Scott and I will be discussing the two big watershed books for the New Atheism: Sam Harris' The End of Faith and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.
The topic for this show turned out to be a broad range of approaches to atheism and skepticism. Rather than try to summarize it, I would invite you to listen to the podcast if you weren't able to stream it live.
Atheists Talk is produced with funding from the Minnesota Atheists, the Humanists of Minnesota and the generous support of our members and donors. We also wish to thank Q. Cumbers restaurant for purchasing on-air advertising and for providing a great place to eat and gather.
Listen to AM 950 KTNF on Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists.
Stream live online. Call in to the studio 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to
radio@mnatheists.org during the live show.
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Kevin Zelnio and John Abraham Discuss Climate Change
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has released new temperature norms based on 30 year historical data. These are the "normals" that meteorologists compare the days' weather to the mean for any particular day. The temperature norms are higher than they were ten years ago, and ten years ago the norms were higher than those of the prior decade. Denialism has to be very strong in a person in order to pretend that the global climate is not getting warmer. The data accumulate in the air and in the sea, and on land and indicate with very little uncertainty that human activity is the leading cause of global warming. This is the scientific consensus. The seas are showing the effects of warmer water, as the level of carbonic acids absorbed into the water are having a dangerous effect on the biosphere under the waves. Reefs are bleaching.
At a time when solutions need to be discussed in the public, scientists are facing an increasingly shrill level of "debate" and denial from those who claim that they are alarmists who are crying fire in a crowded theater when there is no need to worry. Denialists claim the atmosphere is too big and chaotic for us mere humans to have an effect.
Those of us who are familiar with creationism's means and methods recognize the tactical similarities between creationism and global warming denialism. Our guests for this show are Dr. John Abraham and Kevin Zelnio.
John Abraham is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering (Heat Transfer and Fluid Mechanics) at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, He responded to a presentation made by Chrisopher Monckton at Bethel University. Monckton is a leading denialist who has many convinced that scientists are lying about global warming, but Abraham
showed how this charge is false.
Atheists Talk is produced with funding from the Minnesota Atheists, the Humanists of Minnesota and the generous support of our members and donors. We also wish to thank Q. Cumbers restaurant for purchasing on-air advertising and for providing a great place to eat and gather.
Listen to AM 950 KTNF on Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists.
Stream live online. Call in to the studio 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to
radio@mnatheists.org during the live show.
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The Ledge is a feature film that sets an atheist against a fundamentalist in a deadly love triangle. The plot and subplots examine in a taut, well-paced drama the conflicts that lie beneath in a society that assumes faith provides a firmer foundation for ethics and morals than does a secular, atheistic worldview. Matthew Chapman, today's guest, wrote, directed and co-produced the film, which debuted at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.
Chapman is a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, and is the president of ScienceDebate.org.
Atheists Talk is produced with funding from the Minnesota Atheists, the Humanists of Minnesota and the generous support of our members and donors. We also wish to thank Q. Cumbers restaurant for purchasing on-air advertising and for providing a great place to eat and gather.
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Whether the Bible is a collection of texts that can be used for moral guidance is an unresolved question for Western society. Bible-based religions use the book as a guide in order to shape ethics not only for their adherents, but for governance of the larger society as well.
Hector Avalos, PhD, Professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University, has been deconstructing the monolith of respect that we are supposed to afford the Bible in several books and collections. Avalos' method lays out a careful and critical examination of the book itself as well as the apologetics approach that believing scholars use to misrepresent the ethics of this collection of authoritative scriptures.
Laying aside the verifiability of the texts collected into the Bible, which Avalos examined in his book
The End of Biblical Studies, Avalos now turns to its ethics of slavery. Apologists claims that the Bible was a key tool in the 18th and 19th century abolitionist struggles for the ending of human slavery. In order to maintain the position that The Bible could be used to argue that God didn't want people to own other people, scholars need to misrepresent its clear teachings and Avalos shows in his forthcoming book
Slavery, Abolitionism and the The Ethics of Biblical Scholarship. Avalos not only looks at the Bible itself, but also examines civilizations in the Middle East, both preceding the time line of the Bible and concurrent to discover whether or not its teachings were an improvement over the ethics of slavery for non-adhering societies.
Atheists Talk is produced with funding from the Minnesota Atheists, the Humanists of Minnesota and the generous support of our members and donors. We also wish to thank Q. Cumbers restaurant for purchasing on-air advertising and for providing a great place to eat and gather.
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