Summary: KMO and Olga continue the conversation with Jay Smith and Jeff Wilburn. This week the topic moves from race in the Peak Oil narrative to the prospects for atheistic rational materialism in a post-petroleum milieu. The same fossil fuel windfall that has allowed industry to replace the work of human and animal muscles with machines and thus allowed for the emancipation of millions of people from forced labor has also allowed a flowering of scientific rationalism and an atheistic worldview. Might some of the moral progress of recent centuries prove ephemeral in the wake of Peak Oil? The consolation of religion appeals to humans in times of uncertainty and hardship. So what are the prospects for science and atheism in the context of the industrial collapse and population contraction? Music by The Weal and the Woe. The Sam Harris clips come from here and here.
