Comments on "Christmas With a Capital C" and More

I recently viewed the Christian movie Christmas with a Capital C What follows is my comments on it.

I find it ironic that the lead character is played by Ted McGinley, an actor best known for playing gigolo Jefferson D'arcy on Married... With Children. Ted was once on a show boycotted by fundamentalists, and now he stars in a movie that they will love.

The plot of the movie is that two former high school rivals, Mitch Bright (the unbeliever) and Dan Reed (the Christian) butt heads when Mitch moves back into town and brings his evil atheist ideology with him. We learn that Mitch, after graduating from high school, moved to San Francisco (the source of all abonimable liberal evil in America). Mitch is a mean bastard, a liberal, and an atheist. Why, I can't believe he's not also a homosexual!

Mitch seeks to file a lawsuit over some overtly religious Christmas decorations paid for with tax dollars. Mitch has a point there (not on Christmas decorations as such but on overtly religious decorations paid for with tax money), though I personally would never be so bothered by such decorations to file a lawsuit. Mayor Dan Reed is rightly advised that Mitch will win the case, and so he removes the Christmas decorations. The Christians in the town decide that the best way to resolve the conflict is to put up Christmas decorations in privately owned quarters and to "overcome evil with good" and give Mitch Bright a proper and generous welcome to the town. This is a message that I endorse: Yes, Christians, use your freedom of expression when and where it is legal and fair to do so, just as we atheists and everyone else does. And be nice. Represent your faith properly.

Despite that good message being in the film, there also seems to be some scoffing that I found ridiculous. Mayor Dan Reed asks rhetorically if the town is also supposed to have a manorah and a kwanzaa "I don't even know what the symbol is." A comedian featured in the song "Christmas with a Capital C" mockingly says, "I just say happy holidays because you don't believe in Christmas because I don't want to offend you, blah blah blah blah...." as if that were something to laugh about. Ahahahahah! Those people with their tolerance and their inclusiveness, what idiots! The attitude present in these scoffing Christians is remarkably poor, wrong-headed, and hypocritical. They are too arrogant and self-righteous to stop for one second to imagine how people of other faiths, or no faith at all, feel about some things.

How Should Atheists Feel About Christmas?

At one point in the movie the character played by Daniel Baldwin asks rhetorically if the next people Mitch will go after are the ones who say "God Bless You" after you sneeze (he supposes even that would offend an atheist). I'd like to take that and use it as analogy. Though no one knows the origin of that custom for sure, HowStuffWorks reports that "Some people believed that a sneeze causes the soul to escape the body through the nose. Saying 'bless you' would stop the devil from claiming the person's freed soul." No one believes this today, but people still practice the custom of a post-sneeze blessing. Likewise, I think it's completely acceptable to continue Yuletide traditions, even if we know longer endorse the reasons people used to practice them. Little known fact is that the real origin of Christmas is thoroughly pagan. If Christians don't view Christmas as a worship of pagan gods, neither should any atheist think that Christmas is an endorsement of Jesus. It isn't. It was created to celebrate an event in nature, the winter solstice. Regardless of the origins of Christmas, it's fun, and we can have different reasons for liking it than the reasons that people once celebrated it for.

That's my story.

A Critique of Buddhism

You don't see this often. Here.

Skepticon IV

Check out the preview of Skepticon IV here. Nice music, and very exciting. Two of the lectures are already available at Hambone Productions' youtube page.

Skeptic's Christmas List 2011

The End of Christianity An Excellent Collection of essays that effectively destroy Christianity. I've reviewed it here. It's a must have because you won't get through the book without learning something new and interesting.

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True Richard Dawkins' latest book that answers a large number of questions about science. It's an especially great gift for teens and preteens as it is fun and easy to read, with lots of illustrations.

God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales Penn Jilette, the louder half of Penn and Teller, writes a fun and raunchy collection of stories from his life about sex, atheism, and more.

Atheism and Naturalism My book which makes an excellent introduction to atheist thought.

