Speech coaches for freethinkers?

Isn’t it striking how many highly intelligent freethinkers are ineffective speakers and writers? 

Not all of them, mind you.  Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are notable exceptions in my mind. They both get right to the point using ordinary words.  They both look at their audience while speaking. Harris is one of the more affable speakers out there, while Dawkins excels at communicating with an earnest intensity.  Their approaches to delivering their ideas explain their popularity.  They stand out from the crowd with their ability to convey their ideas.  Many other freethinkers (all of them intelligent, sincere and committed to following evidence where it leads) could greatly improve on the way they deliver their ideas.  By failing to work on their delivery, they are losing opportunities to communicate their valuable ideas.

I base this conclusion on my viewing of the presentations at the La Jolla conference, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival.”  You can watch videos of the sessions here. I briefly discussed the conference here.

While watching some of the presenters, however, I imagined being a fundamentalist; In short, I imagined feeling threatened by the ideas of the La Jolla freethinkers.  If I were a fundmentalist, I might think I disagreed with the ideas of the scientists and philosophers while I was actually much more repulsed by the manner in which those ideas were presented.

For instance, some of the freethinking scientists and philosophers appear arrogant.  They might not actually be arrogant, though they appeared

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Campaign speech to keep religion out of government

Author Susan Jacoby has proposed the following as a "little campaign speech" she'd like to hear from candidates running for President.  In proposing this speech, she notes that she is taking it for granted that "the 2008 Democratic nominee will be a believer in God and a member of some…

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Name that God

Who is the God about whom each item on this list is allegedly true: He “was the biggest healer in Antiquity, even raising the dead. They called him Savior and Redeemer. He was born of a mortal virgin mother, but had a divine Father. He walked on water. He was not…

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We can’t even sing anymore

I’m in the middle of reading This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, a delightful work by Daniel J. Levitin.   I plan to write about this book when I’m finished reading it, but one thing he wrote in his introduction especially intrigued me. Levitin writes…

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Raising a Wall Can Open a View

I visited 2 very different construction sites today, on a whim. Two sons of one of my clients each were working a different site, and we just went by to see what was going on.

The first site is a new 9-story office building in Clayton, MO, a financial center near the center of the country. The son was applying fireproofing to the steel structure, much like you may have seen in 9-11 WTC documentaries. It was fun to ride up the external cage elevator on a breezy January morning and watch concrete sprayed onto the steel, to take a look around, staring down the open elevator shafts and the stairwells still missing stairs, to feel the wind in an office building with just cables between me and the precipice.

Then we went to the other son’s site, where a 2 story residence was being constructed in an old neighborhood. We were just in time to help raise the first external wall up on the second story. I rarely do that, generally preferring the George Jetson style of gainful employment.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with politics and economy and faith? Try the notion of distance from an issue, of perspective. From the points of view I had today, I’d say the building trade is thriving. People are hard at work putting up new buildings all over. Compare this to the national housing starts (down). Were you aware that the Empire State Building was built during …

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