Breakfast TV atheism

It seems that someone in channel 9 must have seen the 'Faith Off' and thought that it was a bit of allright. Soon after the videos went to air on News.com, we were contacted by the Kerry Anne show about being interviewed as a panel.

The interview went allright, Kerry Anne was a bit hard on the Muslim girl and the questions were quite divergent from those that we were expecting (we were emailed a list of questions that were the same as those we had answered in the news.com interview), but all in all, I think it came out allright.

Before the show, there was quite an interesting discussion going on between the Catholic, the Buddhist, the Hindi and I about the psychology of faith, creation stories and world youth day. It was a much more interesting discussion than the one on air and we were all a lot more candid when we weren't being filmed.

The videos have been put up on youtube (thanks John) and have been split into two blocks to remove the ads (no free advertising's getting on this blog!)

This is the first section:


And here's the second bit:

Faith Off!

It's taken it's time, but the Faith Off clips have finally been put up on the news.com site.

The videos are a series of clips compiled from individual interviews into sections that each addresses a single topic. The topics are Sex Before Marriage, Homosexuality, Life After Death, Fitting In, Theory of Evolution and World Youth Day.

I am quite happy with the editing, which didn’t misrepresent my opinions like so many of these types of things do. My quotes include “As far as we know, when you’re dead, you’re dead. So you may as well make the most out of living” and “Evolution is as close to a fact as any scientific theory can be."

The site is kinda cool, there's a nifty interactive component through which you can learn a little more about each person's position on religion by clicking on them.

I had a great time doing the interview and found the interviewer to be quite receptive and interested about my position. After talking to the other participants, it seems that I was the only one to deviate from the predefined list of questions and that some of the others were referring to their notes throughout the interview so as not to misrepresent their dogma.

I am also happy with some of the responses of Richard, the Buddhist, especially his response to the World Youth Day; “in my mind, if it’s just a lot of people getting together and hearing the same old dogma and having that reinforced to the expense and to the exclusion of people using their own minds […] then they might just perpetuate a lot of the division we have in society”

Just an interesting fact, only one of us eats pork. Can you guess who?