Richmond Area Free Thinkers Society

The other day I was browsing Kerasotes’ website and I noticed that the movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” was featured prominently in the “Coming Soon” section, receiving billing above even the next Chronicles of Narnia movie.

This was hardly the first exposure to this movie that I have had. I’ve been following it’s progress through other blogs and websites for a while now. But it suddenly made it a lot more real, and close to home. Would we really be getting Expelled shown here in Richmond?

The synopsis of the movie is this: Intelligent Design is the position that everything we see around us in the natural world must have been the product, at some level, by an unidentified supernatural designer, and that traditional solely-naturalistic explanations are insufficient to explain the complexity we see around us. Those individuals who support Intelligent Design are constantly being suppressed by the proponents of “Darwinism” (Stein’s word for “Evolution / Naturalistic worldview”). Darwinism is also “necessary, but not sufficient,” in the words of David Berlinski, for the horrible atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich.

But of course, this movie really isn’t a documentary so much as a propaganda film. With recent reviews done by Michael Shermer & John Rennie of Scientific American, and a very fresh Copyright Infringement lawsuit pending, the contents of the movie are almost moot compared to the details surrounding it. (Read More »)

We Americans are blessed in that we are participants in the greatest experiment in democratic living ever to exist on planet earth.  Citizenship in this marvelous venture comes with a cost.  That cost is that we are periodically obligated to take part in our democracy by voting.  Beyond simply voting, however, we have a duty to think critically about the issues on which we vote.  In our world of instant communication, where media are motivated by the bottom line rather than objectivity, and where political candidates are managed by experts with Machiavellian motivations, critical thinking is no easy task.

Critical thinking is the process of analyzing claims while maintaining intellectual humility and fair-mindedness.  This can be done in three steps:

Step one

Make sure the claim is clear and unambiguous.  One of the tricks of propagandists and political persuaders is to design a claim which cannot be pinned down.  When this happens, critical thinkers must determine just what claim is being made.  Exactly what is the candidate claiming?  Without a specific claim, no critical analysis can be made. (Read More »)

One essential element of a democracy is that when people honestly disagree on how to deal with the political and social issues they face, they feel free to openly express their disagreement. In order to make a democracy work, people must be both willing and able to argue their views in a market place of ideas and allow citizens to sort the good ideas from the poor ones.

In our contemporary culture, however, the idea of argument has taken on negative connotations. We think of it as an unpleasant activity. We are admonished not to bring up the topics of politics or religion, because these subjects often produce unpleasantness. We believe that arguments are toxic and destructive of relationships. We view arguments in military terms, where one side is vanquished. Arguments are seen as damaging to the self-esteem of the “loser.” Losers of arguments may feel hurt and angry, because they perceive their loss as a personal humiliation. (Read More »)

This story has been all over the news for the past two days. A young girl, 11 years old, has died because her parents chose to pray rather than take her to the hospital. She ultimately died of ketoacidosis (diabetes), and her death would have easily been prevented by a treatment of insulin and basic medical care. The girl’s family “believe in the Bible and that healing comes from God, but that they do not belong to an organized religion or faith, are not fanatics and have nothing against doctors.”

The controversy comes from their choices once they noticed something was wrong:

“We just noticed a tiredness within the past two weeks,” she said Wednesday. “And then just the day before and that day (she died), it suddenly just went to a more serious situation. We stayed fast in prayer then. We believed that she would recover. We saw signs that to us, it looked like she was recovering.”

The question, then, is whether or not it is bad parenting to deny / avoid medical care when something is clearly not right.

(More discussion after the jump) (Read More »)