and ... here we see.. the Attenborough , Taken outside of its normal Environment.. , in what can only be described as remarkable footage..

>> ^burdturgler:
The question in the beginning seems to be "Are you a religious man?" (when considering the wonders of nature etc). He answers "no". She then asks if it (again his experience with nature) has any philosophical meaning to him

You are wrong. She first asks him: "are you a religious man?" and when Attenborough answers "no", she follows that up with "it doesn't have any philosophical implications for you?" not "does it have any philosophical impications for you?"

When Attenborough says "Well, it does have philosophical implications, and you haven't asked me that" he is correct: The interviewer implied that since Attenborough doesn't believe in God, then he has no philosophical views on nature.

i hate US stile nature doc voice overs
you guys need a david attenborough

>> ^burdturgler:
No one brought it up .. he specifically went out of his way .. in fact he said .. "it doesn't have particularly Christian" implications.

When you are having a conversation with someone and you ask them a question like "how did you like the movie?", it is implied that you want their opinions on the movie. In fact, it is a sign of mental illness if you ask someone a question and they only respond literally with one word answers and doesn't respond further.

ie: "did you like the movie?" "yes. <silence>"

The interviewer just asked Attenborough: "Are you religious". Of course Attenborough is expected to expand upon it. It's not "are you religious?" "no" "Great lets move on then".

Your claims that Attenborough went out of his way to bring up the subject of Christianity to attack it is way off base.

>> ^burdturgler:
But he reveals that he has a particular problem with Christianity even though it was never specifically brought up.

Christianity was brought up, when the interviewer asked if he was a religious man. When you talk to a prominent British naturalist about religion, it is not much of a stretch to think that you are talking about Christianity, considering the British, his core audience, are predominantly Christian.

If the question is "How does your extensive background in observing nature impact your philosophical view of the world?" and the answer begins with "Well, I don't like Christianity".

Well, this is an excellent display of the straw-man logical fallacy. Attenborough didn't say he disliked Christianity; He said he doesn't find the idea compatible.

It is quite interesting that you misconstrue his statements as an attack on Christianity and in the process reveal your own hatred and bias against atheists.

>> ^ctrlaltbleach:

One thing that jumps out at me here in your comment is the line The only problem I have with the atheists on this site is the assumption that people who believe there may be a god are crazy or idiots for thinking that way...

Wouldn't you believe that somebody who believed in Zeus was crazy? How about somebody who believed in fire breathing dragons? Unicorns? If you met anybody who believed in these things you'd think that there's something very very wrong with them. What makes Christianity so different? The amount of people that believe it? Does that make it more valid? You know up to a certain point, everybody in the world thought the earth was fucking flat? Does that make it true, too?

Now that we have things to explain what we once filed under "god's doing" why are people still clinging on to this ridiculous fucking fairy tale?

>> ^burdturgler:
But that's not how it went. Honestly, I will try to be fair here and say it's impossible for either one of us to truly know what what was in either of their heads during these moments of the interview .. so I would hope that you could at least understand my side of this particular part of the argument. For me, she asked 2 questions. For you she asked one. I see where she was going .. trying to ask questions to get him to tell us about the deeper meaning behind his important work (if there was one). Common themes for this are religion and philosophy. It was really a gift for him to enlighten us all about what philosophical views he might have on the protection of animals .. the importance of wildlife preservation, man's connectivity with nature .. etc ..
Instead it became what it is here. So maybe there is some mental illness that makes him react angrily towards Christianity instead of promoting his own cause and letting us understand the philosophy that drove him to be a man who studied nature and all it's wonder. Instead we hear about how God created a worm to eat a kids eye. Where did that come from? Does that make sense to you in the context of all of this?


Are you insane? It's called conversation. She asked him if he was a religious man. He said no. She asked if it had philosophical implications on him. Philosophy could be anything, but since the preceding question was about religion and David seemed interested in talking about it, he started with that philosophic impact. He says he gets mailings from creationists that focus on the splendor and diversity, as if God created nature for humans entertainment and study. I know these kinds of people, they've probably said everything to him while failing to address the many horrific and indiscriminate parts of nature that adversely affect us for no apparent reason. Giving the worm that eats eyeballs as an example is just as good as any. For the type of God these people believe in, it is within God's power to eliminate these sources of human suffering and yet he chooses not to. Why does that worm have to exist? Why not create another butterfly instead? Why not except humanity from viruses and disease? For all your fevered ranting and psychoanalysis, you aren't explaining anything.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
I applaud any person willing to swim against the tide of mindless "Oooh! Oooh! Me too!"-ism that goes on here in the sift. Well done Mr. BurdT. While I'm not a fan of profanity or inflammatory language, I certainly support those who spike the wheels of atheist groupthink.
This discussion essentially follows the traditional fallacious nature of most atheist vs. God debates. The atheist premise is that if God existed, he would prevent human suffering. Or - phrased a different way - God must not exist otherwise he would not allow people to suffer. Or - a different way - "Hahaha your 'loving' Christian God is really a cruel sadist because he allows & creates suffering."
This is the fundamental flaw in the atheist position. The existence of suffering does not mean that God created the suffering or that he enjoys it. It displays a fundamental lack of understanding about the very basic nature of what God is, and what he wants.


that has GOT to be the worst straw man i have ever SEEN!
you set up the "atheist argument" and then say its a fundamental flaw?
weak my friend..very VERY weak.
show me this understanding of god that you espouse.what is this fundamental understanding that you so obtusely speak of?and this lack thereof?
what does "HE" want?
is it from scripture?which version?publishing date?language?gospels?apocryphal or canonized?greek orthodox or KJV?
i have an entire bookshelf,let me know which i should pull out.

while i can admire BT for standing up for his beliefs,potty mouth aside (bad form BT),i cannot and will not let such a poorly flawed argument slip past and not call you out on it.
mr pennypacker...you sir..are full of cow cookies.

