You'll notice, Rhesus, that I said you'd have to go get a prestigious graduate education to be 250k or more in debt. Emory certainly qualifies; it's been ranked in the top 20 medical schools in the nation.

The average debt for a medical student is 150k, which is much more manageable. People who went to private colleges and prestigious medical schools will have more debt, and many will have less.

Only about 10% of the US population has completed any sort of post-graduate education, most of which are Master's degrees, which have a much lower cost. The average person graduating with a Master's degree can expect to owe somewhere between 50k and 75k, though again, a really high end education costs more. A professional degree costs the most of any, but only 2% of the population has one.

So when you talk about people coming out of the school system with 250k in debt, you're talking about maybe a quarter of a percent of the population.

>> ^Fade:
Interesting point about student debt once leaving school. Is that accurate in the states? quarter million dollars in debt before you've even started working?


Oh, heck no. I got my Bachelor's from a fairly expensive private university. If I'd relied on entirely on loans instead of scholarships, I'd be something like 90k in debt. A public university would typically cost half that.

You'd have to go to an expensive private college then follow it up immediately with a prestigious graduate education to be 250k in debt. But with that kind of education, you wouldn't have much difficulty paying it off over the typical ten year loan period.

His body was found on... 9/12? The same day as the 9/12 rallies organized as a part of Glenn Beck's project?

I really hope that's a coincidence.

Heh, awesome.

Though it does repeat one of the most common misconceptions about Diogenes. He didn't carry around the lamp saying "I'm looking for an honest man." How exactly this confusion came about, I'm not sure; none of the Greek sources have the word "honest" inserted. He just said "I'm looking for a man." (In the Greek, anthropos, or human being.) Which is to say that he thought the unnecessary institutions of civilization twisted humanity into an unrecognizable distortion of itself.

The cask he lived in was a cast off from the temple of Cybele. This is actually highly significant; Cybele was a goddess of the wilderness. The myths surrounding her implied that abandoning civilization was an entirely doable way to live.

One of my favorite quotes attributed to him is this: "When Lysias, the drug-seller, asked him whether he thought that there there any Gods: "How," said he, "can I help thinking so, when I consider you to be hated by them?"

Most of our knowledge of Dioegenes of Sinope comes from Diogenes Laertius, who wrote biographies of many major Greek philosophers in the 3rd century CE. An online English translation can be found here: http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/diogenes/

Looks like that video was removed.

Found another link, though probably lower quality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilPTiwQIKGg (part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRlB0CO81MI (part 2)

Part of it certainly is an Oklahoma problem. We pay our teachers crap, so we lose our best ones to the better-paying states around us. Oklahomans tend to have a very anti-intellectual attitude, and fewer and fewer kids are actually going to college. If this state doesn't get turned around soon, we're going to be even worse educated than Alabama.

Is that not what he is doing? He looks at the motives of theists, deconstructs them, and uses them as a platform to criticize their behavior. He presents an exaggerated and stilted strawman. "Theists do X & Y bad things, so they are wrong..." complete with 'mean' pictures for theists. Such behavior mirrors the emotional blackmail of some theists. "You do X & Y bad things, so you are wrong..." My conclusion was more of a tongue in cheek tweak of that rather amusing hypocrisy. Where the arguments are passing each other in terminology is the metaphysical level on which the subject matter rests.

That's such a distortion of QualiaSoup's video that I have to wonder if we watched the same one.

Let me be clear. I am not an atheist or agnostic. My disagreements with the video and with QualiaSoup's overall philosophical position run very deep. In fact, my first comment lays out a number of them and avers to others. Ideologically, we are opposed. I have every reason to point out flaws in his video.

Yet it is not flawed in the way you claim. He does not say that theists are wrong because they do X & Y bad things. Rather, he claims that they are wrong, lays out his argument as to why theists are wrong, and then proceeds to criticize the bad behavior of a subset of religious believers.

