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Hank offers a brilliant analogy: Say you’ve picked out a private kindergarten for your little girl, and you’ve gone down to take a look at the place to check on a last few details. During the hourlong tour and consultation, you ask “What are the classroom rules here at Bronfield Academy? What will be expected [...]
Archive for October, 2011
Attention Religious Believers, THIS Is What It’s Like For Atheists Reading Your Holy Books:
October 4th, 2011 
Daniel Fincke 
Posted in Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, Philosophy Of Religion, Religious Extremism, Religious Extremism 
Tags: Bible 
No Comments »It’s a long night (Or “Welcome to the Camels With Hammers Late Night Train Station Lounge”)
October 4th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Through a series of errors and bad choices interesting to me but which would be boring to anyone else, I’m waiting here at the Mineola train station at 2am. It’s four and a half hours after my classes ended for the night, and yet I am still waiting to begin my nearly 2 hour trek [...]
Ray Comfort on Atheist Experience
October 3rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke Last spring, for the first time I watched an episode of The Atheist Experience as it premiered. The episode was this one in which Ray Comfort was the special guest: It was a fast hour. If you have not yet visited the The Atheist Experience at their new home on Freethought Blogs, get to it. [...]
Christianity’s Love of the Dark Side
October 3rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke When you talk all day about God’s love and God’s mercy and God’s forgiveness and God’s grace and God’s compassion, it’s easy to convince yourself that you must yourself be an especially loving, merciful, forgiving, gracious, and compassionate person, even when you’re not. Similarly, some atheists think that banging on about reason and evidence all [...]
What Would Stephen Colbert Do?
October 3rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke The Colbert Report Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive If you’re anything like me, you routinely find yourself in difficult situations in life which require superhuman levels of ironic coolness, intellectual brilliance, quickness of wits, and deep personal goodness and you have to ask yourself, “What Would Stephen Colbert [...]
3 Jesus Christs And A Shrink With A God Complex: On Ariadne Blayde’s “Go Down Into Silence”
October 2nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke Last night I saw a terrific college play, based very loosely on the premise of a real life 1950s experiment in which three delusional psychiatric patients who each believed they were Jesus Christ were made to live together to see whether it could break their delusions. Before I share my reactions to the play, here [...]
Posted in Arts, Arts Tags: Ariadne Blayde, Fordham University, James Presson, Theater Review, White Box Studio Theatre 4 Comments »How Evangelicals Can Be Very Hurtful Without Being Very Hateful
October 2nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke The weekend after George W. Bush’s reelection, I attended a MoveOn.org get together at my friends’ house. The idea of the event was that people would volunteer their homes to host nationally coordinated local strategy discussions. So, it was me, my two friends, and a whole bunch of hard-left Upper West Side Manhattanites all of [...]
Is Evangelicalism Uniquely Vindictive, More Than Other, Secular Ideological Dispositions?
October 2nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke So I had Martin Bashir on in the background one day last week and was struck to hear Nick Broomfield (whose new documentary Sarah Palin: You Betcha! I highlighted a couple weeks ago) directly and solely blame Sarah Palin’s vindictiveness on her religion. Outside of a handful of scathing New Atheists I don’t think I have [...]
the cRommunist’s take on Race and Religion
October 1st, 2011 Daniel Fincke Friend of Camels With Hammers and our new Freethought Blogs neighbor, Ian Cromwell is an instantly engaging writer. Here is his take on racism of even well-meaning kinds: I don’t remember exactly how it came up, but Sally asked me what my background was (I think she said something like “where are you from?”) I told [...]
The Atheist Experience, Now On Freethought Blogs
October 1st, 2011 Daniel Fincke Freethought Blogs is now hosting the blog of the atheist community’s signature call-in show, The Atheist Experience. If you want to know why this show is such a phenomenon in the atheist blogosphere, just watch the 15 minute video below on the vice of faith and how it tears apart relationships unnecessarily: Keep tabs on [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheist Videos, Atheist Videos, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism 3 Comments »WWJTB (Why Would JT Blog?)
October 1st, 2011 Daniel Fincke One of our exciting new neighbors arriving here at Freethought Blogs today is atheist activist JT Eberhard. In his announcement about his blog’s move over here, he offered the following thoughts on why and how to blog and what the measures of a blog’s success should be: One of the most frequent questions I get [...]
Al Stefanelli
October 1st, 2011 Daniel Fincke I’m really pleased to have Al Stefanelli as a Freethought Blogs colleague. A year ago, when his blog was already much bigger than mine, he reached out to me and his quite unsolicited praise and encouragement stuck with me such that I have always regarded him fondly since. Shortly thereafter I went and listened to the [...]
“There Are No Chaplains In Foxholes”
October 1st, 2011 Daniel Fincke You remember when the atheist community was up in arms about Fort Bragg holding an evangelical festival designed to convert soldiers and civilians alike? You remember the active duty U.S. Army Sergeant who stood up and demanded equal opportunity for the atheistic point of view to be heard and scheduled “Rock Beyond Belief”, a festival [...]
Kylie Sturgess, Freethought Blogs’s “Token Skeptic”
October 1st, 2011 Daniel Fincke Kylie Sturgess, of Pod Black and the Token Skeptic podcast, will be coming to Freethought Blogs at the Token Skeptic blog. Her first post is a charming and creative (and, thankfully, easy) multiple choice test, which makes me like her very much already. From Pod Black, here are her impressive credentials which also should recommend her to [...]
En Tequila Es Verdad
October 1st, 2011 Daniel Fincke Okay, over the course of the next three hours, I’m going to play my part in introducing you to the 7 exciting new blogs to join the Freethought Blogs network today. The first is Dana Hunter’s blog and I can’t figure out how to sum her or what she does up better than she does: You want [...]
Ingersoll Against Blasphemy Laws
October 1st, 2011 Daniel Fincke As PZ pointed out, Rebecca Watson took the opportunity yesterday, on International Blasphemy Rights Day, to highlight some choice selections from Robert G. Ingersoll’s magnificent closing argument in defense of C.B. Reynolds, who, on May 19 and 20, 1887, was being tried for blasphemy in the state of New Jersey. You should read Ingersoll’s whole [...]
The Google Bubble
October 1st, 2011 Daniel Fincke Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, explains how websites from Facebook to Google change our search results to tell us want they think we already want to hear: “Don’t Bubble Us” is another link concisely summing up these themes. Duck Duck Go is a search engine which [...]
Which Should You Trust—The Jigsaw Pieces or the Picture on the Box?
October 1st, 2011 Daniel Fincke Two cute bunny toys try to solve a jigsaw puzzle in this parable about how believing in evidence differs from believing in authorities. (many thanks to Vanessa, a most loyal Camels With Hammers reader, for the tip) Your Thoughts?
How To Become A Great And Successful Blogger (Volume I)
Canada on Strike Get More: SOUTH PARKmore… Okay, so maybe this past weekend you watched the bloggers behind Crommunist Manifesto, WWJTD, Atheist Experience, Voice of Reason, En Tequila Es Verdad, Rock Beyond Belief, and Token Skeptic become newly knighted as Sacred Bloggers of the Order of Freethought Blogs and thereby ascend overnight to international stardom as part of phase [...]