Famous Las Vegas magician and outspoken atheist Penn Jillette has a new book out, it's part autobiography and part a conversation about atheism, from what I've seen so far it looks like a reasonable read. At the moment Penn is doing the rounds of talk shows in the USA promoting this new book and last night I happened to catch him on the Piers Morgan show (see YouTube version here) I haven't been paying attention to Piers Morgan much lately, I had some vague notion that he was popular in the states but nothing more than that. I had no idea that he was such a moron, either that or he plays at being moronic very well indeed.
Take a look at the interview and see how many basic logical fallacies you can spot in his arguments against atheism, I spotted at least half a dozen (argumentum ad populum, non sequitur, straw man etc..). Morgan declared his hand almost immediately, i.e. that he was a believing Catholic and attempted to goad Jillette into a negative reaction by being aggressive, argumentative and talking over Jillette from the outset. Jillette on the other hand handled it really well, he remained calm and polite and simply neutralised Morgan's ridiculous arguments with "logic 101", although it was clear that Morgan didn't understand why his arguments were stupid. I like Jillette a lot more after seeing this, he's cool, as for Piers Morgan all I can say is I'm glad he's working in the USA and I don't have to listen to his idiotic views at home.
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