I don't recall having erroneously mixed those issues - but if you interpret it that way then for the sake of clarity I'll address it. I was pointing out the hypocritical nature of the argument in this vid, and then made a general bemoaning complaint about why atheists keep feeling the need to slap religion in general, blanket terms. I make no commentary on why atheists reject religious truth claims. My comments are wholly confined to the topic of 'why do people feel the need to behave badly when dealing with other schools of thought?" The final bit in this vid could be directed as much to atheists as theists... "If you attack someone because they don't share your beliefs, you're invited to consider what that says about you and the values you claim to embrace."

How is it that you think QualiaSoup is behaving badly? If this were a political discussion, this video would be seen as markedly civil compared to most debate and commentary. He is not blindly asserting his opinion or venting his spleen. He lays out his arguments in a calm, logical manner. He doesn't obfuscate or make it difficult to figure out on what premises his arguments stand or fall. This is not a piece of demagoguery or propaganda. As far as I can tell, the video falls well within the bounds of civil discourse.



I accept that premise. I also point out that I never stated it was 'unmitigated good'. I said, "They do great good". That cannot be denied.

If you mean that "American and US religiously based charities do great good in the early 21st century," then maybe that's a supportable position. I have great reservations about it--I do not think that attempting to destroy indigenous religions in Africa and South America or fighting condom use in Africa are anything like goods--but the cultural and legal restrictions on acceptable church behavior act as a deterrent against the abuses seen past and present when churches have significantly greater power--as, for example, in the rampant child abuse in Catholic boarding schools in Ireland up through the 80's.

I fail to see how that does not apply equally to atheist advocacy pieces such as this video. My original argument (above) was regarding the INTENT of this guy in doing this vid. Was it shadenfrued, prosoletyzing, money, attention, or what? How is he any different than the religions he is attacking? Not very much from what I can see. If it is argued that 'religion causes influences people to behave poorly' then it is perfectly valid criticism to examine how this guy's atheism is influencing HIM to behave poorly. Therefore your argument that it is an 'ad hominem' attack to examine THIS guy's behavior, but it is merely 'inductive reasoning' to examine how religion influences people negatively must be rejected as specious and biased.

But you aren't just inquiring into a possible link between atheism and poor behavior. In your original comment, the logical work done by your analysis of his motives was to justify your dismissal of his position. That is blatantly fallacious.

In contrast, most atheists distinguish between why they reject religious truth claims, and why they may or may not think religion to be harmful. This distinction must be kept in mind by all involved in the discussion to avoid misinterpretation of opposing views or accidentally presenting a fallacious argument.

It must be kept in mind by all parties that a particular religion could be true, yet have negative social consequences if believed. Likewise, atheism could be true, yet have negative social consequences.

To mix the lines of argument together, as you have done here (and as all too many theists and atheists do), is to become prey to fallacious and distorted thinking.



Since the entirety of your set of accusations against churches 'charity for conversion' has been admitted to be wholly anecdotal it cannot be discussed rationally. I can't discuss Muslim practices as I've not witnessed them. Nor Bhuddist or Hindu.

All I'm trying to point out is that Christian charity is not an unmitigated good. Pressure to convert is one aspect. Another might be the attempts by Christian aid organizations--not merely Roman Catholic organizations--to limit the use of condoms in Africa.

So, using this line of thought I can logically reject the various arguments that posit 'religion' and 'faith' are negative influences merely because there are some people who happen to have been part of a religion have had questionable motives. To do otherwise would be a classic example of an ad hominem logical fallacy, no?

No, that would not be an ad hominem. It would be a (perhaps rather weak) inductive argument. Since the argument goes to the desirability of religion (whether or not it is a negative influence), rather than the truth claims of religion, it is perfectly valid to talk about ways in which members of that religion may or may not be influenced to behave well or poorly.

I have found no document to this date from a major religious charitable institution that states that mandatory conversion is required before assistance is distributed.

You mean a major Christian institution, don't you, rather than a major "religious" one? There are Jewish and Muslim charities that only offer aid to Jews and Muslims (this is significantly more toxic for Muslim charities, as Judaism is not in the practice of seeking converts).

It is rarely done, among Christian ministries, so overtly as to leave an obvious paper trail. Rather, at the individual hospitals, charity wards, and so on, non-Christians are turned away if they refuse to convert. Exactly how common this is, is very difficult to tell, but it's certainly common enough to constitute a problem.

