Robin Ince quits working for the BBC over his support for men in dresses and terrorists

[SingleSexSpacesInSchools]

Shame really he’s a nice guy, a huge bibliophile, met him a few times at book signings, the last live show of his I saw he did shoehorn in “and of course trans women are real women” or some such nonsense.

guessing the infinite monkey cage is cancelled now, that was in my top five podcasts.

can’t do a popular science show and think women can have a penis though. Wonder what Brian thinks?

the video of his love resignation , presumably at the end of a monkey cage recording, is here
https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1plg02g/bbc_presenter_robert_ince_claims_he_has_been/

notably he doesn’t say how men in dresses are being treated badly. Everyone has a blind spot.

I think that is a very human centric, goal driven analysis of creation, which is oddly religious 😁

I haven't read The God Delusion so I'm not sure if this is Dawkins' argument, but the angle that militant atheists like (IIRC) Stephen Fry often bang on about is "If there's a God, why does he allow terrible things to happen? Therefore, even if there is a God, I want nothing to do with him or he can't possibly exist because he'd stop the bad things".

Which is to assume that any deity has complete and utter control over what humans do and their effects, and disregards any concept of free will. It's not a very intelligent argument.

I often think that an unfailing belief in science - science, after all, being just what humans know (or think they do; history is littered with understandings humans have ultimately got wrong from the earth-centric solar system model* to miasma theory) - is as religious as religion itself. Sciencism, if you will.

(*and we all know how well it went for any dissenters from this preciously held theory, just ask Galileo)

Hmm, i mean this would only work as a test if it were true that materialism is true and self-evident.

But if there is a god, which is to say an immaterial first principle, which in your test scenario is true, then clearly it is incorrect that materialism is self-evident.

So you have the human in this scenario, like Dawkins, assuming that materialism is self-evident, which is, depending on how you want to look at it, a reasonable (but unevidenced) belief, an irrational belief, or a logical contradiction.

So I am not sure the winner in this test is as clear as you make out.

It's basically an emotional argument.

It resonates with a lot of people because suffering offends people's sense of justice. Though in a completely materialist scenario suffering isn't unjust at all, it's just inevitable.

The other humorous rebuttal to the idiocy of ‘Pascals Wager’ is an extension of the ‘two southern Baptists on a bridge’ joke. whoops.. sorry… it’s northern baptists https://www.churchandculture.org/blog/2014/5/26/the-best-religious-joke-ever

So his contract was not renewed in September, shortly after the Prescott letter landed (the Gaza / trans desk / Trump splicing / crap complaints team memo.)

At the same time people who worked on the IMC, both the talent and the show staff, were having issues with Ince’s behaviour.

Additionally he was apparently a supporter of a (rightly or wrongly) proscribed organisation, when he was expected to show impartiality.

He was reading Thribbesque poetry to captive IMC audiences.

In 2024 he’d also been massively rude about the sainted BBC luvvie Sir Stephen Fry over Fry’s comments about Stonewall. (This was far more than the ‘gentle criticism’ that Ince calls it.)

I think he became a liability in the round. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Cox didn’t want to work with him any longer.

I was curious a while back, in relation to a creative industry where I have some contacts, about why a certain person was getting so much work. So I asked.

Me: Why do you think (Person X) is getting so many gigs? It seems to me that she's a very mediocre creator.

Them: She's consistent, she files her work before deadline, she's pleasant to work with and doesn't cause drama. That's about it.

Me: So you just need to be low maintenance and baseline competent?

Them: Think of the trouble we had with (Y and Z, pronoun people hired for diversity points and discreetly dumped). Low maintenance and baseline competent should not be underestimated.

In the case of Robin Ince, a moderate talent with a history of getting gigs based on who he's friends with - but who's probably convinced himself he's there on merit - shifting from low maintenance and baseline competent to high drama and doesn't get on with the host might be the problem.

