The Agora - The Marketplace of Ideas and Free Thinking

SHOW LESSWelcome: “Greetings and Salutations. Welcome to the Agora, a forum to examine the unexamined life.” Tagline: “The place where we talk about all the things you want to but are afraid to.” We believe that the questions of faith, ethics, morality, and society are to important to be solved through memes on Facebook, or celebrity rants on Instagram. We live in a world that makes it easier every day to avoid anybody who might disagree with your worldview, and as a result, many are losing the ability to articulate and defend their worldview First World Problem: When the timeshare you’re staying at doesn’t have in-room laundry Cliche of the Day: “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care”

What is tolerance? How do we truly tolerate someone? Is tolerance dangerous? Should we tolerate ideas that could be dangerous? 

In this episode we seek to dissect the idea of tolerance with Dr. Mike Gurney, a professor of ethics, philosophy and theology at Multnomah University. The conversation starts off considering the nature of belief and how we want to seek out truth and believe things that we are convinced are indeed true. The nature of truth is a bit elusive and we spend alot of time trying to figure out if there is an objective truth or if truth is relative. There is much discussion on Nietzsche and other influential philosophers and all those guys and how they're ideas were passed on and are still being talked about today. We touch on the enlightenment and discuss the difference between tolerance of ideas and people. Eventually we discuss if we should take down the systems now or if we need to reform the system we have now. Toward the end we spend time discussing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and extrapolating from there the intent of the founding fathers. 

Joining us today is Linn-County Treasure and Budget Officer Michelle Hawkins to discuss local politics and how our freedoms affect everyone around us. The discussion centers around the pros and cons of free speech and the consequences of everyone being able to speak freely. We tend to categorize people based on shallow opinions and social media hasn't helped that, and we hold that in order to get a good understanding of who a person is, you have to have a meaningful conversation with them. We also discuss how we have replaced relationship with association, and in the moment, with cancel culture gaining momentum, we all seem to have this desire to distance ourselves from anything problematic, rather than having conversations about the issues. We think people can help each other without having to agree with each other. We discuss the egocentric-ism of how some people want to shut other people down and prevent further discussion from taking place.  Setup: Nikon Z6  Live Gamer Portable 2 PLUS  OBS studio Tonor Microphones Surface Pro 7  Recording with Adobe Audition

The place where we talk about all the stuff. In this episode we discuss the cliche "we won't regret doing too much", perhaps a derivative of "better safe than sorry." We take a look at the meme about what refutes science. Richard comes at the question quoting Hume and Garrett subtlety refutes Krauss on the definition of the word nothing. Daniel espouses the idea that perhaps logic, reason, and cause and effect don't exist beyond the origin of the universe. All in all its a good time.  

A Discussion of the Origin, Purpose, and Destiny of Humanity
Welcome to the Agora, the Marketplace of Ideas and Free Thinking. We're a couple of regular people who want to come together and have long discussions about the nature of reality, how things work, how to solve the problems of the world, and make fun of each other while we're at it.   Come join us here or on your favorite podcasting platform   Today is the pilot episode where we figure out where it all goes wrong, the produce and editor gets to beat his head against the wall while the guys talking go about their happy lives. We start the day off discussing first-world problems, unintentional invalidation of others pain, and something about millennial only reading news headlines. Eventually we wander around to the main question which is an examination of the question, is the world better today than it was 100 years ago?   Our schedule going forward will hopefully be to livestream and record on Fridays and release the podcast on Mondays.   Please subscribe and follow! Leave some comments about how you liked it and what we can do to improve.