Atheiskeptihumanist Forums

Filmmaker, Roger Nygard, joins us to to talk about the big questions and discuss his new documentary, The Nature of Existence. Roger put a questionnaire on his site asking visitors to discuss what they believe, and encourages you all to check it out and give your own answers to life's big questions.

Before the interview, Eli and Lamar discuss some of the crazy stuff they've seen in the news lately, such as: Billy Joel's daughter attempting suicide with a homeopathic overdose, one man standing up to the Christian infiltration of the military, new science that totally proves God's existence, a new kind of mile high club, and Pelosi pandering to papists.

Also on this show, just before dedicating it to the now deceased heavy metal legend Ronnie James Dio, Eli and Lamar offer a farewell toast to, Joe, their fellow podcaster and co-founder. The three parted company last week and this is the first episode after the line-up change. You can still hear Joe on the Atheist News podcast where he and Brother Richard continue to dish on the crazies while Eli and Lamar forge ahead with Chariots of Iron.

Sorry to hear Joe is not in on COI anymore. People do change overtime, and I understand that we must all go the direction our paths lead. I am one of those few dozen that choose to listen to COI and AN both.

I resent that he touts the symbolism and (Free) Masonry. That symbolism was all due to the lack of the common person being literate. Our society before literacy was wide spread, used symbols in everything. It was the easiest way to convey information to those who could not read. They could see a symbol (picture) and know exactly the inference of it. Free Masonry utilized that because that was the same period of time that Free Masonry was born. I was taught about the history of Free Masonry when I joined my local Blue Lodge. The use of symbols is rampant in our government. It is on our money, in the architecture of the buildings, and on many of the documents as well. I really dislike it when Free Masonry is painted in that bad light. It's like saying the Templars were the early Free Masons. I have not found any evidence of this anywhere. It has all been conjecture (based on the information I've been presented with). Their sky daddy religion is fraught with ass loads of symbols.

The flight attendants better keep that evangelical shit to themselves! I'd become very unhappy because of the sky daddy too. It would cost them their jobs, because they are representing the companies views. That would probably cause a publicly traded company to lose money, since a customer who was offended could conceivably sue, as well as the creating a hostile work environment if you proselytize to your fellow workers. This is some of what is happening to me at my work place... the proselytizing.



Keep on keeping on!

I loved this episode, it was a very interesting discussion with Roger Nygard. However, this is just a short note to address the point made about France's military history, specifically with regards to World War 1. It was suggested that France wasn't really involved apart from getting wrecked by the two superpowers of Britain and Prussia fighting on their soil. France most certainly was involved in this war, they entered the war right from the beginning as part of the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia. French casualties exceeded those of Britain and Austria and were a greater proportion of their population than those of Germany, being the highest proportional casualties of all the major powers.

I don't like to be pedantic, I just thought I'd let you know before you're assailed by an irate Frenchman.

I may have mis-stated my point, and I'll issue a correction next show, the amount of fighting that took place on french soil and the destruction and losses suffered was radically disproportionate to their involvement in the conflict.

Edit-

I did not issue the correction "next show", this tidbit got overlooked... apologies.

Travlyn, you're dead-on about symbolism, and it goes even deeper. This is something I've been studying a bit for my dissertation, and I was discussing it earlier today, so forgive me but I'm about to get nerdy.

Some of this is common sense, but every letter of every alphabet today, outside of Asian logogramatic scripts, derived from Egyptian via Phoenician. The Egyptian glyphs were clearly images denoting the thing they referred to, but as different cultures abstracted those rarefied representations, the images became stripped down to what we recognize as letters. But for a long time letters retained some of their symbolic meanings that extended beyond their phonic valences. Take the letter A; it was originally written upside-down from how it looks today --∀ -- and represented the aurochs, a now-extinct giant species of cattle. The letter M came from the word for water, mem, and was meant to look like waves, while the word for N, nahash, represented a snake.

So what, simple enough, right? Yeah, but what's interesting is that before literacy was so widespread, when it was still the domain of the shamans and bureaucrats and functionaries, they still retained some of that sense of symbolic meaning. That makes considering some old symbols and documents kind of like dealing with puzzles that need decoding in order to grasp the full meaning. I've been looking into the letter D, which at one point represented a fish -- dag -- and later came to represent door -- daleth -- and how that symbolism is worked into Pythagoras' cosmology; the letter looked very similar to the vesica piscis (fish), and long before Jesus, Pythagoras both considered the fish sacred and referred to the vesica piscis as a doorway between the world of spirit and the world of matter -- from fish to door. He basically encapsulates the evolution of the letter in his cosmology.

Such meanings and resonances may be one reason why literacy was so often reserved for the select few; if they thought language and letters had a kind of cosmic, magical quality, then it'd take all kinds of both intellectual and moral training to be trusted with it. It was workers/builders like the Phoenicians who started to democratize alphabets more or less to keep records and effectively do their jobs as they boated around the Mediterranean. That's also one of the reasons the poets of the Gaelic Order were targeted during the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland; they were just below the nobility in status, and their facility with language was (irrationally) feared. But as I understand it -- and this is where I get a bit hazy and you may be able to offer something -- the democratization of language and symbols wasn't always looked well upon, which eventually resulted in groups like the Masons using symbols/language in coded ways so as to protect themselves, in a sort of equal-but-opposite way as those past shamans, bureaucrats and functionaries. Does that sound about right?

By the way, what's the Blue Lodge? I don't know too much about Masonry, but my understanding is no atheists allowed, although one branch out of France (Grand Orient?) does allow atheists. I was looking into this recently when I came across an article comparing Masonry to the martial arts.

Blue Lodge refers to the lodges of Freemasonry. This is mostly an American term as the lodges elsewhere are usually called craft lodges. These are the lodges that confer the first 3 degrees of Freemasonry on a person: Apprenticeship, Fellowcraft, and then Master Mason. These then allow for further progression into the York Rite and Scottish Rite, as well as Shriners (like the children hospitals and the funny little red fez's) and Eastern Star (allows the women to participate in a special group), DeMolay (for young men 14-21?), International Order of Rainbow Girls, Jobs Daughters, etc. There is even a special lodge type for blacks, Prince Lodge. I've never really understood that except that back in the day you had to be a free man to join and there was a stigma with the whole slavery bullshit. How we forget how much white slavery was happening back before the abolitionist movement that started in England just prior to 1800. Wikipedia does a decent job of giving an overall explanation of Freemasonry with appropriate links.

Admittance for membership has a few rules, but the foremost being a belief in a single deity. Depending on how you define yourself as an atheist would then determine your eligibility. I did go to my lodge and inform them that I do not believe in any deities, but the did not strike my name from the rolls. I merely have to pay dues and I believe there has to be a vote by the brothers in good standing to allow me back in to lodge. Had I continues to pay my yearly dues or bought a life membership, I could have gone back at anytime and they would never be the wiser except when they pray.

I am happy to answer anymore questions you may have to the utmost of my ability.