Thursday, September 20, 2018

Philosophy Rookie

I’ve always felt like a rookie when it comes to philosophy.
I grew up in a blue collar home where work was done to put food on the table and buy things. I stood out from my environment because I was interested in thinking about the reasons why we do things on a bit deeper level, but learning about things in that way was frowned on. “We do things because we have to”, was always the lesson I was given. Thinking deeper, philosophy, was a waste of time. Something that people did when they couldn’t do something useful. That lesson was drilled into me from a pretty young age and it’s something I still hear from my dad pretty regularly.
I could never shake the need to know more though. I started learning about philosophy from friends who lived somewhat less sheltered lives than I did. We shared books about metaphysical ideas that they seemed to understand far more than I did. So I would pretend I understood. I’d listen to them wax on about the illusion of reality and whether god was real or not and I loved it. I didn’t always get it but just hearing the ideas expressed was something that brought me joy. Later, one of those friends went on to study philosophy in university and I sort of tagged along. He would talk about what he was learning while we smoked weed and got drunk and I felt like I was a more knowledgeable person when he was talking. It became a thing that we did. We talked about philosophy because we had the time. We compared ourselves to Socrates and Plato and thought of ourselves as brilliant. Really it was my friend who was brilliant.
Eventually my lack of education caught up with me, so I had to move back to my hometown and work for my dad. Back to the blue collar life where we worked and didn’t worry about the reasons behind our actions. Motivations were for other people to examine and there wasn’t time for questioning existence. There’s something nice about simplicity like that. You work to eat, have fun when there’s time, and deal with problems as they come. Still, philosophy would never quite leave me alone. I still spent my downtime thinking and reading and learning.
I later started a family. I became a blue collar dad, like my own but with a slight twist. I still loved philosophy and despite a lack of education I tried like hell to read it and understand as much as I could. Luckily, I reconnected with some friends from my younger days. A university educated philosopher as a best friend can help you go a long way to understanding concepts and when looking for resources. I was introduced to more and more philosophers and their writings and while some ideas seemed to be blatantly false, others were astonishing and brilliant. This was around when I first discovered podcasts. In an audio format that I could carry in my pocket at work I could listen to excerpts from pop culture and philosophy books, lectures from philosophers who were current, and I could even take mini courses on philosophy. Still my dad said I was wasting my time and still I felt like a rookie with so little understanding and so much to learn, but I loved it.
When I discovered that there was an online atheist community with a love of learning and a passion for science and philosophy I was sucked in very quickly. I was around 30 and I had spent my life thinking that I didn’t know much and not really understanding as much as I wanted to but this explosion of information that was in front of me and a community that validated my identity as well as my love of learning gave me confidence I didn’t know I could have.
By the time I was 35 I was a separated, father of two who was on his own again for the first time in a decade and I needed something else. An outlet that I could focus on and that would help me use some of the things I had learned over the years. I was listening to an atheist podcast after a night out with friends and it occurred to me, “We should start a podcast”. By we I meant my old friends who would sit and drink and talk philosophy, politics, and science for hours on end. Why couldn’t we record that and put it on the internet? Hell, we were brilliant, and people deserved to hear how brilliant we were. That was the origin of The Brainstorm Podcast, a show that puts a group of folks into a room together and records it. Even from the beginning we talked about various philosophical topics from morality, to meaning, metaphysics, to epistemology, to political philosophy, to the value and meaning of postmodernism, and more.
The show is now made up of a few kinds of shows from a current events type show that breaks down topics with a bent towards critical thinking and skepticism, to an interview show that tries to spread the message of critical thinking and compassion, to a round table discussion on the controversial topics of the day. Every single episode is an exercise in critical thinking and philosophy. Though the crew has changed over the years. Brainstorm has been going for almost 5 years and has over 200 episodes published, and a lot of the original crew have gone their separate ways. We lost a philosopher and we gained a physicist. We lost an agricultural scientist and we gained a political scientist.
Philosophy and the practice of logic and critical thinking is key to being a skeptic alongside epistemic humility and a desire to self reflect. That’s what Brainstorm is about, even while we spend our time examining different topics along the way. Our tagline is “The Truth Matters”, and that seems to hold true even more in a time when fake news is an epidemic, and pseudoscience and science denial is promoted by the leaders of a major nation.
After all I’ve learned and all I’ve done I still feel like a rookie when it comes to philosophy, but I think that’s kind of the point. 

