* Why :) won't Blagojevich resign? While pundits ponder why Gov. Blagojevich is holding on to his office, you heard it here first at BEL that apparently he's told the Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn that he's going to have to put up something of value before Blagojevich resigns. "If you think you're going to walk into this office with nothing in your hand, you're nuts, this office is worth a fortune, so put up or forget it." - ;)
* Snow in Houston and Orleans: Tuesday we at KGOV.com reported a temperature of minus 81 degrees in Siberia, while I was interviewing the author of It's the S-U-N, Not Your SUV, John Zyrkowski, who opposes the global warming hype along with the 31,000 U.S. scientists who signed the petition against the global warming scare, and we reported that America can expect cold and snow, due to the minus 81 degrees forecast for Siberia. Now on Thursday, while there is much more cold coming from the arctic through next week, it's already snowing even in New Orleans of all places, and in Houston (see caption) earlier in the season than it has in 64 years, per the Weather Underground: "broad area of snowfall... ties the mark for the earliest snow fall in the Houston area [from Dec. 10] 1944."
* Comes Now Atheist Dan Barker: the media has been quoting atheist Dan Barker regarding the atheist plaque set up in the capitol in Seattle near the nativity scene. When Dan Barker was a teenager, he was involved with the ministry of Kathryn Kuhlman, one of a group of so-called faith healers. (See a BEL listener, TOL's Crow, who initially compared Bob to Benny Hinn until...) After interviewing atheists including:
- ABC's Reginald Finley, called The Infidel Guy, from ABC's Wife Swap program;
- TheologyOnline's psychologist Zakath;
- TOL's member who calls himself Fool;
- John Henderson who wrote the book God.com; and,
- Michael Shermer, an editor with Scientific American and the Skeptic Society who in in this famous 73-second excerpt on BEL denied that the sun is a light, illustrating that it's tough debating atheists when they're hesitant to admit to even the most obvious common ground;
now comes Dan Barker, a director with the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
* Truth, the Senses, the Universe, Sun and Moon: Acknowledging the difficulty in proving a negative, Bob Enyart stipulates at the outset that atheist Dan Barker would not have to worry about whether God was out on a star in a galaxy far, far away, but rather, Bob and Dan could discuss the evidence before us all, right here and right now.
Bob then asks Dan Barker whether or not objective Truth exists. The atheists who will acknowledge that objective truth exists often give so many qualifiers that it can be hard to know if they believe in objective reality. Dan stressed, with Bob's concurrence, that "the word truth is not a thing;" that is, truth is not a physical object. After Bob and Dan seemed to agree that Truth and objective reality exists, later in the discussion Dan seemed to backtrack, and suggest that everything could be an illusion including Barker's very own existence. Yikes! With this Bob blew up in frustration. Not really. Actually, Bob simply reminded Dan of Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" and when Dan said that perhaps everything was an illusion, Bob replied, "Dan, you can assert that you think that I am an illusion, perhaps you think I'm in a dream you are having; but no, you cannot assert that you are an illusion; that YOU do not exist." And Bob indicated Dan's toying with the possibility that perhaps he didn't exist was further evidence that he was equivocating earlier regarding the existence of truth. In the end, Bob was thankful that he and Dan could once again agree that Dan existed, so that the show could proceed.
