Friday, Oct 03, 2008

Vocab & Omri Have a Real-Life Talk with Some Arizona Atheists [09.21.08]

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Download this episode (118 min)
On the night of Sunday, September 21st, 2008 in Phoenix, Arizona, Vocab and Backpack Truth affiliate Omri Miles had a 2-hour conversation with Shannon M. Singleton (organizer of The Phoenix Atheists Meetup Group) and Brad (host of "ApostAZ.org", an atheistic Podcast) on belief or non-belief in God and the philosophical implications of that.

As I listened to the show, there are times where I talked too long or too much and I feel bad for that. The negative effects were "amplified" because my microphone volume was louder than everyone else's ... I think I talked to close to the mic as well. I am still learning how to do this. Please bear with me, as I hope to get better in every manner as I do this type of thing.

Either way, please listen to the audio and tell us what you think of this conversation ...

EPISODE #11 ... (kinda')

Posted by Vocab Malone and Tommyboy at 4:13 AM |   

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6 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Heya. This is Patrick who you talked for some time with this Friday, downtown. Overall, I enjoyed this show (and will be listening to your show tonight). The main thing that bugged me is the set of examples you used as atheistic models of government.

Communist nations and dicatorships are terribly poor examples of "atheistic government" because any government that enforces a religious belief, or explicit disbelief is a *theocracy*. Furthermore, Cuba, Soviet Russia, etc., are not even comparable to "Christian governments" in the modern world because such governments do not enforce a national religion.

To give you an example of why atheism is a fine candidate for a dictatorship's state religion, pretend you are Joseph Stalin. You are building an empire, and your empire needs to have a strong sense of unity and loyalty to the state. In order to do this, you must have one state "religion". At the same time, you want to be the absolute highest power in your people's mind. The obvious solution: enforce atheism throughout the state and build a cult of personality around yourself.

The kind of "atheistic government" that is comparable to modern "Christian nations" is simply a free government governing a population that consists primarily of atheists.

10/5/2008 4:53 PM
Vocab Malone and Tommyboy said...

Patrick C. said... "Communist nations and dicatorships are terribly poor examples of 'atheistic government' ... "

That's the whole point!
=)

Patrick C. said... "atheism is a fine candidate for a dictatorship's state religion..."

Yup ...

Patrick C. said... "you must have one state 'religion'. ... you want to be the absolute highest power in your people's mind. ... enforce atheism throughout the state and build a cult of personality around yourself."

So Stalin viewed atheism as a religion, then?

Patrick C. said... "The kind of "atheistic government" that is comparable to modern "Christian nations" is simply a free government governing a population that consists primarily of atheists."

Nope, that is a secular government (not an atheistic governement), like the U.S. We just "happen" to have a lot of Christians here.

VM

10/6/2008 4:11 PM
Anonymous said...

Stalin may or may not have viewed atheism as a religion, but he absolutely used it as one More accurately, he viewed and used it as an important portion of a religion of sorts: the Cult of Stalin, so to speak. That is, his enforced state religion was this: "There is no God [there is only the glory of communism and Stalin, our dear leader]. Anyone who holds on to such a belief is simply a drag upon society [and upon the incredible progress of communism that Stalin is here to bring]."

As for the definition of an atheistic government, our argument has simply broken down into semantics. Any nation-state that enforces or disallows religious disbelief is nothing I would advocate.

10/6/2008 10:23 PM
Vocab Malone and Tommyboy said...

Patrick C. said ... "Stalin may or may not have viewed atheism as a religion, but he absolutely used it as one More accurately, he viewed and used it as an important portion of a religion of sorts: the Cult of Stalin, so to speak."

Your view point sounds uncannily similar to Sam Harris' on this topic ... hmmm.

Either way, I think it's a cop-out of sorts but of course I don't think you or my other "a" word friends advocate this type of gov't per se.

Of course I'm gonna look around the world the past 100 years and say "OK, here are all the governments that officially labeled themselves as atheistic and look at the outcome" ...

vm

10/7/2008 1:59 AM
Anonymous said...

Any government that tells its people how they are allowed to think, whether that's to think as atheists, to think as Protestants, or to think as Catholics, has the same problems. Correlation, as I'm sure you've heard a hundred times, may not indicate causation.

10/7/2008 6:15 PM
Vocab Malone and Tommyboy said...

Patrick ...

I look forward to coming to your group @ Ironwood H.S. soon!

Vocab

10/20/2008 5:46 PM