It is not a problem, as I said, in the US or the industrialized world. Your personal experiences with charities operating in the US or Europe is not representative. It is a problem in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Southeast Asia.

It is also not, generally speaking, a problem with US organizations that take public funds. Federal rules prohibit government money being used for proselytizing. In fact, a small number of US religious charities have refused to accept government funds under Bush's "Faith-based Initiatives" program precisely for that reason; it would restrict their ability to require service attendance when providing aid.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
Hmm - I'm more curious about INTENT here than anything else. Let's suppose for a moment that Joe Q. Theist sees the video and says, "Hmm - well he made a couple decent points." What then?
1. It could be simple self-righteous shadenfrued. Such persons may simply enjoy wagging their finger at what they consider to be the quaint, anachronistic, and occasionally foolish behaviors of their fellows.
2. Another goal could be recruitment. He may be seeking to convince others to abandon religion and faith completely so that they can join together as a larger group of similarly minded persons.
3. Possibly fame & money are his goals. He may simply be trolling for attention by attacking establishment morality. Or, if he's got a website with advertisers, then he could just be interested in hiking his own profits by addressing a controversial topic and garnering traffic.
Hey - this sounds familiar... Self-righteousness... Prosoletyzing... Attention... Money... This guy is a missionary for his church. Ah - nice try there pal. I've got 7th Day's and Jehovah's hitting me up to join their churches already. Not interested in hearing your particular spiel.

Your fictional average theist (what the heck is that supposed to mean, anyway? I don't even know what an "average Christian" would look like) would be using very poor reasoning skills in making such a judgment. Not only is such speculation about his motives entirely ungrounded, but it is irrelevant. To claim that, simply because his motives could be questioned, his argument and conclusion must be false, is to commit a classic example of the ad hominem fallacy.

QualiaSoup's arguments stand or fall on their own.


Seriously though - what is with atheists anyway? Faith-based initiatives contribute to society and the world with massive charity, good works, and personal benefits. They're clearly not 'all bad' as some would have us think. And - if you don't want to have 'faith' then none of them are forcing you to do anything. What's so awful about just taking personal satisfaction in your own beliefs privately?

If only it were the case that no one was forcing beliefs on people! Sadly, that's not the case, and it is through faith-based initiatives that it is done.

All too often, Christian and Muslim missions and charities make participation in religious services mandatory if one is to receive the benefits those organizations distribute. This is done all over North and South America.

Further, in outside the Americas and in the poorer areas of the Americas, the people who run Christian hospitals and charities all too frequently deny services to people who refuse to convert. Some of the workers are in fact proud to reveal this fact; they consider it their duty.

The people who go to these charities usually have no other options. And in many cases, the consequence of not receiving their benefits is death. They must literally convert to Christianity or die. Islam is, of course, not immune to this sort of thing; the Taliban holds its grip on Afghanistan by similar means.

Even in milder cases, the message is clear: you owe us, and the best way to pay us back is to convert. Charity provided by evangelistic, monotheistic religions comes with strings attached. It is not clear at all to me that their giving is a social good.

>> ^Almanildo: There, you said it yourself. Treating God as a scientific hypothesis is simply a sophisticated way to say that you demand a reason to believe in it. This reason has to be either some sort of evidence or some logical or philosophical argument. As QualiaSoup points out, the philosophical arguments are flawed. So skeptics seek evidence for God.
It seems like you are trying to evade the question by having it both ways. First you assert that God does have an effect on our daily lives, through points of contact with our world. Then you refuse to treat these effects as potential evidence requiring analysis.


Sure, we have to provide some reason why we believe in something. That does not mean that the reason has to be construed in strict scientific terms. It may need to be in some sense empirical, rational, and all that, and hence capable of being grappled with intellectually, but that does not mean that what is being investigated is open to scientific inquiry in the way that rocks and bacteria are.

Science relies on a rather narrow kind of reason--instrumental reason--and not reason totally or simply. There are other forms of inquiry--such as the phenomenological investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, or Merleau-Ponty--which depend on very different kinds of reason.