Sunday, November 19, 2017

Defending the atheist community

So, I spend a lot of time criticizing the atheist and skeptic community. I know that a lot of people consider it to be multiple communities but usually when I discuss it I talk about it as one group. I've done shows discussing sexual harassment and the apologists for it in atheist and skeptic circles. I've posted about racism and sexism in our community and I've criticized the vehement anti-Muslim bigotry that goes on in atheist circles. These are all very big problems and they need to be addressed and dealt with in the same way that any community might deal with them. ...but that we can't lose sight of the good that comes from atheist and skeptic activism around the world.

I'm hoping that this doesn't come across as a #notallatheists type rant. I want to ignore the bullshit skepticism toward social movements that seems to be taking hold in North American skepticism and on Youtube and focus on the social activism that is being done in the name of secularism.

Here are a few groups that are doing positive work.

Love or hate Richard Dawkins, he is not the only person who works for the Richard Dawkins foundation. The Dawkins foundation is an organization that's mission is to spread scientific literacy and secularism. They head up movements like the Openly Secular campaign, The Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science, and The Subtitles project. Openly Secular intends to eliminate discrimination and increase acceptance by getting secular people – including atheists, freethinkers, agnostics, humanists and nonreligious people – to be open about their beliefs. The Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science is a resource for middle school teachers to get the tools they need to teach evolution and answer its critics. The Subtitles Project is a project meant to add subtitles to science videos on the internet in different languages so that people from all over the world can learn from them.

Then there's The Clergy Project. I recently interviewed Leslie Mair regarding her documentary film on this organization. The Clergy project helps leaders of religious organizations who no longer believe to cope with the conflicts that come from being a non believer who's well being and income rely on being a religious leader. They also help people who have chosen to leave their jobs as religious leaders and find their way as secular people.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation in the US is an organization that promotes the separation of church and state and actively fights battles in court on that front. They also provide educational content and support for people who are facing discrimination based on religious privilege

American Atheists is very similar and is effective in other ways. The head of American Atheists is David Silverman who has been on Fox news a number of times defending atheist and atheism against the views of the religious right.

The Canadian Secular Alliance does some similar work here in Canada and is working towards changing our current school systems from a Catholic system and Public system in to one school system for all students.

There are great support groups too. Recovering from Religion is a group that is solely dedicated to supporting people who have left religion or who have doubts about their religion. There's Grief Beyond Belief, whose whole purpose is to support people who have lost loved ones but don't have religious faith to help them through the grieving process. There's the Secular Therapy Project that is meant to connect people who need therapy or counselling with secular therapists who won't push religion onto clients.

That's just a few of the organizations that are doing positive work.

There are also a whole host of atheist and skeptic podcasts and Youtubers that are doing positive work and provide supportive content to help skeptics and atheists deal with in a world that is overwhelmingly religious and unskeptical. Just to list a few that are doing great content, The Scathing Atheist (the crew on that do multiple shows), Cognitive Dissonance, Serious Inquiries Only, The Utah Outcasts, No Religion Required, The Thinking Atheist. for Youtubers there's Kristi Winters, Aron Ra, Matt Dillahunty, Darkmatter2525, Steve Shives, Solder of Science and a ton more.

There are great blogs too. The Friendly Atheist by Hemant Mehta, The Graffiti Wall by Alix Jules, pretty much anything written by Jessica Xiao, Sincere Kirabo, Trav Mamone, or Stephanie Zvan.

My point is that there are great people and great organizations doing great things in the atheist community and as a whole we pretty much have the separation of church and state thing figured out. We don't always agree on other stuff but those are the growing pains of any group and I think that there is still hope that we can do some great stuff in ours.

Sorry to everyone I didn't list. I value you all and the work that you do but I just wrote the names that popped into my head at the time of this writing.

Saturday, November 18, 2017

Post number 2

Some people can write something once a month or twice a month and it's pure gold. Everything they say is amazing and all the thoughtfulness and research they put into thing is obvious even if you disagree with the things they say. This doesn't just go for writing but for all kinds of content creation. Some of my favorite youtubers and podcasters don't put out content on a weekly basis and the stuff they produce is outstanding.

That's not how I work. I have a weird need to put out content on an almost constant basis. Some of it is good, some great, and some of it is way less than good. For instance, my writing. I used to be not bad at writing and I put out semi regular content back when this blog was called something else and before I deleted everything because I disagreed with nearly all of it. I'm sure that you can find archives of it somewhere. As they say, nothing on the internet is ever truly gone. The content isn't something that I worry about. My point is that even back when my content was what I would now consider garbage, I felt a need to put something out into the world on a very regular basis.

