Category Archives: Introductions

Entertainment, Introductions, Random

Me me me, it’s all about me.

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Not wanting to be the chap to rock the boat, I thought I would follow in the footsteps of my fellow contributors and introduce myself.

My name is Rob, I’m 26 and 3/4 years old and I’m in training to become a teacher. Here I am playing the drums dressed as a shark.

I’m currently studying for my BSc degree in Natural Sciences (high five Laurens) and will be teaching a short Introduction to Evolutionary Biology course in Spring. Other than Biology I have a healthy interest in Religion and Philosophy and was even lucky enough to teach this at A-level for 6 months last year.

Other than my academic pursuits, I play the drums for a nautical themed ska-punk-folk-anti folk-bugle blowing outfit known to few as the seas of mirth, and I also do a fair amount of writing, involving reviews, promotional features and a book. My book is about how I’m joining 12 religions over 12 months. I have only just started. It’s terrifying.

The reason for me wanting to blog here, is that I want to do better at knowing things. I have always found that being shown to be wrong is an entirely wonderful way of learning, so putting my thoughts down and having you chaps show my errors and expand on certain areas was too good an opportunity to miss. Saying that however, I hope I can provide you all with something with at least a smattering of interest.

The topics I will most likely babble about will be science and the love of science, philosophy, psychology, politics and a whole plethora of other such things. I can be quite faddy so best not to set too much in stone now.

Can’t wait.

Introductions

Belated Introduction

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Just a brief pause from my series on critical thinking, to follow in the footsteps of my fellow League of Reason bloggers and post a brief introduction to myself, my interests and this blog.

As you can tell from my rather unimaginative username, my name is Laurens. I am a 25-year-old male from the UK. I have recently completed an Access to HE Diploma in Natural Sciences which covered Chemistry, Biology and Ecology. I hope at some point in the future to pursue a degree in a scientific area, although this dream has been halted by finance issues. My main scientific interest lies in evolution, and I wrote a dissertation on the evolution of bipedalism in hominins (I may post this here at some point, if you’re interested?). I find the natural history of our planet, and the diversity of life extremely fascinating, so expect some future posts on this topic.

I am also quite a creative person. I studied art previously, and I enjoy painting and drawing. I am a guitarist/singer and post covers and original songs on my youtube channel. And am also in the process of learning card magic—which I feel ties in strongly with some principles of scepticism; mainly through providing insight into how our minds can be fooled. I am toying with the idea of elucidating this further in a series of blog posts here, depending on whether you guys think that would be interesting or not.

If you have any questions about me, or this blog let me know in the discussion thread.

Cheers,

Laurens

Introductions

This is me!

15 Comments

He_Who_Is_Nobody will hopefully have started a trend: He talked about himself. And his goals on this blog. And he gave us some insight into his future blog plans.

I’ll follow suit.

This is me.

Just so you can put a face to the name.

Right, so where do I come from? Well, I’m a 22 year old student at the Pedagogical Highschool of Vienna, studying “English as a foreign language” and “Geography and Economics” (G&E). I studied “History and Political Sciences” and G&E for 2.5 years at the University of Vienna. I’m training to become a teacher and should be finished next year. Hopefully.
I also take some courses (both online and IRL) on biology.

Currently, I have five post series in mind:
1) Making education a priority. I’ll talk about why schools/Unis/kindergarten/etc. are the way they are and what we should do to improve them.
2) Politics. I already started on that here. Basically, I know a lot of politicians, especially in the EU, so I have a bit of insight. I’ll counter Euro-sceptics and lash out at idiot politicians.
3) Medicine. My flatmate studies medicine and I like to read about it, so between us we’ve got quite a bit covered. I also have a few doctors in the family: My Aunt and Uncle, plus their son who’s about to start studying it, my other Aunt and Uncle, her Father, plus her mother’s a pharmacist. The intent here is to look at some alternative medicine, at some good medicine and at the business and politics of medicine.
4) Science in the news. I’m not sure if I’ll get to that, but it’s one of my pet peeves. Idiot journalists who butcher real science. Gah, hate.
5) Biology. I’ll say upfront that I have no degree in biology, but I’ve got some people who will look through these particular posts. Here, I mainly want to talk about some obscure creationist claims and I may post monthly paper reviews, depending on the time I have.

I’ll also be in the show, I hope, so see you there!

I hope you’ll enjoy my posts. If there’s anything else you want me to post about, any questions you might have: PM me and I’ll (probably) be happy to comply.

Anthropology, Archaeology, Introductions, Paleontology, Science

First blog post

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Seeing as how this will be my first blog post, I thought I would start by giving my CV.

