Movie Friday: The Job Interview

A reader has started her own blog, and one of her first posts features what I think is quite an interesting and funny video:

There are a couple of things you should know about a video like this. First, it is an abstraction of several actual experiences, somewhat punched up and stitched together to make a point. I’m somewhat in doubt that anyone has had a single job interview in which all of these things have happened. However, I can avow from personal experience that I’ve been on the receiving end of every single one of those comments.

Of course it’s not simply just mindless entertainment – imagine having to deal with questions like this every day, every time you do anything that doesn’t fit with the stereotype. When that stereotype is a negative one, it disincentivizes people from pursuing anything that puts them constantly in a position of having to defend themselves from such stupidity. There’s a lot of tearing down that happens within the community as well, and that’s certainly a problem that must be addressed. It’s fun, however, to watch the interviewer stumble all over his words, knowing he said something stupid but not knowing how to extricate himself. It is partially for this reason that I write about stuff like this – to give people some insight and vocabulary on how to navigate situations like these.

For the record, while I wouldn’t personally respond to a situation like this in the way that Marcus does, I can certainly appreciate his reasons for doing so.

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Movie Friday: Protect Yourself with Censorship

While Wednesday’s article wasn’t really about free speech, it did touch on an important aspect of it – the idea that censorship can protect us against ideas we don’t like to hear. After all, the reason for censoring Huckleberry Finn is, at least in part, to shield people from having to hear words that make them uncomfortable. I’ve laid out my stance on censorship quite vociferously before, but suffice it to say I am firmly against it, even when it is done to accomplish goals that I would otherwise applaud.

But since it’s movie Friday, I thought I’d let you enjoy a much more light-hearted response to the idea of censorship:

There is a whole series of these, each of which is quite hilarious. I also like the way the author responds to comments on the videos in character. While there are some great ones to choose from, this one tickled me in a way that I usually have to pay extra for:

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Movie Friday: Imaginary Friends

A while back I wondered aloud at the complete lack of self-awareness and sense of irony demonstrated by religious people – consistently using arguments that refute their own position, all the while blissfully unaware of their hypocrisy. It’s funny, but oftentimes utterly depressing – sometimes these cognitive dissonances are so slippery that logic just slides right off.

For a great example of this, let’s talk to Fr. Jonathan Morris of Fox News:

Now I know you caught the punchline at the end, but let’s back up a bit first.

First, a “study” says that people who pray do better than those who don’t, and a completely reasonable mechanism is proposed. The hypothesized mechanism seems to be supported by the fact that it doesn’t matter who or what you pray to, the effect size is similar. This is exactly what you’d expect to see if the effect came from the human mind rather than from a supernatural source.

And then Fr. Morris gets his hands on it and says “If God really does exist, there’s going to be feedback.” So is there feedback, Fr. Morris? “Well of course these studies aren’t going to show that.” Why wouldn’t they show that? People who pray to the proper god will have better outcomes than people who pray to a heathen god, or who pray to a stick (which, of course, they don’t).

And then there’s the delicious bit of irony at the very end, where Fr. Morris rightly identifies belief in an imaginary friend as a product of a diseased mind. It is here (and only here) that I think he and I might find some common ground.

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Movie Friday: Merry Christmas!

There is, underneath all the eye-rolling stupidity, a point to the annual debate in the atheist community about the celebration of Christmas. Yes, it has become so mainstream as to have its religious significance diluted. Yes, it is so pagan in its celebration as to strip it almost entirely of any overt Christianity. Yes, it can be (and has been) rebranded as a holiday celebrating humankind’s ability to be at its best in the way it treats other humans, regardless of any person’s beliefs about a supernatural force.

However, the celebration of Christmas does reinforce the false equation of Christianity with goodness – as though Christianity is a moral system (it isn’t) or that Christians are better people (they aren’t). Christianity may offer opinions on good and evil, but can claim no monopoly of either understanding or execution when it comes to questions of morality. However, thanks to centuries of religious domination, we in the west subconsciously equate Christianity with righteousness (“it’s the Christian thing to do”, “we’re God-fearing people”, “WWJD”).

Celebrating Christmas, no matter how secularly we try to do it, requires the inclusion of Christmas songs. Some of them are simple winter ditties (Frosty the Snowman, Winter Wonderland, Jingle Bells), others are secular (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas), and a great many are explicitly religious (O Holy Night, Away in a Manger, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing). By flipping through those messages interchangeably, we prop up the notion that Christmas is explicitly religious, which in turn equates all the virtues of Christmas with the religious celebration.

Luckily, there’s guys like Patton Oswald who ask us to maybe think about things just a little harder:

Whether you’re celebrating a secular, egg-nog-filled Yule or a Jesus-heavy Christ-mas, I hope you enjoy yourself. Remember, I’m off my vacation starting the first weekend after the New Year, and I look forward to seeing you all in 2011.

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Movie Friday: Crommunist is on vacation

I started my vacation on Tuesday, and since I’m running around Toronto getting into all kinds of adventures, I’m not particularly motivated to launch into a lengthy explanation for this video.

If you can’t see the parallels between this and any religion that you might currently or formerly belong to, then you’re doing it wrong (and by ‘it’ I mean ‘using your brain’).

Also, here is a baby that has learned to do something truly baffling – straddling the line between adorable and horrifying:

It’s not the Holy Spirit, it’s more like “Holy Shit!”