I am only moderately creative. Many people have large imaginations and can expound on a particular subject for many pages. That's not me, either. I have very specific ideas and I'm pretty decent at getting them going. I've often considered myself more of a doer than a planner or thinker. Some of those things go together sometimes. I plan out my podcast every two weeks and then I carry out that plan but my ideas rarely go beyond something that I can personally do or something that I can work with my immediate circle of friends and family to accomplish.

The one major exception to this was the conference that I planned (with much help) and executed in 2016. I was a one off, random idea that we just sort of ran with. Now, however, knowing the various potential roadblocks and stall points that one can face with a conference I'm stagnating and having a lot of difficulty planning and executing another one. There are a lot more people involved this time around too and we don't have a wealthy benefactor helping to fund us like we did last time. I've said it before that I'd take the financial risk if I think the community wants another conference in Saskatchewan but I'm simply unable to do it with my current status.

That said, I'm not entirely sure the community wants another conference. The social justice split seems a death knell for any real success in conference organizing unless you have a populace that is quite a bit higher than we have here. Our success would rely on people being willing to travel. This is is unlikely because of the temper tantrum that many people seem to have regarding social justice. To be clear, I'm on the side of social justice and I think that skeptics who interject their views on it without accepting consensus views from sociology, social psychology, and political science are on the wrong side, but that's not what I mean when I say temper tantrums.

I did an interview with a person with whom I disagree. I thought it went fine. In my podcast commentary, I did my best to fact check the claims they made. I spoke about points of disagreement and I made it very clear that I just disagreed with them and still valued them as a person. They chose to take that as a personal attack and they unfriended me. I proceeded to block them because even as they were unfriending me they decided they needed to get the last word in and insult me in an angry message that doubled down on our disagreements and turned things personal. This was a person who just a short time earlier told me that the reason they couldn't communicate with "sjws" was because they took everything so personally. This is the kind of temper tantrum I mean.

This is the kind of temper tantrum that says, "I won't change and you can't make me. If you try to convince me I'm wrong I will insult you and then abandon you". This is what I see from people regarding social justice. They've been aptly named, Status Quo Warriors. Frankly, I don't want to have a conference with people like this attending. People who argue against identity politics without realizing that they are always engaging in them. People who ignore consensus views among experts whenever it suits them. People who believe that the world cannot get better and that we shouldn't even try to change it.

How do you even negotiate with people who don't see any injustice in the world besides the injustice that affects them?

I hope that we can get enough support from our community to get our next conference off the ground but if we can't then I think it's because of the anti-social justice sentiment and their temper tantrums.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

writing for practice

Writing is hard. I often find myself sitting in front of the computer thinking of things to write but when I start to put words on the screen the thoughts magically disappear. I can take a break but when I come back, I can't seem to pick up where I left off. The train has left the station and I wasn't on it.

This blog will be my attempt to get better at this thing called writing. I'm going to commit to writing at least one thing per week and hopefully more. I may bare my soul or I may type out the most meaningless drivel every written. Either way, my goal isn't to be profound or insightful. Not yet anyway. Right now my goal is to write and to get better at putting words on "paper".

It's Tuesday morning and I found myself logging into Blogger with the intent to write something but not knowing what to write about. It's a bit frustrating to sit in front of the computer and have no semblance of an idea. I'm thinking, "I'd better get something down", I have to got the gym and get groceries. I have an interview for one of my podcasts today at 2 so I have a limited time to do this.

Of course there's some delays. First a pop up shows up on the screen telling me that I should buy a new domain name. "That's a great idea", I thought, sure that the payment I made on my credit card would have gone through after 3 days. It didn't. I also need to renew the domain for my podcast website but with no room on my credit cards that is rather difficult. Which of course brings me to my complaint for the day.

Why aren't all electronic transactions instant? Or at least, why do they observe stat holidays? It's not like a person needs the extra day off so they can approve all the electronic transactions that banks deal with. This isn't a matter of labor. It seems like it's purely a matter of control and essentially, banks are assholes.

Some friends have pointed out that it's likely a remnant from the old ways of doing things and it seems like this link from a friend speaks to that. 
Banking, despite the automatic nature of it, is very much still attached to the original hours of operation. That means that a day off for a stat holiday shuts down operations. It's honestly just fucking ridiculous, and very frustrating.

Beyond that things are going pretty swell today. I have an interview with Chris Reed later today and I'm in the process of setting up a time to meet with a therapist/counselor. I'm quite looking forward to that.

I think I'd better work on some other stuff now though so that's all I'll write for today. Have a good one to anyone who happens to read this.