I am currently a contract archaeologist; my specialty is human and faunal remains (I am not using that much today). I have been on excavations in Hawaii, Spain, and in my great state of New Mexico. I obtained my Bachelor of Science with honors in Biological Anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 2010. My senior thesis was about dental microwear on extant primate populations (it can also be used to reconstruct paleo-environments). I one day hope to return to school and continue studying skeletal anatomy, paleoecology, and cladistics. I also volunteer at my local natural history museum, which I also hope to obtain a larger role in soon (hopefully specimen preparation work and excavations). To sum it up, I like bones and fossils.

My main Ethernet hobby, as many of you already know from practically all my forum posts, is debunking creationism. With part of this blog, I am hoping to add just a little more firepower to the pro-science side of this argument, not only in biology, but also in all fields that creationism tries to distort and tamper with.

The other part of this blog I am hoping to answer general questions people have about archaeology, anthropology, and paleontology; a basic “ask an archaeologist/anthropologist/paleontologist” blog. I would welcome all questions; the main thrust of my volunteer work is answering questions from the public. Thus, any questions are welcome and will be answered by me (hopefully).

For the most part that is what I would like to blog about; I may blog about other things, such as how great New Mexico is, but look forward to creationism debunking and archeo-babble.

I guess this is enough for my first post. I hope everyone will enjoy my blog as much as I enjoy writing it.

Have a nice day. 🙂

Introductions

They’ll let anyone do this: Introducing Squawk

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Greetings to the League of Reason.

For better or for worse I have been installed as a member of the blogging team. Many of you will be familiar with my posts on the boards, though to date my more significant contribution has been in the live chat.  With this additional role on the blog I hope to stimulate discussion on a variety of topics of interest to members of the league.

But what to do with this first post? Not an easy question to answer, so I suppose I ought to introduce myself to those who have not had reason to interact with me to date. I’m from the UK and was raised as a Catholic in accordance with my Mothers religious belief. I attended faith schools from the age of 4 until 18, one Church of England, the others Catholic. My religiosity throughout that time was inversely proportional to my ability to think critically and my exposure to new information.

Continue reading They’ll let anyone do this: Introducing Squawk →

Introductions, Reason, Science

Introducing an old hand

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Long gone are the days when YouTube stars like djarm67 and AndromedasWake would broadcast their thoughts to our humble league. With the web log lying dormant (what, we have a blog!?) it was time for a rag-tag team of forum mods and chat ops to pick up the flag of reason and march bravely forward into the blogosphere. *My idea*

Most of you probably know me already, or have at least argued with me over some trivial detail in an unimportant thread. I’ve been here since the earliest days of the League of Reason and it’s become one of my favourite online communities. I hail from New Zealand which is a nicely sized nation in the South Pacific. I consider myself very lucky to have been born surrounded by all this natural beauty – see Lord of the Rings for your walk in the local park. I’m still finishing my university education but have so far completed a degree in biotechnology.

I’m a lifelong atheist but it wasn’t until the final years of college that I got into scepticism. I’m a member of the NZ skeptics and do what I can to help out on worthy causes. I might as well pimp the new sceptical podcast: The CUSP . If I have to choose a label I’d go with freethinker because I think that best sums up the way I (want to) approach new information and ideas. I’d also like to consider myself a fierce proponent of all things scientific and have done my best to inform people on matters involving evolution, global warming, vaccines, homeopathy, and other alternative medicines.

Enough of what you agree with me about, where can we have an argument? I think objective morality exists, GM agriculture is a good idea, and support the wars on Iraq and Christmas. Threads can be found around the LoR and other sites in which I (attempt to) defend these positions. I love to read and would probably class myself as a bit of a bibliophile. Whether you agree with my positions or not, I hope my blog posts will make you think about current issues facing atheists, freethinkers, and sceptics and that you get something out of them.

Before I came to this site I had never heard of Carl Sagan so I’ll finish with a quote from him that goes right to the heart of my philosophy: “It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” I think that’s exactly right.

Blog: Indoctrinating Freethought
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Aught3 and http://www.youtube.com/user/Belikescopes

Introductions, Philosophy, Reason

About Knowledge

16 Comments

Hey there .

It’s very late and I’m tired but I said I will have a blog by Sunday and if I don’t deliver I will OCD my brains out over it. I’m awesome like that. So please excuse my possible ramble.

In this blog I will mainly adress the Theists. I heard many of them saying that they KNOW certain things in regards to God and what they say to be “the Creation’ . Even in the recent debate between Thunderf00t and Ray Comfort, Ray said a couple of times that (unlike Thunderf00t) he KNOWS what the truth is.