Some of you are failing to parse the interviewer's questions.

Q: "...Are you a religious man?"
A: "No"
Q: "So it does not have any philosophical implications for you." (I think this is a stupid leading "question" which shows her misunderstanding of the previous exchange and makes the keen observer suspect she's spent too much time in right wing Sunday school and not enough in a real school.)

A: "Well it does have philosophical implications, but they [don't push me towards religion]." To paraphrase, if there were a benevolent god who created all species, he would not have created terrible species of parasites which live only by torturing innocent people.

This video contains David Attenborough's statement of why he is not a christian; This video conveys malice toward none. Conflating it with hate speech against Christians is utter nonsense.

>> ^bluecliff:
A nice protestant free-for-all. Capitalist to the core.
Your greatest gift, Stephen, was and for ever shall be poetry. It's amazing that such a boringly imperialistic, and philosophically lukewarm people (except Hume and Hobbes) could produce the likes of... well the list is too long (but beats any other nation in Europe)


The UK is about as imperialist as it is religious. The United States has more resemblance to our Red Coat past than GB does now. Always seemed like a bizarre irony that the Founding Fathers might be more at home in modern day Britain.

I think the "Intelligentsia" are a much more dominant class in the UK which may stem from the relatively high proportion of people going through higher education and University. As a result our nation is characterised by sceptics and cynics. We export them to be judges on Talent Shows, everybody needs at least one Brit on their panel now. Our television is full of them too, mostly thanks to the leftist BBC, our comedians poke holes in every minutiae of society and politics, we must have THE monopoly on investigative journalism and Nature documentaries were invented by Attenborough. So yeah, we end up giving a lot of empirical minds with eloquent voices a spotlight while in other countries they struggle to be heard. Mythbusters had to disguise its scientific methodology in explosions.

Loved this movie. The remake will be to the original what Oprah is to David Attenborough.

The audio should be replaced by a narration from David Attenborough.

Right after Jackass came out, a couple of friends-of-a-friend decided to stage their own version of the movie -- with a hornet's nest. They found the thing hanging from a tree at the edge of a field and it was not remotely on the small size. Also, this was in late August and the queen had already flown away, leaving the drones to slowly starve to death. Thus, the enormous number of stripey-stripey sting-stings were already good 'n' pissed-off.

They were about to get moreso.

So chowderhead A and chowderhead B have a brilliant plan: they're going to shoot this enormous ball full of astoundingly-irate murderous insects with a shotgun while they're filming it. If you're hearing banjos playing and luke-warm cheap beers being cracked open, you're about in the right frame of mind.

Places, everybody!

The stage is set: on one end, at what's decided to be "minimum safe distance", are our erstwhile David Attenborough/Jonny Knoxville knock-offs. At a decidedly NOT minimum safe distance away is the arthropod version of the T'sar Bomba. All we're missing now is a Mossberg, enough idiocy to think this can end any way but badly, and a camera. With far too much alacrity for what's about to happen, all three are provided.

Aaaaaand, ACTION!

* BOOOM! *

At first, surprisingly, nothing happens. This period of stasis lasts roughly a picosecond. Then, unsurprisingly, things start to happen and they happen far more quickly than the Chuckle Brothers planned on. This plays out in three acts:

Act 1: "Hey, uh, why is the nest still there?"
Act 2: "Uh-oh..."
Act 3: "FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!"

Hubris takes many forms, and schadenfreude takes twice as many, but both combined were statistically zero compared to the number of hornets involved in this fiasco. Had the two Mensa escapees who irked said hornets thought this thing through -- stop laughing -- perhaps they would have arrived at the conclusion that 1. a shotgun slug is not the preferred load-out when dealing with a ball made out of wasp puke and 2. being the only two things visible within a 20 mile radius of the ball made out of wasp puke pretty much negates the mystery of who the hornets are going to sting the ever-loving fuck out of.

With their plans in ruins and the nest not, our heroes decide to quit the field. This is the first smart thing they've done since looking at that big ball of wasps and deciding it was redolent with untapped hilarity. The hornets are having none of this white flag nonsense, however, and they decide to quit screwing around and really inflict some pain. It's a quarter mile back to the car and the hornets are going to make them pay for every inch of it.

The final score:
Hornet losses: meh, they were all going to die in a few weeks anyway.
The chucklenuts: 23 stings, a dropped shotgun, and three minutes of footage that they took in the pre-YouTube era and thus is lost to time.

Moral:
Hornets are not toys.

I can though *promote.

It's easy to be skeptical, as it all seems too good to be true... but Attenborough, that's some serious cred having him weigh in.

So... I guess we can say "Suck it creationists"

>> ^burdturgler:
Last time you saw a decent video depicting Christianity or any religion in a positive light in the top 15?

How about right now? That recent enough for you?

Seriously, burdy, it seems to me you're venting frustration for something else here. This is a brief excerpt from an interview ffs.