Particularly with freelancers who aren't directly employed by the BBC. Lord knows I am frustrated that Ian Hislop has been on HIGNFY for 35 years and still has lousy comic delivery. But they know what they're getting with Hislop. If he suddenly started bigging up Palestine Action, it might be a different matter.

well, God's omnipotence is baked into Christianity so, no, it's not really. Either god is omnipotent and therefore could create a world without suffering, or god is not omnipotent and the whole thing falls down. The rubbish argument that there has to be bad things for good things to be good is a work around, and one an omnipotent god would not need.

Well yes and Dawkins uses the example of the capricious angry god of the OT. It's all very anthropomorphic. As if they have to conceptualise God , the universe and everything as some old loon on a cloud so as to not believe in him / her /it.

It's why they are happier debating some fundamentalist preacher than a scientist or philosopher. I started paying attention when my then teenage kids became fervent atheists a few years back. They were fans of Sam Harris , Dennett , Hitchens and the rest. Wonder what Hitch would make of all this though?

Fry's objections have more to do with phenomena inherent to what is alleged to be Creation, like the existence of the worm that causes river blindness, than with phenomena deriving from the exercise of free will.

CS Lewis still has the best stab at theodicy I've seen (The Problem of Pain) & I still don't find it convincing.

Thing is, there are lots of horrible yet unnecessary bad things, like viruses and parasites. Why would a loving God create, for example, the cholera virus? It doesn't make any sense.

It used to be fairly routine for a large minority of children to die in infancy. Given that God prohibits killing, why would he create something that results in the early death of so many humans? It doesn't make a huge amount of sense.

That's not my main reason for not believing in God, but it seems a fairly good reason.

It's just as possible for Christians to take a Deist position & argue that the world was originally created & set in motion by a non-interventionist deity.

There are thousands of gods created by humans in this world, most people are very happy to reject all of them but theirs. Atheists are just a little bit more consistent and agree with all the rejections.

And that's the only thing every atheist agrees on.

Very nice summation! And undoubtedly a lot more accurate than his "I died for the transes" martyrdom story 😉

then they would not be omnipotent - AKA all knowing, powerful and loving.

Very interesting. I think you have nit the nail on the head here:

"In the case of Robin Ince, a moderate talent with a history of getting gigs based on who he's friends with - but who's probably convinced himself he's there on merit - shifting from low maintenance and baseline competent to high drama and doesn't get on with the host might be the problem."

Well sure it’s anthropomorphic, because pragmatic atheism is very much a response to the gods made in men’s image which affect human societies. Don’t blame the atheists for what theistic religions came up with! Antideism, if you like, is kind of neither here nor there. Maybe there’s that sort of theoretical deity, what practical difference does it make? Fun to philosophise over but irl it’s the consequences of beliefs in specific types of ‘god’ which matter to most people.

That doesn't follow.

But that is assuming that the deity in question is a Christian god. Most atheists seem to argue against any god, of any stripe, and disregard the idea of a deity who either can influence but chooses not to, or can't influence in the way we would like/expect. And both of those assume that whatever decisions a deity does make don't have a "greater good" aspect that just doesn't work in humans' favour.

The "Why does a loving god allow bad things to happen" is humans assuming that a) a deity is loving, b) loving is the way humans interpret it/would like it to be and c) the things are bad in the wider scheme of things.

Just got to say I did not see this thread going this way.

Someone please get it on Robin's desk.....

How on earth is that position consistent with christian theology? I suppose the label ‘Christianity’ is a broad enough church to encompass non realist theists or whatever but the narrative of the Bible is massively interventionist throughout.

It’s more interesting than Ince. Though that’s a low bar.

You begin from an Aquinian account of Creation & then for the purposes of this thread, fast forward to the theological disputes of the late C16th & C17th & proceed from there.

Yes, the Old Testament God wasn't that bothered about wiping the slate clean and starting again.

The idea of a beneficent God does seem very recent.