Just in case anybody else was wondering: this is an actor, not a reading by the man himself.

IT LIVES!

*dead #2 one more backup to go!

*dead

LIES. This video is 4 minutes long.

It's been a while since I watched it but I think he lost me at a bit where he concludes that there is no point, therefore the premise of living life as an atheist is false. My own response to this is that there does not need to be a point and, due to the sequential nature of his reasoning, everything that comes after this is flawed because of the false dichotomy. (I was reading the wikipedia list of logical fallacies last week )

>> ^shinyblurry:

Glad that you can see that..you might be the first. What do you specifically disagree on with the first video?
>> ^lampishthing:
Yeah, I don't agree with the first video but, if you take it as a given, what he says here makes sense.>> ^shinyblurry:
In context, it isn't cognitive dissonance. He started off by saying that you have to surrender freedom to the truth to get the deeper and richer freedom. Do you understand what he meant by that? For instance, let's say you decided to be an anarchist and did whatever you wanted instead of following the rule of law. Technically, you are exercising a lot more freedom as an anarchist. You are making your own rules, essentially. However, the truth is that you would actually be much less free, because once you gave up following the rules, you would no longer be accepted in the society. So, although you may be more free when you can do whatever you want, you give up that individual freedom to participate in the society, and that gives you a deeper and richer freedom. Truth can both destroy and liberate freedom. What matters is what we were designed for, what truth we have to surrender to to actually be free, which is what the video is talking about.
>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:
holy shit.
"It is true.. that claiming to have the truth is a terrific way to destroy freedom.
And yet, there is a truth that we've gotta have to be free" ?!?!?!
You know what cognitive dissonance is.. right, shiny?

Or, you know, we could find out where their employees shop for them, who their lickspittles are, what cars they have driven for them, where their houses are etc.>> ^brycewi19:

I suppose we just have to wait it out until the Koch brothers pass away (one is 76, the other is 72) before we might be able to budge back against their money the funnel in to extreme conservative politics.

Someone should * promote this. In the meantime I shall *quality.

omfg 3 mins in and we're only on summer glau's intro

Well, yeah, that's essentially what he said. There's no meaning to life apart from what we meaning we give it. Some people find that depressing. Some, like myself, do not. Let's just have a bit of craic!>> ^shinyblurry:

You'll notice he never actually gave a reason why one particular version of reality should be preferred to another. He gave an example of choosing to support gay marriage to create a fair and just society, which of course are value judgments about the ideal way to live. There is no reasoning as to why we should make those judgments in the first place. All he said was, if you realize that we are the final arbiters of right and wrong (which isn't true, but for the sake of argument I'll concede this), "chances are" that you would be more apt to choose gay marriage than not. That is simply another unsubstantiated value judgment, and does not provide a foundation of reasoning to support the conclusion; namely, that we can derive meaning and purpose from telling stories about molecules in motion. That this idea of extracting meaning from cold, dead matter will ever be anything more than a morass of personal preferences arbitrarily defined by a group consensus, the definition being subject to change at any time according to the whims of its members. I advance that if meaning itself is subject to our whims, then there is no actual meaning to anything after all, and the only solution left is nihilism.

*discard

*discard

Yeah, I don't agree with the first video but, if you take it as a given, what he says here makes sense.>> ^shinyblurry:

In context, it isn't cognitive dissonance. He started off by saying that you have to surrender freedom to the truth to get the deeper and richer freedom. Do you understand what he meant by that? For instance, let's say you decided to be an anarchist and did whatever you wanted instead of following the rule of law. Technically, you are exercising a lot more freedom as an anarchist. You are making your own rules, essentially. However, the truth is that you would actually be much less free, because once you gave up following the rules, you would no longer be accepted in the society. So, although you may be more free when you can do whatever you want, you give up that individual freedom to participate in the society, and that gives you a deeper and richer freedom. Truth can both destroy and liberate freedom. What matters is what we were designed for, what truth we have to surrender to to actually be free, which is what the video is talking about.
>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:
holy shit.
"It is true.. that claiming to have the truth is a terrific way to destroy freedom.
And yet, there is a truth that we've gotta have to be free" ?!?!?!
You know what cognitive dissonance is.. right, shiny?

*nsfw !!!! Strip club scene!!!!! I say this whilst at work!!!!

I've gotta know, how on earth did you come across this video?