Robin Hanson has some really insightful advice: I’ve known some very successful people with quite weird ideas. But these folks mostly keep regular schedules of sleep and bathing. Their dress and hairstyles are modest, they show up on time for meetings, and they finish assignments by deadline. They are willing to pay dues and work [...]

My post on Kyrsten Sinema’s historic decision to run for Congress as an openly non-theistic and bisexual candidate has generated a lot of interest from new readers. I am in an airport waiting to fly home from visiting with family so I can’t do any other new blogging of substance until later tonight. In the [...]

Andrew Sullivan has opened voting for The Dish‘s annual awards and,as always, the nominated posts make for a fascinating recap of the year. What has most mesmerized me are the charts:

“White Wine In The Sun”: Your Thoughts?

Facebook did a fascinating (non-peer-reviewed) study: The idea of ‘six degrees of separation’ — that any two people are on average separated by no more than six intermediate connections — was first proposed in 1929 in a short story by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, and made popular by the John Guare play and movie, Six Degrees [...]

Okay, I have no competence to discuss economics with any significant level of expertise. I found this video with economist Steve Keen interesting and I would be interested to see those of you who know something about economics discuss it: Your Thoughts?

Your Thoughts?

via Your Thoughts?

The season finale is here: Your Thoughts?

Sierra tells her story on No Longer Quivering: Modesty taught me that my first priority needed to be making sure I wasn’t a “stumbling block” to men. Not being sexually attractive was the most important thing I had to consider when buying clothes, putting them on, maintaining my weight (can’t have things getting tight!), and moving [...]

In the comments section of a Rebecca Watson post, Tim Minchin writes: I stay in a lot of hotels and travel in a lot of elevators. They are very helpful, what with their elevating properties and all. Sometimes, I am in an elevator with a woman. Just me and her. In this little, quiet, rumbly [...]

Very sweet: Your Thoughts?

Here I was frustrated, trying to figure out what to do about the fact that I have no time at all to blog today and then I see that Maryam Namazie’s new blog on the Freethought Blogs network has gone live, so I can just send you over there for the day! Here are her [...]

Reposted from June 23, 2010: Pride is essentially the personal identification with something admirable.  When I am rightly proud of my traits, I rightly take the traits themselves each to be admirable in one way or another and rightly take myself to be admirable insofar as they are part of me and expressions of me. [...]

Ms. White is a middle school teacher at Jefferson Middle School in Champaign, Illinois, with a great idea for an interdisciplinary project that she needs our help to fund since she works in an impoverished school district: My Students: One morning this summer I woke up and began reading “A Long Walk to Water”. An hour later, [...]

Dana has a terrific post countering the simplistic inference that just because we reject the Jesus story as true, we atheists must be incapable of appreciating stories. She explores what’s wrong with this idea numerous of interesting ways. Money quotes: I’m a Gnu Atheist, my darlings, which means I’m one of those hardcore majorly-atheistic atheists, and I still [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Following Jason’s lead, I figured today, Blasphemy Day, would be a good time to repost my thoughts on the holiday, originally published two years ago today. I should add the qualification that while I still endorse the Pat Condell video at the end of this post, I do not endorse his more racist and xenophobic [...]

The following is a repost of an article I wrote in which I explore several possible interpretations of how God could “make things good” and explain why each makes God’s contribution to value nonsensical or irrelevant. Below the fold, I explain the problems with trusting the existing faith traditions to be special guides into God’s [...]