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Movie Friday: Wife-beating etiquette

“Wow,” you’re probably thinking “where exactly is Crommunist going with this?”

Exactly where you think:

Yeah… that just happened.

Apparently, according to this man’s religious convictions, the way that Allah honors the wife is to prescribe the specific way in which her husband is allowed to “discipline” her through physical beatings. Allah also sets out the circumstance under which it’s permissible to do so: if she won’t sleep with him. Thus is the majesty and mercy of Allah displayed – a woman has a choice of whether to be raped or beaten. God surely is great!

I don’t think any of my readers here are Muslim, or if I do have any Muslim readers I doubt they’re particularly devout, so I don’t think there’s much to be gained by expressing my complete disgust for this particular religious tradition; however, there is a larger point to be made. I’m sure someone somewhere looks at this and says “this is how you know Christianity is true – Jesus would have never allowed this.” Despite the fact that Jesus doesn’t say a single word about whether or not it’s permissible to beat your wife (I’d imagine he wouldn’t be cool with it, but we don’t know that for sure – I guess it wasn’t a very important topic to him), this is a completely circular argument:

A. Beating your wife is bad
B. Christianity says that beating your wife is bad
C. Therefore, Christianity is true

Here’s the problem: A is assumed to be true completely independently of the other premises. I happen to agree with A, but that in no way says anything about C. If A is a true premise, there is a way of establishing its truth outside the framework of any religious tradition. The logical way to follow B is to say “C: therefore,  Christianity is right about wife abuse.” If I start my own religion and say that it’s okay to murder penguins for lulz, but also say that the Earth orbits around the sun, does that make my religion true? Of course not – it just means that one specific claim that I have made is based on something we understood already.

Back to these two fucks in the video clip. The only words I can use to describe someone so debased, so twisted and depraved, so…

Y’know what? Let’s let Hollywood take care of the insults, shall we? (OMFG is this ever not safe for work)

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Movie Friday: NiqaBITCH

Satire has never looked so good:

The fundamental difficulty I have with the niqab is that it’s impossible to completely tease out the coercion and brainwashing that goes into religious and cultural education. I can’t understand why anyone would want to cover themselves with a thick cloth, but does that give me the right to pronounce it ethically wrong?

At least these women are showing that the debate shouldn’t be taken too seriously. There’s a bit more background to be found in The Guardian, but there’s not much more to be said about it.

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Movie Friday: What REALLY happened to the dinosaurs?

Sometimes you can defeat an opponent through superior tactics – predicting her/his strategy and countering it out of the gate. Sometimes you defeat an opponent through brute force, having the sheer numbers to overpower her/him. Other times it’s just dumb luck, then the cards happen to fall in your favour and you end up the victor.

Other times your opponent defeats her/himself:

This is my issue with biblical literalism – that book wasn’t published by someone wishing to lampoon religion; on the contrary, it was written by religious people to demonstrate a system of belief. The fact that this system of belief is unbelievably stupid means that any attempt to build a factual narrative from it will also come out unbelievably stupid. Ron Babcock (the comedian) doesn’t have to do anything aside from just reading the book – the humour is already there.

My favourite line comes at the end:

I grew up Catholic, but I didn’t grow up fucking retarded

This is how I came by my atheism – not out of some kind of spiteful rejection of a God that I knew was there but I didn’t like – but out of using my (God-given) intellect to evaluate what seemed to make the most sense. Either I had to reject the idea that a completely incoherent, non-predictable, non-observable, fundamentally unknowable entity had specific designs for me based on a book that was both internally and externally inconsistent, or I had to essentially lobotomize myself and believe the crazy shit that would be a direct result of that book being accurate.

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N.B. A reader pointed out to me that it’s fairly hypocritical of me to talk about the use of language and privilege and all that other stuff, and then to turn around and use the word ‘retarded’. He makes a fair point, and I apologize for using it here without any sort of disclaimer. ‘Retarded’ is an ableist phrase that is extremely derogatory toward people with developmental disabilities. While I try not to use it in my day-to-day language, I shouldn’t have quoted it here without pointing that fact out.

Movie Friday: The Great Debate

My cup runneth over with frustration these days whenever I am drawn into debate with someone who trots out old, pre-debunked arguments, as though I’d never heard them before. It happens when discussing race, it happens when discussing gender, and it definitely happens with religion:

I wish life came with a moderator like this. Let’s stop with the old arguments. Let’s stop letting them clog the pipes. If we’re going to have a discussion, can we please start without me having to punch myself out of energy by carefully taking down each fallacy you’ve parrotted off of some website, particularly if they’ve been shown to be false again and again.

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Movie Friday: Race, The Power of an Illusion

Is race biological? Well… kind of. The external physical traits that we call race are biological, but it doesn’t go much deeper than that.

This is a really cool PBS series that someone on reddit brought to my attention. It’s Friday, so it’s a movie, but you can still learn something. I learned a bunch of stuff watching this.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

This is one of the reasons I like science. It has the power to allow people (in this case, high-school kids) to work through, challenge, and debunk “traditional” ideas that have no merit. It’s also why I think skeptics are so well-suited to this kind of discussion – we’re happy to follow an idea only so far as there is evidence for it. When it comes to race, there just isn’t sufficient evidence to support the stark differences we see in the population; we have to look at alternative explanations.

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