>> ^chilaxe:
Re:HadouKen24
You do seem well-informed on this topic.

1) "These give us an "in" for something like an empirical analysis."
It doesn't seem similar to empirical analysis if people's experiences of mystical feelings are all mutually contradictory. One person believes he or she senses one thing when reading a religious book, and another person senses nothing.

Strictly speaking, simply having a feeling when reading a book is not a mystical feeling. It is just a feeling. I am referring more to things like the [i]writing[/i] of the Bible or the contact that the Oracle of Delphi was said to have with Apollo.

2) "Why should we expect it to conform to the standards of a scientific epistemology?"
These videos are intended for the portion of the population that's open to a rationalist approach. If scientific thought builds civilizations, with their advanced medicine and space travel, and religious thought doesn't have a history of verifiable achievements, a portion of the population will regard the balance of evidence as favoring a rationalist approach.

Sure, a scientific approach is extremely useful for developing new kinds of vehicles, safer homes, and so on. No one denies that. It is not at all clear to me how or why a scientific approach ought to be taken for all phenomena or to explain all ways of thinking about things.

There are a number of philosophical and religious positions which are utterly undecidable on the grounds of science and, if correct, render science woefully incomplete. One must evaluate these positions according to criteria other than scientific, such as coherency, consistency, etc.

3) "If an image of the Japanese Sun goddess Amaterasu were to materialize and defuse all our nuclear weapons, I don't think it would be unreasonable to take as our starting hypothesis that Amaterasu really did just finally prevent a nuclear holocaust. "
Yes, if there was a verifiable supernatural event, that would constitute some evidence.
However, using mystical feelings as evidence, as most people would, doesn't seem to be supported by the balance of evidence when neurotheology, the neuroscience of theology, is taken into account. (Since 1994, neuroscience has been breaking down exactly what happens in order to (assumedly) create mystical feelings... e.g. turn off the neural circuits responsible for the sense of division between self and world, and suddenly we feel "connected to all things.")
Not everyone believes in relying on the balance of evidence, but this video is intended for those who do, or to at least give folks a sense of the advantages of relying on the balance of evidence.


The "balance of the evidence" is that, when you put people having similar religious experiences in an MRI machine, you see similar things happening in their brains, and the things you see are more or less the kinds of things you'd expect to see whether or not you believe there is an anomalous element to the experience.

"Neurotheology" is not nearly advanced enough to come to any conclusions about the ultimate nature of such experiences, and may in fact be incapable of making such conclusions.

There are a few things about this video that I feel I should comment on.

1) It's a bit erroneous for QualiaSoup to claim that the spiritual or supernatural realms proposed by various religions are conceived as realms we have no connection to or ability to contact or explore. If that were the case, then all religion would be a non-starter. Rather, the claim is that there are points of contact--specifically, those central to the particular religion, such as the temples and oracles of ancient Greece, or the revelation of Holy Scripture in Christianity. These give us an "in" for something like an empirical analysis.

2) Skeptics treating God concepts as scientific hypotheses is getting a little tiring. It's not intended as a scientific statement; why should we expect it to conform to the standards of a scientific epistemology? It is, in fact, the primacy of such an epistemology which is under contention.

3) QualiaSoup's point about the inconclusiveness of miracles is well-received--but it is on the same continuum as arguments that we can't know if we are just brains in vats being fed stimuli by mad scientists. If an image of the Japanese Sun goddess Amaterasu were to materialize and defuse all our nuclear weapons, I don't think it would be unreasonable to take as our starting hypothesis that Amaterasu really did just finally prevent a nuclear holocaust. To be sure, scientific investigation may then question that claim and open it to further scrutiny which may or may not confirm the hypothesis, but that does not mean that, prior to such disconfirmation, we do not have at least some good reason to believe in Amaterasu.

All empirical judgments must be made in terms of our background knowledge. Part of that background knowledge is our knowledge of popular religious beliefs. If we have an independently verifiable experience which matches well with the religious beliefs of our--or perhaps another--culture, then we would have grounds to at least provisionally accept at least some of those beliefs--if only in modified form.

