I’m really suprised to find their full episodes on Google Video. Did they make some deal with them or something?
Yeah, “monogamy is baloney, because we found some social scientist to say so, and lots of animals aren’t monogamous.” My, that’s a scintillating argument.
No.
Welcome to the internet.
I’m a big fan of skepticism and critical thinking in general–that’s why I hang out here!–but it seems to me that the so-called “skeptical movement” that Penn Jillette is trying to promote is really just an “atheist libertarian movement” in disguise. It seems to me that there are plenty of people who consider themselves skeptical but then go believing pretty much anything they hear from anyone who claims to be a “skeptic.” Penn, James Randi, whoever…there’s definitely a dogma there, just a different one.
For example, one of the beliefs that a lot of “Skeptics with a capital S” seem to share is that alcoholism is not a disease. I guess that’s fine, sure, but it’s one of the weirder things I’ve seen a couple of good friends argue about lately. All of the “it’s not a disease” cites came from “skepdic.com” and the like, and the other side’s attacks came under fire for being from the NIH, because it’s a government institution, yadda yadda, lots of libertarian stuff.
Anyway, I don’t think that libertarian ideology (or atheism, for that matter) is necessarily the only conclusion of a critical/skeptical outlook and a well-examined life. So yeah, I’m a little put off by Bullshit!
I’m not seeing where you’re getting athiesm from, unless you’re talking about the “movement” in general and not the program. I can’t see any episodes debunking (or attempting to debunk) the existence of a deity. Certainly there’s episodes skeptical of paranormal activity, but not of gods, or religions.
They say the Bible is bullshit: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8463073960287313294&q=penn+teller+bullshit&hl=en
They also do shows against family values & abstinence, which are associated with Christians.
They say Bible literalism is bullshit. Very much a different thing. They make the point that believing in the Bible, as faith, is something they can’t argue against; but when people take what happens in the Bible as literal, historical fact, that’s the bullshit part.
But not part of believing in a god. Being for gay marriage or anti-abstinence only education does not make one an athiest.
The US is almost alone in treating alcoholism as a disease and having the philosophy that alcohol abusers can never touch a drop of alcohol again for fear of falling off the wagon.
Penn Jillette on NPR There Is No God:
“I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy – you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do.”
Shrug I listen to his radio show every so often, and he comes off as a rather sensible and quite likeable character. Doesn’t seem miserable in the least bit to me.
Being an athiest does not mean one pushes an athiest agenda. If it did, there would have been a “God/Yahweh/Allah/etc.” episode of Bullshit!, but there was not - as was pointed out in the Bible program, you can’t argue against faith.
Not necessarily. New forms of contamination are being found all the time for which water is not treated. For example, it has been found that outfall from paper mills produces a hormone-like pollutant which literally changes the sex of fish exposed to it (it makes female fish grow a male sex organ called a gonopodium.) Effects on humans, if any, are yet to be determined. I’m currently working with one of the biologists who discovered this effect.
I’ll stick with the reverse osmosis, UV-treated stuff, expensive as it may be.
I gave up on Bullshit after the New Age show.
I’m no New Age person, but I have taken a yoga class or two, and found it to be quite mentally refreshing as well as physically challenging, and it seemed ridiculous to entertain an alternative opinion spewed by someone who obviously hasn’t stretched beyond scratching his butt-crack since Hector was a pup. Granted, someone who is trying to take your money loads on a bunch of pseudo-mystical crap (the main thrust of their piece), but that doesn’t mean the act itself is completely without merit. And if I’m going to take your word for it, show some evidence that you’ve tried it and found it wanting.
This does not however, turn me against them or their other work. I’m still a major fan of their magic act. I just think that, while I loved a number of episodes, ultimately, in Bullshit they bit off a little more than they can chew.
BTW, I’ve visited Penn in his house in Vegas, and he is a seriously tweaked individual. Not just the fact that the custom-built house deliberately resembles a minimum security prison (It’s called “The Slammer”, after all), or the fact that the house knows when he’s home and keeps the cover on his pool locked when he’s away so the neighborhood kids don’t drown themselves, and another wall can slide back to reveal his band setup (he said of his house, “It’s as computerized as Bill Gates’, but mine works”), or that he photographs all his guests in front of police lineup wallpaper, and all the pictures rotate through his screensaver, or that his kitchen is built for his height, or that its floor is decorated with an inlaid red chalk outline of Teller with a butcher knife in his hand, or that the music of the Residents plays through the house. All those varieties of tweaked I can totally get on board with. That’s not what gives me pause.
