I need to finish up my summary of day two of the conference, but I’m just so tired from work. Oh well. Here goes.
Day two kicked off with Peter Singer. Rather than try to summarise what he was saying, and thus most likely get things horribly wrong, I’ll just say that I remember feeling very satisfied with his philosophies on ethics without religion. It made sense, his arguments were clear, and you can read more about his thoughts here. One quote from him:
“If what God says is good, then morality is arbitrary.” – Peter Singer.
I wasn’t particularly impressed with Kylie Sturgess’ talk (I know, I’ll probably be ostracised for this), but her data was fairly sparse and poorly presented, and the arguments themselves were a bit vague. It was a sort of interesting premise for a study: supernatural beliefs and gender (and religion), and I do share her observation that most women I know believe in horoscopes whereas guys don’t. But as a scientist I found myself underwhelmed by the scope of the study, and the data, and not really sure what the point was, or why it is significant. Guess I wasn’t that interested in a study that told me what I already knew from my own observations and one that didn’t really present any insights.
Robin Williams was great, though, as expected. I think this about sums it up:
“I can give you a devastating argument against religion in two words: Senator Fielding. Richard Dawkins said his IQ is lower than an earthworm, but I think earthworms are useful.”
Jamie Kilstein was hilarious (I’m not sure of the exact quote, but at one point he said something like, “And if we see a Hummer, we will key it up so bad it will look like Wolverine made it his whore!”, in the context of starting a ‘religion of the Smiling Vagina’…)
But really, Dawkins was the highlight, and he made some excellent soundbites for the media. Something about a “divine knob-twiddler” went down extremely well. Also, “I don’t actually call myself an atheist… I am an atheist in the same way I am an a-fairy-ist.” Brilliant stuff.
And here is a link to a video of a conversation between PZ Myers, God, and a banana.
All in all, a really fun weekend in Melbourne. I made some lovely new friends, and fell in love with the city all over again.