Heathens of all Kinds

I started rereading some of the old blogs I used to frequent in my Blogger days, namely Stupid Evil Bastard. Les has fun, interesting, and thought-provoking things to say on many things, including great links.

Which is how he introduced me to the site Heathen TV, which contains video clips that about about the insanity of religion and it's more fanatical followers. As quoted from its About page:

HeathenTV serves up videos relating to atheism, religion, science and quackery from around the web. Dedicated to propagating the idea that superstition isn’t that super, it features hand-picked high quality content from the famous and infamous, with a serious skew toward the skeptical.

There are some fantastic debates to listen to here, but today's clip is from Sam Harris debating with a rabbi. I've been hearing about Sam Harris' work lately, so I might try to pick up one of his books (I hear "The End of Faith" is worth reading).

No worries... I'm not turning into an atheist by any means. But I find it interesting that outspoken atheists tend to use similar rhetoric that religious fanatics use. See if you can spot it:

• If you don't believe in our God, you'll go to Hell! You're life will suck with out belief in our God!
• If you believe in God, or make faith too big a part of your life, you're borderline crazy.

The problem is that non-belief in God flexes the same intellectual muscle as belief in God, since both are Beliefs. Neither practionner is armed with any kind of knowledge, so they structure their beliefs around what speaks true to them. This type of thinking drives atheists crazy.

And just like any other set of beliefs (or non-beliefs), you can become fanatical about them. I like listening to debates or reading articles by learned people, atheists or not, but they just lose me when they turn their arguments outward to say "and if you don't come to the same conclusions as I do, you're stupid/crazy/inferior".