You should download my book Selected Essays. It'll make great reading during all your downtime during the winter. As I've described it:

"Think of the book like a deluxe DVD edition of this blog. It's packed with never-before-seen writings, and what you saw before has often been transformed.

"There's a fun skeptical chapter on why alien theories for the creation of humans, life, and the pyramids are bogus (besides common sense, there are a lot of fun scientific and historical facts that prove it is baloney!). There's a very original and fresh take on the fine-tuning argument. And in the last chapter of the book I show how a song by Jack Black disproves one of the arguments for God's existence!"

And if you need something to watch this holiday season:

Penn & Teller Bullshit: Eighth Season

Christmas with a Capital C Buy a used copy. It's an anti-atheist Christmas movie. It should be good for a laugh.

New essays

Hi everyone,

A while back I began writing two essays that served as responses to Christian essays in the ebook Is Christianity True?

I've uploaded them to google documents:

my response to Richard Gerhardt.

My response to Bob Perry.

Others have also written responses to the ebook, and a handy index of these posts can be found here. The other writers' websites are:

http://www.soulsprawl.com
http://www.foxholeatheism.com
http://www.commonsenseatheism.com

Why Not the Supernatural?

Here is a question that I want to ask all my fellow naturalists, those who believe that only the natural exists. Why is it that there are no supernatural beings? Though it may be the case that none exist, is there a reason that none exist?

I believe there are several possible answers to this question, but I'd like to hear yours. Below are some possibilities I've thought of from my readings in philosophy:

1. Spirits are logically impossible. I think it's fairly well-established that consciousness is really nothing more than an emergent phenomenon from physical stuff. If that's what consciousness is, an emergent physical property, then no non-physical entity could have consciousness. Therefore there could be no mind without a body (a spirit). Richard Carrier has suspicions towards the logical possibility of spirits as well. He writes:

[I]f God has no location, then by definition there is no location at which God exists. And if there is no location at which God exists, then God exists nowhere, which entails that God does not exist. For the proposition "there is nowhere that God exists" is literally synonymous with "God does not exist." From any intelligible definition of being, in order for anything to exist, it must exist somewhere--even if that somewhere is everywhere, or some location other than space.

2. The concept of a spirit is meaningless. This is the position held by most verificationists. They believe that any proposition that does not refer to something that is at least possibly observable is meaningless. A spirit, as a non-physical entity (as defined by believers) means nothing. Of course a statement that means nothing could not rightly be said to be true. Though verificationism is now considered passe amongst most philosophers, it still has notable proponents such as Crispin Wright, Michael Martin, Kai Nielsen, Daniel Dennett, and others.

3. An Indexical understanding of "Real" coupled with conceptual problems with Dualism renders the spiritual unreal. David Kellogg Lewis proposed the idea that the word "real" is an indexical term, and things which we call real are merely those things that we actually or potentially can interact with. Things that are not real are things that we cannot even potentially interact with.

Now remember that as I jump to a seemingly unrelated subject. How can a spirit have any effect on the physical or interact with it in any way if the two have no point of contact (a spirit, being nonphysical, cannot possibly have a point of contact with the physical)? Maybe it can't.

From those two conjectures it follows that spirits cannot be real. To be "real" a spirit has to interact with the world around us in some way. But a spirit cannot interact with the world because there is no point of contact between the two.

Now, I don't take much of the above too seriously. These all seem to me like nothing more than hunches which stand every chance of being wrong. What are your answers?

News

Rational Responders now hosts a link to my book Atheism and Naturalism (check the book ads on the right side of the page). Thanks you guys!

The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond The Grave is now available for kindle. It's a steal at $9.99. If you're interested in the resurrection of Jesus (as mythology or otherwise) you want to own this book.

John Loftus' masterpiece The End of Christianity is also available for the kindle, at just under ten bucks. Again, if you want a brilliant and amazing collection of articles about Christianity, which range from the philosophical to the historical to the anthropological and beyond, you want a copy of this book. You want it sooooo bad.

This coming Tuesday (October 25th) marks the end of my sale for my latest book. If you want to own a copy of Selected Essays for only five dollars this is your last chance!