Hello #SSA2012 Visitors!!

Hello #SSA2012 visitors!!
This conference has inspired me to make a concerted effort to do something useful with my blog! Seriously, I cannot express how impressed I am by all of the great, intelligent young minds around me. Wow!

Stay tuned, I only have a short drive home, so I'll pump out something awesome tomorrow (TODAY (holy hell, it's 0445). It's been so great to meet so many young people excited about secularism!

We are the future and the future is now!
-TCA

Hey, Brother! Do You Think...

 

So this "Hey Brother Do You Think..." meme has been making the rounds a lot lately and, like many other atheists, it irks me.

On reddit (of course) someone posted this as a rebuttal:

I take issue with this as well, however.

The problem with the original meme is not that they believe in mom (read: God), it's that they have mislabeled mom as something beyond their sensory organs and beyond the real world. While it is important to consider the effect of their ever-evolving state of being while they grow in the womb, the most important thing to consider is that they /do/ have the capacity to measure "mom" and her effects on their environment.

Ignoring the fact that they aren't even babies yet and lack the capacity to reason, I will grant them, as does the original conjecture, these capacities, and assume they have the same faculties as a well-developed and scientifically ametuer adult. Given that, they can hear her, they can feel her bodyweight shfiting, and they can trace the umbilical cord from their bodies to hers.

If an adult human were trapped in a room, or even, say, stricken to a hospital bed with a feeding tube attached to him, without even knowing where the tube came from or why it was their, he could summize that it did not come from god, even though it is something he cannot live without.

The problem I have with the rebuttal meme is that they have no evidence of Santa. Sure they get gifts from santa, and their parents tell them they will get lumps of coal if they aren't good, but they have to take that on the authority of their parents. Beyond that, they have no real reason to believe santa exists, beyond /wanting/ him to exist. But if you think about it, they really only want him to exist because they've been told to want him to exist.

This rebuttal is just as fallicious as the original claim. The original claim uses poor reason to get to a bad conclusion, and the rebuttal uses poor reason to get to a good conclusion. It is a decent enough rebuttal, but it is not the rebuttal this claim needs.

Your thoughts in 140 characters or less?

Graduating...from Tumblr

I guess I'll start with the basics:

• I am an atheist.
• I am in the Air Force.

While I do not fly, my service of choice is known more for its fortifications in the sky than it is for the one's it maintains on the ground. Therefore, I am the CockpitAtheist.

This is not to be confused with the great deity of Greek chicken sandwiches: Cock-Pita (although, when pressed, I will admit His existence and am therefore, very much a Cock-Pita Theist).

So far in my tenure on the interwebs, I have migrated from social platform to social platform trying to find a niche that fits my personality and allows me to gloss over the narcissism I think it takes to keep a blog (that's a story for another time).

I started in 2004 in Xanga. Who didn't have a Xanga, right? I imagine people still use it, but, like many blog sites, its use, and my interest in it, faded because it didn't evolve with the internet. I never got into LiveJournal or MySpace very much, and Facebook was a bit too personal to use for serious journaling.

For the brief time I used Tumblr, I liked it. However, I felt very restrictive in what I could post and how I could post content. Maybe I just don't know what I'm doing, but it's far too cookie cutter for me. I want a place where I can post articles, quotes, and a video all in one post without some crazy ass formatting. With that, I am cutting the hand-holding, blogging-umbilical cord and setting out into the world of faceless thoughts expressed behind the wall of the internet:

Hello World.

Hello Blogger.

Now the question is can I easily cross-post from Tumblr? Because as much as I despise its setup, there is a lot of exposure to be had on that forsaken site. We shall see...