4) Finally, it is certainly the case that the kind of demanding pushiness that Soup criticizes is thoroughly unpleasant and unreasonable. Private reasons to believe in a God or gods do not justify that sort of behavior. His words on the problems with that particular attitude toward faith are perfectly appropriate. I worry a bit that the problems with the video will make it difficult for reasonable Christians and Muslims (since those are the two groups I see engaging in that sort of "dialogue") to perceive where he does in fact hit the mark.

If he's not going to phrase things in a manner that such people will respond to, it would be nice if he could present a few comments on the aspects of those two particular religions that encourage such attitudes and behavior. It seems to be strongly linked to monotheism--Judaism has less of such problematic attitudes, but they are still present, and seem to have been much more present in ancient Judaism. In polytheistic traditions, one tends to find a much higher respect for debate and diversity of thought. One need only look at the vigorous debates between Greek philosophers, who could agree on the subject of the gods no more than in any other areas, or the staggering profusion of religious practices and beliefs to be found in India. It is misleading to speak of such traditions as "tolerant;" the word implies that it takes some effort of will to maintain civility, when in fact polytheists tend to accept such diversity as a matter of fact.

'S why I pay extra for cage-free, free range eggs. Not cruelty-free by any means, but there's certainly much less cruelty.

I'm with you, Throbbin. It's important to keep in mind the costs of what we eat.

And yes, that does mean cutting back on meat and dairy. But that's something most Americans should do anyway; we eat too much of them, and it's bad for most people's health.

I get that this guy is doing satire, but there's a line between satire and a pure straw man--and NonStampCollector took a flying leap over that line in this video.

In the first place, any halfway competent theist using those arguments will of course make it clear that these argument do not necessarily support any one religion over the others. This is how Aquinas used similar arguments in the 13th century, and it's how theistic thinkers deploy them today. They are only intended to weaken the atheist position generally. NonStampCollector doesn't even attempt to address them on this level.

In the second place, it's asinine to assume that every religion is the same--either with regard to how well they are supported by the cosmological, teleological and moral arguments, or how much or little they incline their followers to religious violence. As it happens, the Hindu has a much better case than the Christian or Muslim for saying that these arguments support his religion. Brahma, unlike the God of Abraham, does not have a seemingly petty concern with particular tribes of humans or become angry or feel wronged because of sin. Brahma is described as illimitable, all-embracing. Brahma is a more cosmic God, better supported by the discovery of the age and vast distances of the universe.

Other Gods or divine realities so supported include Plato's Form of the Good, the Logos of the Stoics, the God of Leibniz or Spinoza, and even the God of A. N. Whitehead (co-author of the Principia Mathematica with acclaimed atheist Bertrand Russel) and Charles Hartshorne.

Tendencies toward violence differ considerably between religions. The Hindu and the worshiper of Amun have no reason to get into a fight about religion. Hinduism is not a single religion, but thousands of intertwined religions which have co-existed peacefully for thousands of years. A plurality of religious beliefs and practices--including atheism--has long been not fought by Hindus, but embraced. Only when aggressive evangelistic monotheisms actively attack Hinduism does anything like an instinct to violence come into play--and even then it tends to arise mainly in extreme circumstances. (As in Orissa in 2008, when the assassination of a Hindu leader by Christian Maoist extremists sparked a riot and violence by members of both religions, or the year before, in 20007, when Christians deliberately provoked Hindus by .) Likewise, there is no reason anyone would go to war over Amun. It would not be appropriate to describe the religions of Egypt as tolerant--the word implies a perception of annoyance or burden in allowing others to co-exist, when co-existence was assumed as a daily fact of life. In fact, the priests of Amun welcomed Zeus-worshiping Greeks to the oracle of Amun at Siwa, which once declared Alexander the Great to be the son of Amun.

But, of course, NonStampCollector doesn't actually know any of this. He just assumes, like nearly all the New Atheists, that all the other religions in the world are more or less just like the ones he's most familiar with. Makes it easier that way; you don't have to do as much studying or thinking.