Vicarious redemption

The latest video by DarkMatter2525 looks at the notion of vicarious redemption.

Here's an interesting question to ponder: if you could save Jesus from being crucified, would you? And if you would, would this god be considered worthy of worship if he still sends everyone to hell?

A god that endorses scapegoating, methinks, is not moral.

A secular Christmas

I'm not sure how obvious this is in Singapore or the USA: but it seems to me that Christmas has developed into 2 separate holidays - one Christian and the other secular.

Save for the name, practically nothing people associate with the Christmas holidays has anything to do to at all with Jesus or Christianity: gifts, family & friends, feasts, decorated trees, candy cane, snowman, Santa Claus, log cakes, mistletoe etc. There actually are non-Christian Christmas celebrations (obviously...).

So here, enjoy this video by TheThinkingAtheist regarding Christmas traditions.

 
On a related note, I just want to say that atheists can celebrate whatever holiday, religious or not, if they want to. I'm just not celebrating the myths -- if anything, the secular aspects (friends, family and common values etc) are what's worth celebrating.

Morality and Christianity

Sam Harris makes the case against Christian "morality".

Kalam: To cause without causing

The Kalam Cosmological Argument suffers a suite of problems. But I find this particular flaw most interesting: it effectively argues for the cause of the universe while breaking the laws of causality.

TheoreticalBullshit explains this particular flaw very nicely.

Some background might be helpful.

"Atheist just want to sin"

DarkMatter2525 explains how much sense "atheists don't believe in god because they just want to sin" makes.

A little something from Youtube

Just some interesting videos from Youtube for this update. Here's one from Mr. Deity

 

And here's two from DarkMatter2525, a little something with Christmas:

And a little something on the original sin:

Sex, Death And The Meaning Of Life

Richard Dawkins has a new series documentary. To date, 3 episodes have aired and someone has uploaded them on Youtube.

The episodes are availiable on this playlist.

Just a Youtube update

2 new videos! DarkMatter2525 has a new video, "How God Favors Evil".

TrustingDoubt uploadedthe final video for her series "God's Emotions".

Excavating the Empty Tomb

Here's a Youtube channel I subscribed to recently: TruthSurge. His series, Excavating the Empty Tomb (beyond a reasonable doubt), explores New Testament criticism.

The first 9 parts of the series, consisting of 10 videos, presents the case by Dennis MacDonald. He proposes that the Gospel of Mark, the earliest gospel, is actually a piece of fiction that draws upon the Homeric Epics. This case however is not the mainstream view of biblical scholars.

The latter parts of the series, currently consisting 5 videos, moves onto mainstream biblical criticisms. So if you're interested in what biblical scholars think about the reliability of the New Testament, you might want to check this out.

The following embedded video is Part 11A which presents some evidence that suggest that the author of what is called the Gospel of Matthew was fabricating history, not recording it.

New Videos and Playlists

TrustingDoubt has uploaded the seventh part of her God's Emotions series which explores Christian concepts of god using affective science.

Youtube Channel update
After updating the layout and phasing out the Favorites section of my Youtube Channel, a couple of new playlists has been added to organize some of the videos retained from the favorites "playlist".

QualiaSoup and TheraminTrees
This playlist contains a majority of QualiaSoup's videos and a handful of TheraminTrees pertaining to topics such as skepticism, science, religion and atheism.

Psychology of Belief
A 10 part series created by AntiCitizenX. It explores how belief is generated and various cognitive biases and how they relate to belief in god(s).

Discovering Religion
This series created by DiscoveringReligion explores creationism, evolution, religious influence on government and morality. As of now, it has 22 episodes.

AronRa Evolution Videos
Aside from his Foundational Falsehood of Creationism series, AronRa has a number of videos pertaining to evolution. Like his series, these videos are content heavy, very interesting and educational.

Evid3nc3 Series: Atheism
A playlist consisting part of Evid3nc3's series that pertains to atheism. Personally, the highlight of the series so far is the video: A History of God.

Animated Arguments
A playlist of videos of standalone animated "arguments" by DarkMatter2525.

"There are no gods"
3 videos, 40 minutes. This is a response series by TheraminTrees addressing concepts of god he once accepted and now rejects.

Old Testament Gods - AETV
3 episodes of the Atheist Experience TV show on the topic of Old Testament gods. Spanning more than 4 hours, Tracie explores the OT pantheon (El, Asherah, etc) with Matt while answering calls intermittently.

Channel Update

Just a note. The Atheozoa Youtube channel has been updated with the new layout format.

As such, the favorite videos section has been phased out (the Favorites playlist is just plain too messy to feature). Also, the new layout removed the "Subscriptions" section and replaced it with the "Featured Channels" section where I have only put up a couple of channels at the moment.

One nice new feature is the "Featured Playlists" section where I've put up the the higher quality video series by several Youtubers.

Do check out the channel at: Channel Atheozoa

Evid3nc3 and TrustingDoubt

Two new videos has been added. Evid3nc3 continues his long running series with a video addressing the objections to Evidentialism (addressed in the previous video).

TrustingDoubt has yet another interesting video addressing the anthropomorphic god of Abraham from the psychological perspective.

Examining the Existence of a Historical Jesus

Here is a presentation by David Fitzgerald at Skepticon 3 titled "Examining the Existence of a Historical Jesus".

In this presentation, information about the historicity of Jesus is drawn from books on the subject and presented. It touches on the lack of contemporaneous extra-biblical evidence, the contradictions within the gospels themselves, the fact that none of the gospels were eye-witnesses, the difference between Paul's Jesus & the Jesus of the gospels and other interesting tidbits.

Why Science is Better Than Religion and Always Has Been

Also from Skepticon 1 is this presentation by Richard Carrier entitled: "Why Science is Better Than Religion and Always Has Been"

I like it.

PZ Myers - Science Ed: Science vs Religion

Yea, this is old stuff. This is PZ Myers at Skepticon 1 back in 2008. It's kinda sad considering that it still applies after more than 2 years.

Enjoy!

Quran's factual origins

Just as I have come to know that the Bible is a translation of several books written by different authors, decades after the events which they purport to describe by non-eyewitnesses whose stories were transmitted by hearsay in the intervening decades, I am interested to know what real history has to say about the formation of the "holy" book known as the Qu'ran.

L'Orientalist now has 2 videos with information pertaining to the topic and here they're.

The Inimitable Qu'ran

Did the Umayyads change the Qu'ran?

The creator of the videos provides citation of the literature he uses on his blog linked in the information below the video itself on Youtube.

Of objectivity and oughtness

QualiaSoup has uploaded the third video of his series on morality: Of objectivity and oughtness.

Moral Absolutes and Morality

DiscoveringReligion has two videos up discussing further the religious idea of moral absolutes from their god.

It echoes and expands the same idea I briefly mentioned in the last part of this blog entry: Morality: Subjective, Objective.

L'Orientalist on Islam

A channel, L'Orientalist, with well referenced, clear content about Islam from a skeptic's perspective has come to my attention. I'd thought I'd post one of his videos here.

What do you think?

For liberal/moderate muslims, if you take issue with this video, may I ask, is it that the facts presented were incorrect or from the standpoint of your personal theological interpretation (in spite of the book's contents)? For the record, I only care about the former; the latter, not so much.

The Non-Explanation

Here's a new video by DarkMatter2525:

Conditioned to believe that basically everything is in accordance to God's plans, religious people rationalize any and every outcome in a strange twisted way. Since God is defined to be always right, no matter the situation, God is "good" irrespective of the situation, be it an accident or a natural disaster.

It's fucking nuts.