion.

This is why I believe we should shift our focus from one of certainty against the existence of a creator (i.e. atheism), to certainy that all earth religions have no link to a supernatural creator, even if one exists (areligionism?).

By the way, the person who most influenced me to arrive at this conclusion was Carl Sagan.

2. How Evolution REALLY Works

Comment #112512 by VivaCriticalThinking on January 17, 2008 at 12:14 pm

Excellent! Thanks for putting this together.

3. Carl Sagan's COSMOS begins airing on Jan 8th

Comment #104346 by VivaCriticalThinking on December 28, 2007 at 11:02 am

It is encouraging to see that Cosmos is still in demand.

I haven't seen a scientific study of this, but I suspect that more Americans have adopted critical thinking and abandoned superstition because of exposure to Carl Sagan than any other recent personality.

I would like to propose this as a question to social scientists.

4. Response to My Fellow 'Atheists'

Comment #77228 by VivaCriticalThinking on October 8, 2007 at 7:56 pm

I think it is a mistake to put too much emphasis on a specific leader or spokesperson for any cause, including this one. Unlike religions, rationality is advanced by good ideas, rather than appeal to authority.

Sam Harris, for all his brilliance, has previously shown a flaky side. For example, most of the chapters of "End of Faith" are as good as it gets. But then there are some, completely un-necessary and off-topic, discussions on torture and mysticism that distracted from the main points of the book. In debates, Sam often has to pay the price for these views, at the expense of the main points he wants to argue.

In his latest speech and the response, he made many good points, but also created a lot of confusion and got distracted on meditation, which has nothing to do with the topic. Having said that, I think we should forgive Sam for being imperfect, like the rest of us.