It’s the hardcore porn art that festoons nearly every surface of the whole place, the kitchen woodcut print of a woman fingering herself, the photomosaic of tiny penetration shots that resolve at a distance into a picture of Christ on the cross, the curved wall in his bedroom that slides back to reveal a bondage chair in an apparently soundproof chamber. That’s what puts me off.
As one of the most churchified people on this board, I pointedly reject this manhandling of the term “faith”. I understand that “faith is the evidence of things unseen”, but this is typically extnded to “all of religion, and in the west, typically all of Christianity”.
I deny that faith is something “you just have”, like it’s excema or something, that you can’t help, and you must pity others for having.
Christianity is revealed personally, which does place it outside the realm of science, but does not make it into “things people believe that are wacky but you just can’t argue with”.
What I don’t understand is how these types seem to skip the point that AA does NOT say that you’re not responsible for your actions. If I could boil down their statemtent, it’s:
You are somehow more susceptible to these things. That’s tough, and we feel your pain.
Now, what are you going to do to deal with this? It cannot continue. We are here to help.
That’s not what they said. They said that there is no evidence that monogamy is somehow “natural”. If you know of any such evidence, please present it.
Cite? This is exactly what I’ve always been told, growing up in Sweden.
Where do you all get this “Penn is miserable/suicidal” stuff from? He’s always come off as someone who loves his life to me.
If she was an adult diabetic who was opposed to animal testing then you might be able to make a charge of hypocrisy stick although ITSM that it’s not so black and white. Saying she’s a hypocrite based on what she may have done when she believed different things than she believes now is not reasonable. For instance, I’m a vegetarian but I ate meat for about 20 years of my life. Am I a hypocrite if I speak out now against eating meat because I used to eat it myself? I don’t think I am.
I’d like to like P&T’s Bullshit!, but…
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether the position they adopt on any given issue is wrong or right; they attack the subject with fallacious arguments - every show is overflowing with ad-hominem, quote-mining and strawmen.
I mean, I admire his hard-headed, no-nonsense style of presentation, but I get the impression Penn could argue the case for anything he liked, and appear every bit as plausible, regardless of truth.
I apologise. That wasn’t the point I was making, so i’m sorry that I was unclear.
As far as I can tell, the program was not saying "you can’t argue against these nutty people with their “faith”. What it was saying was there is that faith and science don’t intersect; you can’t argue against faith by pointing out historical inaccuracies in the Bible.
My own personal definition of faith would be this; it’s something you just know. You may not be able to see it or touch it, but what you believe in is there. It’s what covers the gap between “maybe” and “i’m certain”, even when there isn’t enough quantifiable evidence to be certain.
And if you still disagree… well, i’m sorry. I’m an agnostic (thought athiest when it comes to the Christian God) so likely we’re going to disagree on a lot.
I guess I’m not clear if she’s using synthetic, not-tested-on-animals insulin or not (if there is such a thing - even if it doesn’t come from a pig’s pancreas, FDA approval requires animal trials before human on any drug, no?).
But even if she is, she’s STILL a hypocrite. Synthetic insulin was not created in a vacuum. It was created as a result of animal testing and extraction of pig insulin. Without those pigs, synthetic insulin wouldn’t be here.
So even if she’s not injecting pig insulin, her synthetic insulin required pig insulin as an intermediate step.
No matter what she believed in the past (and I agree that using insulin and supporting, even regretfully, animal research does not make one a hypocrite), it’s what she believes and says now, when compared to her actions, that make her a hypocrite now. She wouldn’t be a hypocrite for taking any type of insulin as a child, but for continuing to take it now. You’re not a hypocrite for eating meat for 20 years, but you would be if you ate it now.
ONLY IF synthetic insulin had been developed completely independantly - sharing no research or finances - from pig insulin would I agree with your assertion.