{"id":3247,"date":"2015-03-25T21:38:01","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T02:38:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/?p=3247"},"modified":"2015-03-25T21:38:01","modified_gmt":"2015-03-26T02:38:01","slug":"nitpicking-at-cnns-atheism-documentary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2015\/03\/25\/nitpicking-at-cnns-atheism-documentary\/","title":{"rendered":"Nitpicking at CNN’s atheism documentary"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m pretty much in agreement with what Staks has already written<\/a>\u00a0on the overall\u00a0utility of\u00a0yesterday’s documentary report from CNN<\/a>. Any time atheists are personally humanized and treated somewhat\u00a0fairly in the mainstream media, it’s a win for us. That said,\u00a0I have just a handful of nits to pick.<\/p>\n

\"Untitled\"<\/p>\n

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  1. If you ask a bold question like IS THERE A GOD?<\/strong> then you have to take at least a halfhearted stab at answering the topic question. This documentary barely\u00a0alluded to\u00a0the arguments for and\u00a0against the existence of God, even when speaking with people who surely had an opinion, with the possible exception of a couple sentences from the\u00a0obscured and closeted atheist preacher called\u00a0Stan. I watched all the way through, eagerly hoping that they would really get around digging in to this question, and\u00a0now I wonder if the lower third banner was basically an editing mistake.<\/li>\n
  2. The narrator says<\/a>\u00a0that young\u00a0David Gormley “has chosen a life without God,” and thereby\u00a0propagates the popular but mistaken\u00a0notion that we have direct volitional control over the content of our beliefs. If you\u00a0believe that it is possible to control our beliefs in\u00a0this way, I challenge you to choose to believe that Thor\u00a0is the One True God. For extra credit, do this only\u00a0on Thursdays.<\/li>\n
  3. David Silverman’s casual\u00a0dismissal of humanists, freethinkers,\u00a0skeptics<\/a> was\u00a0irresponsible and inaccurate. People who self-identify using those labels\u00a0are telling us something about their ethical, epistemic, or scientific methods and priorities, they are not lying to avoid the dreaded A-word. <\/em>This one isn’t actually a nit, since David has shown elsewhere that he understands what these various words mean and how they serve to differentiate between disparate\u00a0concerns. Interestingly, Greg Epstein gives a far better answer to substantially the same question sometime later in the show: “It’s all one community.” This\u00a0is true enough<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  4. “…Father of Atheism, Richard Dawkins.” We unbelievers don’t have a priesthood or a founder, unless you count\u00a0Diagoras of Melos<\/a>.\u00a0There is no\u00a0reasonable\u00a0sense in which the\u00a0phrase used here maps on to reality.<\/li>\n
  5. The near\u00a0total lack of diversity. Atheists come in all shapes and colors\u00a0and former faiths.\u00a0There is more diversity at a typical atheist meetup here in Oklahoma<\/em> than I saw in this film.<\/li>\n
  6. The goddamn hackneyed news template. Basically every atheist news\u00a0piece I’ve seen starts with an uncritical homage to the place of religion in American culture. Here is an example from a\u00a0local news station<\/a>. Here is another example from another local news station<\/a>.\u00a0Notice the similarities? Notice how the CNN documentary did the exact same thing? How many stock clips of church iconography and stained glass\u00a0does the world really need?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Ok, enough grousing. My sincere thanks to Jerry DeWitt and David Gormley for coming out bravely as unbelievers and making us look like kind and decent people to boot. Onward and upward, as they say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’m pretty much in agreement with what Staks has already written\u00a0on the overall\u00a0utility of\u00a0yesterday’s documentary report from CNN. Any time…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-freethought-in-popular-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}