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Chatting Atheism

Cosmic Variance
By Sean Carroll
Aug 19, 2012 6:27 PMNov 19, 2019 9:15 PM

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I took part in a conversation about contemporary atheism, which appeared on The Point, which is a web series spin-off of The Young Turks, which itself is both a web series and a show broadcast on Current TV. (Got all that?) My co-panelists were Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society and Edward Falzon, author of the (satirical!) book Being Gay is Disgusting, and it was hosted by Cara Santa Maria, science correspondent for the Huffington Post. [embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3lwG4MytSI[/embed] The format of the show is that we hear three very brief pre-recorded "points," to which the panelists then respond. In this case, all the points and all the panelists were already confirmed atheists, so we could put aside for the moment the endless arguments about whether God exists and focus on the very interesting questions of what to do about the fact that he doesn't. The points we heard were from James Randi, PZ Myers, and AJ Johnson of American Atheists. I wasn't familiar with AJ before this event, but her video was very strong; I think (hope) we'll be hearing a lot more from her in the future. It was a great talk, although it did reinforce my conviction that while we atheists are mostly right on the metaphysics, we need to really raise our game when it comes to epistemology and metaethics.

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