I will try to argue why this claim cannot possibly hold water.

First of all, what does “to know’ mean anyway?  Can we say that we know anything at all ? I would say we can. For instance, I KNOW that there are more than two people writing on this site. I know this because I can count, I can read, I personally know more than two of them, etc. The point is, I can say I KNOW this because it is in my immediate and direct observation.

I can also say I know that Human and Chimpanzee DNA is about 98.5 percent identical. This is clearly not in my immediate and direct observation but I can still say I KNOW it because I have sufficient data proving it. All facts gathered through observation and experiment point to this conclusion, none of them point against it.

But let’s try another example. Not to long ago, if anyone asked me to define a triangle without mentioning its angles, I would have said that any given 3 points that are not in a straight line form a triangle . And I thought I KNOW that the sum of the interior angles of any triangle is 180 degrees. But I was wrong. This is true if the given triangle is in Euclidian space. But if someone could draw a triangle in the near neighbourhood of a Black Hole with such intense gravity forces, the interior angles of that triangle would NOT add up to 180 degrees. The results are very different depending on how Space bends. So suddenly, even if I was certain I KNOW something, at some point I realized that my so called knowledge was in fact a belief.  And I was wrong in my belief because I was ignorant of the data.

I still have certain beliefs. For instance, I believe that Quantum Mechanic could be eventually proven not to contradict Determinism. I don’t believe that the atoms act randomly but rather that at atomic level there might be laws we haven’t discovered yet and variables we cannot calculate. Which, imho, is not to say that the atoms are not subjected to the cause and effect rules. And I believe that (strongly I may say) because EVERYTHING in the observable Universe is subjected to the cause and effect rule. But I am willing to admit that I don’t KNOW that and there is a possibility I might be wrong. And if, at some point, all evidence will lead to the conclusion that atoms can act randomly, I will change my belief. I highly doubt this will happen, what I am trying to say is that I don’t rule out this option because I realize this is something I believe and NOT something I know.

How about God ? When you say you KNOW God is real and He created everything, what do you base it on?  On a book with origins and authors very dubious (to say the least). God is not in your immediate and direct observation and there is no collected data to support his existence. He cannot be proven through observation and experiment. So you are left with your book. And how do you know that your book is the Truth ? Because it says so in your book. Can you spot the problem with this ? (hint : it starts with a “c’ and it ends with “ircular’)

And you may say now that according to this logic, Atheists cannot say they KNOW there is no God. Which is correct and I don’t know one single Atheist who says so. An Atheist will say he does not BELIVE in a God. The difference between the logic  of an Atheist and the logic Theist is that the first doesn’t believe because of lack of evidence while the former believes DESPITE  the lack of evidence.

Where I am going with this is that you cannot say that you KNOW your God is real. You only BELIEVE he is real. And if you accept that what you call knowledge is in fact a belief, you will also have to accept the possibility that you might be wrong.

I’m just sayin’

Criss

Introductions

Compulsory self-conscious introductory post

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A few weeks ago the League sent out a call. They were seeking new bloggers to join them in their fight against the forces of injustice. This was the moment I had been waiting for, a chance to rise phoenix like from the ashes of obscurity, to take my own person style of vigilante skepticism to the forefront of the war against the credulous, nefarious, discriminatory horde. No longer would I have to fight alone, now the League would have my back. And so I answered that call, and yesterday the League invited me to join their ranks, my excitement was boundless.

 

My excitement ebbed some what when I discovered I had just joined the League of Reason rather than the Justice League of America or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I guess it will do. I will however have to return the spandex bodysuit and red y-fronts that I purchased specially. I’m keeping the cowl however as it’s dead sexy.

 

Seriously I am unbelievably honoured to have been made a part of this blog. Honoured and incredibly intimidated at the same time. There are some seriously heavy hitters involved in this thing. I love the stuff that these guys, and gals, come up with and I am right now feeling rather out of my depth. I actually think Superman and his friends would be less disconcerting right now. Gulp.

 

Anyway my first task as a newbie League member is to introduce myself. I am RabbitPirate, so named because pirates are awesome and rabbits are, er, fluffy! Unlike many of the bloggers here I do not come to the League of Reason with a massive Youtube following. In fact if you were to visit my page you would discover I have no subscribers, no views and only one video…which is actually a repost of something someone else made. What I do instead is blog, and try to write books, but mainly blog. I have been blogging for a number of years now about anything and everything that peaks my interest. However recently I have turned my attention away from such important issues as what I did at the weekend and how much my job sucks on to stories relating to science, religion, skepticism and critical thinking. It is these areas where my passion lies.

