This I Believe - Penn Jillette - There Is No God

[white87911]

Regardless of what you think of NPR they have a pretty interesting thing going on where they are recording average people and more famous people speaking of what they believe.

This is a link to what Penn Jillette had to say (from Penn and Teller)

I just wanted to see what other thought about what he had to say. It really made me think.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5015557

[BlueSkyJaunte]

That was awesome.

[Jeff Higgins]

Another completely clueless man that happens to be an entertainer. That apparently provides all the validity he needs to speak to equally clueless people.

[jorian]

I guess that means you know he DOES have an elephant in his trunk...

[on-ramp]

the elephant is not in the trunk, it's in his mirror

[kang]

Originally posted by Jeff Higgins
Another completely clueless man that happens to be an entertainer. That apparently provides all the validity he needs to speak to equally clueless people.

Clueless just because he doesn't believe in god?

[on-ramp]

First of all, define what "God" is... Given that,

I don't believe you can prove there is a God.

and I also don't believe that you can prove that there isn't a God.

[TheMentat]

Originally posted by kang
Clueless just because he doesn't believe in god?

Cluless because he doesn't share the same view as him.

[IROC]

I can't fault his reasoning. One thing that I, personally, have noticed is that once I shed my beliefs in god, I found that I have more compassion for people and I treasure time with family and friends much more...because the time we have here on Earth is all there is. There is no "afterlife". Make the most of your time now.

I don't think "clueless" is applicable here. Many people have found that they do not need religion and belief in a supernatural being to lead fulfilled, productive lives. I don't see that as "clueless".

Mike

[Flatbutt1]

or maybe he means that by removing god as a crutch, he is forced to do good all the time. if he does wrong, and there is no god, then there is no one to forgive him so he has to get it right the first time.

[Jeff Higgins]

No, not because he dissagrees with me. Because his little essay reads like it was written by your typical brain-dead Miss America pageant hopefull.

It seems to me that so many are all too willing to listen to some one just because they are a celebrity. I have seen his position stated before, much more eloquently, and was not left with the impression that I was reading some mindless drivel penned by an unimaginative moron.

Not all celebrities have anything worthwhile or original to say. This one apparently doesn't. I think it is a somewhat sad comment on our society that folks like him are afforded a forum simply due to their celebrity status. It works even better when they pick a contoversial topic and stroke the liberals by espousing a point of view they know to be consistant with their audience's. If they get good enough at this game, the clueless folks that listen to them elevate them to the status of some kind of insightful sage of sorts. Amazing process, really.

[Nathans_Dad]

At least they have a few of the other side as well...equally as well written too! The top one is particulary good...

William F. Buckley, Jr.: How Is It Possible to Believe in God?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4656595

I've always liked the exchange featuring the excited young Darwinian at the end of the 19th century. He said grandly to the elderly scholar, "How is it possible to believe in God?" The imperishable answer was, "I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop."

That rhetorical bullet has everything -- wit and profundity. It has more than once reminded me that skepticism about life and nature is most often expressed by those who take it for granted that belief is an indulgence of the superstitious -- indeed their opiate, to quote a historical cosmologist most profoundly dead. Granted, that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief -- how can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration -- near infinite -- of natural impulses? Yet, on the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily traceable to nature, than to nature's molder? What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?

The skeptics get away with fixing the odds against the believer, mostly by pointing to phenomena which are only explainable -- you see? -- by the belief that there was a cause for them, always deducible. But how can one deduce the cause of Hamlet? Or of St. Matthew's Passion? What is the cause of inspiration?

This I believe: that it is intellectually easier to credit a divine intelligence than to submit dumbly to felicitous congeries about nature. As a child, I was struck by the short story. It told of a man at a bar who boasted of his rootlessness, derisively dismissing the jingoistic patrons to his left and to his right. But later in the evening, one man speaks an animadversion on a little principality in the Balkans and is met with the clenched fist of the man without a country, who would not endure this insult to the place where he was born.

So I believe that it is as likely that there should be a man without a country, as a world without a creator.

John W. Fountain: The God Who Embraced Me
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5016108

Kathy Dahlen: The Elusive Yet Holy Core
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4975444

[white87911]

Originally posted by Jeff Higgins
No, not because he disagrees with me. Because his little essay reads like it was written by your typical brain-dead Miss America pageant hopeful.

It seems to me that so many are all too willing to listen to some one just because they are a celebrity. I have seen his position stated before, much more eloquently, and was not left with the impression that I was reading some mindless drivel penned by an unimaginative moron.

Not all celebrities have anything worthwhile or original to say. This one apparently doesn't. I think it is a somewhat sad comment on our society that folks like him are afforded a forum simply due to their celebrity status. It works even better when they pick a controversial topic and stroke the liberals by espousing a point of view they know to be consistent with their audience's. If they get good enough at this game, the clueless folks that listen to them elevate them to the status of some kind of insightful sage of sorts. Amazing process, really.

Jeff, you seem to have problem about Penn's perceived celebrity status. That is irrelevant with what he is saying. If it were just one of us that made the same statements, would you dismiss it for the same reason?

[jorian]

"It works even better when they pick a contoversial topic and stroke the liberals by espousing a point of view they know to be consistant with their audience's."

I thought we might keep politics out of it..... No such luck. :/

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally posted by white87911
Jeff, you seem to have problem about Penn's perceived celebrity status. That is irrelevant with what he is saying. If it were just one of us that made the same statements, would you dismiss it for the same reason?

What he was saying was irrelevant; his celebrity status is not. It's what allowed such an inane statement to be widely disseminated. There is nothing unique, inspired, or otherwise noteworthy about what he said, and the only reason we heard it was because he is somewhat of a celebrity. That these kinds of statements even matter to anyone, and why they are assigned any importance whatsoever, is what amazes me. This world is full of gullible people that will sit up and listen when a celebrity speaks, regardless of whether there is anything important about what they are saying, or if they actually know anything at all about it.

[jorian]

"What he was saying was irrelevant; his celebrity status is not. It's what allowed such an inane statement to be widely disseminated. ........ "

Sounds like sour grapes to me. Did they decline to publish your essay?

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Originally posted by Jeff Higgins
What he was saying was irrelevant; his celebrity status is not. It's what allowed such an inane statement to be widely disseminated. There is nothing unique, inspired, or otherwise noteworthy about what he said, and the only reason we heard it was because he is somewhat of a celebrity. That these kinds of statements even matter to anyone, and why they are assigned any importance whatsoever, is what amazes me. This world is full of gullible people that will sit up and listen when a celebrity speaks, regardless of whether there is anything important about what they are saying, or if they actually know anything at all about it.

Have you listened to Bush lately??!

[alf]

Originally posted by Jeff Higgins
...... It works even better when they pick a contoversial topic and stroke the liberals by espousing a point of view they know to be consistant with their audience's. If they get good enough at this game, the clueless folks that listen to them elevate them to the status of some kind of insightful sage of sorts. Amazing process, really.

I could not help but think that many of today's religions would have started this way.

[djmcmath]

Douglas Adams, remarkably enough, is an atheist. Coincidentally, he's also an entertaining writer, which means that if you'd like a pleasant summation of the atheist philosophy written by someone who isn't a fluff-headed celebrity, you've found the man. In "Salmon of Doubt," a collection of post mortem work published by his editor, he has a speech that he delivered to some group or another. It only runs for a dozen pages or so, but it's a good clean concise brief non-wordy statement of his atheist position.

But then, I disagree with him, so I'm not sure why I shared that.

[deathpunk dan]

penn jillette is cool with me as he belongs to the almighty

Church of the Subgenius

Hail Bob.