Consciencebound

Archive for the ‘Videos’ Category

Gotta love Tim Minchin. He has quickly become my favorite comedian

I came across this site some time ago and just stumbled on it again as I was going through my bookmarks. What a great program. The site is called Closer to Truch and is a collection of very well made videos that are made for TV and cover topics on God, Cosmos and Consciousness. This particular program is about 30 minutes long and covers the vastness of the universe.

The host of the show paints himself as a seeker of truth who is humbled by the sheer size of the universe. I identify greatly with him in many of his shows on this site. I love nature and the more I learn, the more interested I am to learn more about it through science. I am humbled myself at not just the size of the universe itself but also the enormity of the amount of knowledge that there is to be discovered about it and just how small I am in relationship to it all. I look back over my adult life and see how much I have learned over the years and see that I am really no closer to having a “full knowledge” of the world then I was 20 years ago. With Socrates, I can say, Read the rest of this entry »

Here is an 8 part youtube video series of a debate on evolution and intelligent design. I was pleasantly surprised by the exchange for the most part even though it is dated. The debate was in 1997 and so there has been a lot of development in this discussion since that time but it was still good and it makes you think. This is a 5 on 4 debate with 9 relevant and highly educated and very well prepared speakers. On the ID side you have William F. Buckley Jr, William Demski, Michael Behe, Phillip Johnson and David Berlinksi and on the evolution side you have Ken Miller, Bary Lynn, Eugenie C. Scott and Michael Ruse. In my opinion, the star of the debate is clearly Ken Miller but there was still many good contributions to the discussion on both sides.

I saw this in Skeptic.com today. Good video by Michael Shermer on some basic principles for discerning between true and false claims.

Interesting discussion on morality from a youtube vlogger. Most memorable quote is at the very end of the video,

The problem is not that people don’t believe in objective morality, the problem is… that they do.

Read the rest of this entry »

How do you parent your children if you are not religious? As a person who used to be religious, this is always a question that I think about. How do I teach my kids to think for themselves and to learn to understand what other people believe? When it comes down to it, I don’t want to indoctrinate my children in my (current) beliefs necessarily, I just want to give them the tools that they need to be able to enter the world and make a decision for themselves about how the world works and what worldview they should adopt.

The book parenting beyond belief deals with these questions and more. I actually have not read this book yet but I just ordered it here after hearing much about it. I have also been watching some of the videos that the author puts out on youtube on his youtube channel here. You can also find his web site which has lots of helpful information here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a cool video that I came across explaining evolution.

I love that the internet is full of so much information that 15 years ago, was only available to a very limited amount of people. This video is taken from academicearth.org which like The Teaching Company (teach12.com) has classes from prominent teachers and professors across the world that you can watch or listen to only academicearth.org is free. This video is of a class at Yale university which is an introduction to the Old Testament of the Bible. If you are interested in understanding more about the Bible as a literary book, this is a great video to watch. Some surprising things that you might learn is that the Old Testament is NOT:

1) The OT is NOT a Single Book with a single point of view but rather a collection of many different writings from divergent points of view that are often not in agreement.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a video version of one of my more popular posts entitled truth seeking. Let me know what you think.

The question of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most important doctrine of the conservative Christian religion. When you read Christian apologists, they make it seem as if the resurrection of Christ if one of the most well attested events of ancient history and that a person would be a fool not to believe it.  Most of us are honestly not qualified to make a determination in our own right so we have to depend on scholars that we read and learn from to make our decision.  This debate between the well known apologist William Lane Craig and the well known Bart Ehrman is in my opinion a wonderful exchange to listen to.  Both men are highly educated and respected in their positions and both are great communicators and debators.  I am often frustrated with debates because at times you get two individuals with very different backgrounds and areas of expertise and they both make different points that do not fully engage one another.  Although these two gentelman are not of the exact same background, they are both authorities in their fields and their fields of study are very close.

It is my opinion that Bart Ehrman wins this debate hands down and shows the great difficulty that we have when trying to understand a claim of the miraculous from 2000 years ago.  I think he does a good job explaining these subjects at a level that a common person can follow and understand.  The debate can be found here if you want to listen to it or here if you would like to read the full transcript.  Check it out and let me know what you think in a comment below.

Read the rest of this entry »