 

I live in the UK just outside of the university city of Cambridge. Alas however that is about as close as I have ever come to higher education as I decided instead to jump straight into the fun filled world of IT support, a decision I regret more and more with every passing day. I spent most of the first twenty odd years of my life as a Christian and even considered going into fulltime ministry work. While I no longer hold the beliefs of my youth I would not describe myself as an atheist, partly because I don’t really like labels, after having the label “Christian” tell people everything about me for so long, and partly because I think it would make my Mum cry if I did. That said if I was forced to call myself anything I would probably go with “skeptic”.

 

When not blogging I like to spend my time reading, writing stories I never actually finish, watching stupidly large amounts of sci-fi on TV, going to the cinema (honestly could I be more of a geek) and arguing with Ray Comfort on his blog…and by arguing I mean he says something stupid, I correct him and he ignores me completely. Meh, it’s a hobby.

 

Well that’s me, hopefully by the time I get to my first real post I will have thought of something interesting to say as right now I’m drawing a complete blank.

 

Thanks for your time,

 

RabbitPirate

Introductions

Introducing SchrodingersFinch

9 Comments

Greetings members of The League,

I’m SchrodingersFinch, but you can just call me Finch.

I come from a world you may not understand, or more specifically, Finland. Finland is the second greatest place on Earth. In Finland women are beautiful, men alcoholics and evolution a fact. Ironically, Finland is one of the most secular countries in the world but we also have a state church. Everyone who reads the Bible, as I’m sure you all do, should know that 21st century Finnish Evangelical Lutheranism is the one true Christian faith (don’t listen to the Swedish spawn of Satan!).

We Finns are a peculiar lot. We’re shy and don’t talk much, but when we do it’s usually something important. I hope this is also the case with blogging (or at least the latter part), but I can’t promise you anything. Writing a blog is something completely new to me, so please bear with me until I get the hang of it.

I feel honoured to be a part of this blog. As you can see, there are some big names and lots of talent involved. I only hope I can match up. When it comes to writing skills I’m definitely not the best since English isn’t even my first language. But I guarantee I will never confuse the word “their” with “they’re” or “your” with “you’re”.

Here are some relevant facts about me. I’m an atheist (gasp!), but more of the moderate kind. I am, however, strongly against creationism and other such nonsense, although I rarely encounter them in real life. I am also a science geek and proud of it! My main interests are physics and biology, but I also enjoy mathematics, chemistry and all the innumerable varieties that exist. As most of you probably know, I’m a moderator on the League of Reason forums and you can also find me on Youtube. Feel free to PM me if you have anything to say or ask. I usually have time to respond to all of them.

Hopefully I’ll have something more interesting to write about soon. If I had a cool catch phrase like all the big Youtubers this would perhaps be a good place to put it.

SchrodingersFinch

Introductions

This is JRChadwick.

8 Comments

When I first came to YouTube, the activities reached no further than that medium.  I have been thoroughly impressed by the thousands of us from all over the planet who have come together with purposes reaching farther than I could have ever expected.

I never expected to become a blogger.  Especially not one associated with musicians, a lawyer, an Astrophysicist, a Biologist, and a teacher.  I do not have any such title.  I am a computer major and a math tutor.  My educational goals have been delayed by several events I won’t get into, but I still plan to transfer to the University of California Davis under their B.S. degree program of Computer Science and Engineering.

I am not sure exactly what I will blog on.  I do have a varied set of interests.  I can probably whip out something interesting on health and fitness, cooking, or PC repair.  I’ll see what inspires me!

I have given some thought as to the purpose of people like me in this venue.  What I mean by people like me, are individuals who lack the education of AronRa, AndromedasWake, Thunder00t, etc. however we still accept real science and work to both promote and defend it from those who wish to undermine it for their own religious and political agenda and send us back into the dark ages.  And I really mean that.  If the Creationists ever were to win, that is exactly what we would have; another dark age.

Anyway, the point of the “everyman’s” anti-Creationism videos that I think is under valued is that they help refute the “Evil Evolutionist Conspiracy” card.  You do not need to be a trained scientist to either debunk Creationism or have a modest understanding of science.  I am here to prove that we are not simply putting blind faith in “Evolutionism” because we just hate God… or what ever psychological projection Kirk Cameron, NephilimFree, or theanswersofnwo3 are trying to plug.

Well, that’s it for my first post.  I look forward to what this newest venue.  I would like to thank AndromedasWake and CosmicSpork for their hard work in making this website a fast success.  And I would also like to thank the hundreds of people out there who have put their trust in me.  Thank you for reading, once again, my name is JRChadwick.

P.S. Don’t worry, I won’t end every post with that line, I just thought it was a nice reference to my channel!