Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards. I’m one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog. More details here. In the wake of the Kony 2012 video by Invisible Children, a friend of mine linked to a brilliant piece from GiveWell (a nonprofit that evaluates charities to tell you where your money will make the biggest difference). In a post titled “The Biggest Killer of Invisible Children is Not Joseph Kony” they wrote: Joseph Kony has... Read more
Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards. I’m one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog. More details here. Two atheist blogs in my RSS reader posted open questions for Christians, and since the the Christian commenters here play nice with others nearly all the time, I’d love to dispatch you to take a crack at them. First up, John Loftus, a minister turned atheist and the author of Why I Became an Atheist and The... Read more
— 1 — Hands down, the most delightful story I read this week was in the Science Tuesday section of the NYT. As a child, actor Alan Alda asked a teacher what caused a flame and was confused by the answer “oxidation.” The old question about the flame came back when the journal Science asked Mr. Alda to write an editorial about communicating science. His article began with the anecdote. Then he thought, why not also create a contest where... Read more
Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards. I’m one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog. More details here. Last night, I went out hear Stephen Law talk about his Evil God Challenge as part of the DC Center for Inquiry’s “Voice of Reason” series. Stephen Law is a professor Heythrop College at the University of London and is the editor of Think–a philosophy journal. His Evil God Challenge is meant to knock the wind out... Read more
Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards. I’m one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog. More details here. The trouble is, that the newest addition to Patheos’s Catholic Portal is dead set against it. In his intro post for God and the Machine, Thomas L. McDonald writes: Emerging technologies are shaping, reshaping, and sometimes warping, our perception of reality. This cannot happen in moral vacuum. It cannot exist without a moral dimension. Anything that is—anything... Read more
Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards. I’m one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog. More details here. I’m not sure which is the best example of the American Foundation for Equal Rights stacking the odds in their staged reading of 8 – a play sourced from the transcripts of the Prop 8 trial Perry v. Schwarzenegger. It might be the scene when the suave and gorgeous George Clooney (David Boies) cross-examines the John C.... Read more
Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards. I’m one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog. More details here. Before a very delicate operation on his arm, the patient says to his surgeon, “Doc, Doc, I gotta know, you can give it to me straight. After the operation, will I be able to play piano?” The doctor answers in the affirmative and the patient sighs, “Gee, Doc, that’s swell! I could never do it before.” Medicine... Read more
Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards. I’m one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog. More details here. Last night I caught the series premiere of Awake on Hulu and I found it captivating. The basic setup: Detective Michael Britten (played by Jason Isaacs — Lucius Malfoy) is in a terrible car accident. After the crash his life bifurcates. In one reality, his wife died in the crash. In the other, he lost his son.... Read more
— 1 — I have a confession to make. I was under the impression that the reason some of your blood vessels looked blue was because they were veins and deoxygenated blood was blue. A post from io9 this week set me straight. — 2 — This weekend I’m hosting a viewing party for the livestream of 8, a play sourced from the trial transcripts of California’s Prop 8 trial. It’s in the style of The Laramie Project, in... Read more
Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards. I’m one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog. More details here. Looks like there are still some questions about why I’m drawing a distinction between selecting for and selecting against in my post on how evolution doesn’t optimize for ethics. One commenter wrote: I see what you are saying, but isn’t it easier to think in terms of “selecting for” when considering how sexual selection gives rise to... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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