Truth course

***Jonathan Wallace has asserted that proclaiming some rights as 'natural' is another way of saying 'Stop asking questions' and 'I have won this argument.' "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." [equal as opposed to royal/commoner, but we want government to treat us as equal and create equal rights]

** From an Enlightenment or Positivist point of view, which is Hume's point of view, and mine, there is simply no avoiding the conclusion that the human race is mad. There are scarcely any human beings who do not have some lunatic beliefs or other to which they attach great importance. People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx. David Stove, The Plato Cult, 1991

**http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYodDH4qZQo video, from their prescription drug campaign in 2005

**https://secure.npsite.org/cu/site/Advocacy?JServSessionIdr012=2idtrp4ea1.app43a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1732 Toy Safety is No Laughing Matter

**Hospers, John.  An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis. Third Edition.  Prentice-Hall, 1988.  The best.  Hospers is very strong on linquistic and conceptual analysis.  I challenge anyone to still believe that supernatural propositions make cognitive sense after reading his, "Meaning and Truth in Religion."  His second edition (but dropped in the third) contains a marvelous dialogue between a person who believes that "necessary being" makes sense and a person who believes that it is nonsense.  Beautiful.

**show propaganda and historical sites: not special defender's sites.  Assign short paper to conclude benefit or harm. Ask how best to assess whether Carson was right or wrong: that will not be the methodology used by the students.  Ask which sources used those policies.  Eventually, let them see how they were hoodwinked by propaganda.

**Note how pesticide resistance is not addressed: the real reason agricultural bans were instituted.

*Show how a simple feedback system cannot be properly argued with a yea or nay approach.  Relate to a real-world example.  Bring back this theme for essentially all real-world discussions.

**tasks -- what were the claims, how long did it take to refute them, who made the claims, who publicized the claims, who made money how,

*Alex Carey, "Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty"

*even skeptics have their own idiocies:

**      Maher on vaccines: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=1251

**              "Unfortunately, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years since I became more involved with the skeptical movement, it’s that being an agnostic, atheist, or skeptic is no guarantee against falling for pseudoscience."

*Arthur Goldwag, "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more"

*At about 2:40 into this hysterical Penn & Teller episode would claim that labeling and certification are the ONLY difference between "organic" and non-organic.   Well, that and price. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhBKtjDtTVk

*http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2007/06/19/the-alternative-science-respectability-checklist/