Thinking Unenslaved

It’s the last Wednesday of the month, which means we’re holding a small contest for blog submissions on the topics noted below. This month is a little different, in that I’ll be going to be soliciting some of the big-name atheist, humanist, secularist, and/or liberal bloggers for permission to reference some of their material. Where relevant, each segment of the show will lead off with such content.

In addition to those authors, our panel will read (excerpts of) the entries aloud and discuss (no, not necessarily eviscerate if we don’t agree) them on the air in our Round Table format. We’ll choose one or two recent blog posts from each of the following categories:

Submission Categories:

1. Atheism or Agnosticism (note the change from last month)
2. (Secular) Humanism
3. Religion
4. Sociology
5. Philosophy

Minimum Requirements for Consideration:

1. Article is “recent” (within the past three months ~ exception might be made in deference to kick-ass authorship)
2. Article is comprised of at least 600 words
3. Article contents contain at least 75% unquoted content

Pretty simple, huh?

Authors of the selected articles will be asked to come on the show for a brief interview and to read and discuss their articles. Show participation is not mandatory. There is no monetary award for being chosen.

Submission Guidelines and Deadline:

1. Submit link(s) to blog post(s) in the comments below
2. Maximum of 5 links per contestant
3. Deadline is 10pm EDT April 26, 2011.
4. Selections will be announced by 10am EDT on April 27, 2011 via unenslaved.com and @Synthaetica (twitter).

Join us Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10pm EDT for some unique and dynamic show content from great authors around the Internet!

I want to thank all our contributors and co-hosts for a great show last night. The content selected was wonderful, and sparked some great discussions. We even managed to gang up a little bit on Zach, but we still love him, and as usual, the conversation was diverse even between a bunch of people who basically agree.

So, that means it’s linky-link time!

Me and The Gang:

• Dawnne Gee ~ @Synthaetica | Until Again | un:enslaved
• Kile Jones ~ {no twitter, sniff} | Kile Jones | State of Formation (contributor)
• Paul Fidalgo ~ @PaulFidalgo | Near Earth Object | music
• Zach Garland ~ @Zachsmind | ~vyou | ~blogspot

Guest Callers:

• Guy ~ @TheGuyGD / @AtheistsStudio
• Packard ~ @PackardSonic

Selected Articles:

I’ve created gawd.us links to these, which are the same as bit.ly links, by the way. That way I can give you guys “metrics” on the “tremendous clickthroughs” you’ll get from being linked here….

1. @TheGuyGD ~ Watson Vs. House M.D.
2. @PackardSonic ~ Mooove it right along
3. @PaulFidalgo ~ Un-Americanizing Atheists
4. @JenTheHumanist ~ Humanism Does not equal Atheism
5. @rnistuk ~ What to do with the Religion Sized Hole in Your Life when You Become an Atheist…
6. @Pribbzilla ~ Let’s begin this conversation

The March Blog Party Episode is below (this is really the “most recent” episode player ~ they don’t make one for each episode):

So, last night’s show was a little different than the shows have been for quite some time. You could even say it got a bit acrimonious from time to time when a theist caller offered no more than spurious, callous, judgments as opposed to anything resembling reasonable discourse. I let that portion of the show continue on for about an hour, and I probably should have cut it short. It should have been no surprise to anyone that she was inclined to respond with dogma and the conflation of belief with fact.

Important Links To Important People:

Angie Jackson: youTube | blogspot

Laci Green: website | youTube

After the show, I stayed up for quite some time. I actually listened to it in its entirety again, despite hating how my voice sounds on the air. Having done so, I have some observations I’d like to share. Feel free to denigrate me in the comments, as I have no doubt I will piss off people on both sides of the argument(s) here. Call it my insipid, unreasonable need to attempt to be objective.

1. Regarding Raissa‘s input: The conflation of belief with fact clearly does not serve her cause. She was asked on several occasions to provide evidence to back up (or prop up, as the case may be) her assertions, and willfully resorted to the exclusive expression of her faith. This is unfortunate, because the operative definition of “faith” is “belief in something which can likely be, or has already been, disproved.” There are reasonable, factual arguments which would sustain her position on adoption, for example. Refusing to research (let alone even so much as attempt to reference) the available material, deferring instead to religious dogma while declaiming its inherent “rightness,” made for sadly shallow and dispassionate listening. Unfortunately, she managed to relegate her entire thesis to irrelevance.
2. Regarding what Angie said on the issue of “making a rape victim carry to term is a form of rape.” I’m getting a lot of shit for this one from some acquaintances who happen to be rape victims who chose not to abort. The operative word being missed in the lectures I’m getting is “making” or “forcing” the rape victim to carry to term. The pro-choice stance is about choice. That my friends who happen to have gone through this scenario had the right to choose not to abort is exactly what people like Angie and myself are fighting to sustain. Bringing a child conceived in this manner to term is not being vilified as a perpetual rape. Being forced to do so, however, is.
3. Sciolism, to me, is kind of a cross between the Argument from Ignorance and False Equivalence. Raissa positioned herself as knowledgeable on the entire subject of the subsequent pregnancy of a rape victim. However, her friend’s experience only makes her familiar with her friend’s experience. A woman who is raped (or is the victim of forced incest if you don’t care to apply the term “rape” to that), can a) independently elect to, b) be forced via authority to, c) be shamed/coerced into, d) be encouraged via peer-pressure to carry the fetus to term. Obviously, Raissa’s friend can only fall into one of those categories, thus making Raissa’s experience a mere 25% of the whole, and second-hand at that. Most certainly (and obvious to all), her “experience” as a mere observer is dubious at best, and the argument from presumed knowledge and insistence upon that “knowledge” as “fact” (even though it was really “belief”) was sciolism in its most nefarious form. She was unwilling to listen to very persuasive arguments to the contrary.
4. At its most basic level, I respect the desire to preserve “life”, which presumably sits at the foundation of the pro-life side of the argument. The problem with it is exactly what Laci so brilliantly pointed out: By more than a factor of ten, people throughout the world are starving. By more than a factor of a hundred, people die needlessly, victims of the changing climate, government/nationalist conflict, failure and lack of local resources, and exploitation. If the debate is truly about preserving “life”, the continual focus on one of the relatively smaller contributors to “death” is woefully misplaced. Moreover, as a condition of individual choice as opposed to the results of hegemonic intervention, the anti-abortion manages to undermine its own moralistic basis. In her short time with Raissa, Laci managed to lay bare the oft-ignored hypocrisy of the pro-life movement: It’s not really about “life” at all, per se. It’s about the enforcement of one group’s definition of “rightness” over the populace for the rather petty purpose of possessing the self-referential invocation of the word “right”.

That all having been said, I must also say it was very difficult not to get caught up in Angie’s passion, Raissa’s sanctimonious presumption of precedence was beyond offensive, and Laci stole the show with a perfectly executed reduction of the anti-choice mission to control individual action under religious pretense.