History of Godlessness from Robert G. Ingersoll to Sam Harris with Justin Clark
History of Godlessness from Robert G. Ingersoll to Sam Harris with Justin Clark
Appears in this episode
The conservatives complain about godlessness, reactionaries think god punishes America for its godlessness, progressives think that America is too religious. But, wherever one might be on the spectrum, they each are unhappy about how religion manifests itself in America.
Today, we have Justin Clark from Red Reviews Podcast here to talk about the history of Atheism, secularism and other types of godlessness in America. He also talks about the cult of Reason and all the other problems associated with the Godless.
5:46 - Who is Robert Ingersoll?
10:04 - Eugene Debs relationship with Robert Ingersoll
12:40 - How Robert Ingersoll Helped Eugene Debs in the Pullman Strike
13:00 - Robert Ingersoll’s Politics
20:00 - Justin’s Critique of the Secular Movement
23:31 - Atheism’s Golden Age from 2004-2016
26:00 - Why Esha thinks New Atheism always represented racism
28:00 - Sam Harris’s Golden Girls’ Trust Fund
Statistician William Briggs Explains the Fraud of Sam Harris’ PHD
30:00 - The Good and Bad of Christopher Hitchens
35:00 - Justin on Why he left the Cult of Reason
40:42 - Biological Determinism and its connection to Cult of Reason
42:00 - The Bell Curve as an Example of Biological Determinism
47:00 - Bell Curve and its affect on Policy during the Clinton Years
48:00 - The Cult of Stefan Molyneux
51:52 - Beware of Scientism
53:00 - Skeptical Inquirer Pedaling Overpopulation Myths
59:00 - Skeptics not so skeptical of National Security Narratives
1:07:00 - Verifying Historical Narratives using Primary Sources
1:17:00 - Changing Narratives and Peppery Dishes by Trotsky
1:19:00 - Lew Wallace, the author of Ben Hur and his fiction about Robert Ingersoll
1:28:00 - Seven Years in Tibet and the convenient lie
1:35:00 - Justin’s next project regarding Eugene Debs and the Soviet Union
History of Godlessness from Robert G. Ingersoll to Sam Harris with Justin Clark
Extremely interesting conversation, but Esha - you far too frequently interrupt, and often before Justin has a chance to finish his sentence. This sometimes makes things hard to follow, at least for me.
Yes, Sam Harris is a bit of a jerk and likely anti-Muslim, amongst other deficiencies, but what some of us are arguing is that religion *in general* is not the way forward, at least the supernatural part. A great deal of the moral teaching may still be useful, but we simply argue that following it blindly because it is supposed to come from a supreme being (when it is blatantly obvious that it was written by men to justify their employment in relatively cushy jobs) needs to be questioned. Jefferson created a bible where he literally cut out the supernatural parts and pasted the rest together, because the supernatural parts were so absurd, but he considered Christ a great moral teacher. What we object to is basing public policy (like killing someone for "blasphemy") on giving credence to some self-appointed authorities just because they say that they are "on a mission from God".
And in terms of overpopulation, in view of accelerating species extinction due to human activity (climate degradation being an especially dangerous example), we think it is time to ask why it makes sense to endlessly expand the human population. This has nothing to do with Malthus or eugenics, and applies to all humans, not just Africans or any other specific groups. If anything it would be more important to reduce population in wealthy countries, since they tend to contribute disproportionately to climate change and species extinction. So the question is not "how many people could we possibly cram into certain space without them starving to death", but why in the world would we want to even try? We should also look at immigration in this light. Of course, there are refugee situations where most would probably agree that it is immoral not to shelter some people. But if, as it appears, many of these are motivated to pursue a conspicuous consumption lifestyle elsewhere, then when they immigrate they become part of the overpopulation problem (as defined above). Rather we should be pushing *all* nations to come to population levels that are sustainable, without emigration, in terms of minimizing and ultimately eliminating further species extinction, and even reversing climate degradation. From time to time, with "tech fixes" (and less likely, lifestyle changes) it may be possible to safely expand human population, but now is not one of those times.