I was listening to some really interesting lectures on the TVO podcast show Ideas today.
The first was by the political philosopher and linguist Chomsky. He briefly described the crisis of Democracy that occurred during the 1960's. Basically on both the liberal and conservative side there was a fear that what was happening in the US was an excess of democracy. Therefore there were proposals to reduce the influence of the average person in the democratic process. One such development has been the drastic reduction in funding to post secondary education
It is striking that in Mexico they have free education, or very low tuition. Of course when the government tried to bring forward legislation increasing tuition student mobilized massively to fight against the proposals, just as occurred in Quebec. The result was that tuition was not increased. You can contrast this with what took place in the rest of Canada, and in the US where people passively accepted the decision to increase tuition fees and barrow huge amounts to finance education.
I also listened to a lecture by the Canadian Science Fiction writer Cory Doctrow, about attempts being made to prevent Computers and other mediums from infringing copyright laws, and how this is doomed to failure. I rather enjoyed that lecture. He proposed that instead of building within computers a program that prevents downloading or recording of data that infringes, you empower consumers to police themselves. One good example he gives is of each person having a radio transmitter and this enabling the locating of people whose transmitters happen to be malfunctioning. I was already persuaded that the current attempts to stop infringement are doomed to failure, and his lecture merely solidified that perspective. He doesn't really get into the legal aspect much though, which is not surprising given his lack of a legal background.
But the contrast between a hammer and a rifle is quite a good one. Computers have become all purpose tools so it simply makes little sense to try to make them so that they can't be used in certain ways.
Finally I listened to this debate between a professor who thinks we don't need religion and the scared, and one who thinks we still do. It was basically an argument about John Lennon's phrase in "Imagine", there is no heaven, it's easy if you try...." etc....
It got down to semantics at a certain point. There were the creations of straw men to a certain extent. If I were arguing the perspective of the anti-religious person, I would stress the free-thinking an investigative aspect. How religion is organized by necessity into hierarchical systems almost exclusively. It is of course possible to imagine religion without that but where can you find it?
I think that is the most powerful attack on religion. But, I haven't read Daniel C. Dennet's book "The Good Delusion", although I did read the Hitchen's "God is not great".
There was a big bone of contention about chimps. Are chimps good by nature or violent. The religious guy made big hay of the idea that chimps were violent and therefore humans are naturally violent also, ergo religion is not responsible for violence. But, this treats humans as simply natural creatures. Thus we must see that even if humans are by nature this way surely they can be different through reason. So the fact that humans are naturally violent doesn't really mean anything.
I would go after religion through the critique of metaphysics (Kant, Hume) and also through Darwin, evolution. There are no transcendent mental states and therefore there is no knowledge of God outside of experience which is bounded by space and time. Even the observer effect remains in the Kantian idealism which is not the kind of idealism of Bishop Berkley, but simply an idealism of human measuring. The religious guy made hay of the observer effect in quantum physics, which in my mind doesn't really get you that far either.
I also went to the gym and did some weight lifting. I ended by advising the brother of Josh on his legal dispute with the city of Toronto. I believe he may have a claim under the copyright act for the destruction of his work by the city, when they painted without warning over his mural.
