Thursday, February 17, 2011

New Vids and Podcast

Besides the major video release I mentioned yesterday, two other known videos of me came out around the same time, plus a new podcast. I'm blogging those three items today.

(1) Back in 2008 the guys of Give a Damn? came to my home and interviewed me for their film (which I've seen, and it's pretty awesome, hopefully it is near to a general release). I didn't make the final cut, so Rob Lehr, the atheist of the pair (Dan Parris is his Christian friend, and he's one of the cool Christians), put my whole original interview online. It's unedited so a bit random and rough (and they ran out of tape almost mid-sentence at the end), but actually it's really good, one of the best unedited interviews I've ever seen, and interesting for covering a lot of novel ground (since it is principally about whether we ought to "Give a Damn" about poverty in Africa). To watch it click here.

(2) Every year or so I speak to a Christian youth group called Stand to Reason. I've been doing this for years. But back in 2010 I spoke on metaethics and my lecture was recorded. It's now available online. It's a casual interactive lecture, not a formal talk, and it was mostly for the benefit of the students there, and only addresses a few specific questions, so it doesn't work that well as a video per se (much better for that is my Michigan talk on moral theory; and for more discussion and links on this topic see Darla the She-Goat and of course read Sense and Goodness without God). But if you are interested, click here.

(3) Finally, I did a Mindcore podcast: Interview with Richard Carrier. Mindcore is a rather low-production-value underground podcast for "elitist college dropouts" (as self-described). It's not an atheist podcast, it just happened to center around that issue this particular show. First half is a discussion between hosts Don Recuero (an atheist) and Diana (a kind of vaguely New Age theist). The interview then starts with me at minute 40:25. I'll briefly describe it from there.

Don begins with discussing the nature and history of the New Atheist movement and my role in it. We segue into politics of atheists. Note that I speak of naturalists of the kind I defend in my book, who accept empirical moderatism, but I mistakenly give the impression I'm speaking of all atheists, when certainly there are dogmatically ideological atheists (and across the entire political spectrum, too). Then we segue into moral theory and mataethics. I talk about the new book The End of Christianity (the now-completed sequel to The Christian Delusion that will be released this year, in which I have three chapters--I'll blog all about it when it's out). Then we close with a discussion of the Jesus myth debate specifically, and the development of the New Testament canon in general.

This was recorded way back in 2010, and the sound quality is not good, and we had delay issues that made it hard not to talk over each other, and I compensated by rambling too much. And not much new ground covered. So not the best show ever. But some may find it of interest.

3 comments:

Don Recuero said...

Hey Richard I do want to thank you again for doing the interview.

I just wanted to explain that the podcast for "college dropout intellectual elitists" is a bit of a joke.

The goal of the show is to provide content for people who are probably not involved with academia but are still trying to maintain a intellectually active life.

I also apologize for any sound issues. I promise to refund all listeners 100% of their money if they are not satisfied with the episode.

Pikemann Urge said...

I watched both 1) and 2) and found them both useful. I appreciated what you said in the interview about whether or not giving food to Africans is actually beneficial.

You can imagine the bleeding heart types protest with a "how could you think like that?". This sort of attitude obstructs charity just as much as selfishness does.

Giving by itself - without reason - is just as unhelpful as being a miser. In fact it seems to be the case that a lot of giving is done out of insecurity, not out of genuine concern.

Throwing money at people won't make them rich. Nor will it make the problem just go away, as so many hope.

camspiers said...

Don,

I really enjoyed the podcast :)