That’s what Wolf Blitzer said to a woman who survived the tornado in Oklahoma: “You have to thank the lord, right? Do you thank the lord?” The woman informed him that she is an atheist. And no, you don’t. If you’re going to thank God for one person remaining safe, don’t you also have to …

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This weekend I continued my long love/hate affair with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as the 2013 induction ceremony aired on HBO. There is much to hate, especially in the long list of bands that should have been inducted long ago. But I still love the inductions every year — especially this year …

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We have another new blogger at FTB, Tauriq Moosa. You may well have seen his work at Big Think, where he will continue to post, but he’s now joining us as well with a new blog called The Indelible Stamp. We’re excited to have him at FTB, of course, so go visit him and give …

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Dan Brown is the tiresome hack who wrote The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons and other books that have sold millions of copies. Those books go over territory that was explored in much more interesting ways by far more talented writers (most obviously Umberto Eco). Michael Deacon mocks Brown beautifully:

Time magazine has a cover story this week about the millenials (or “generation y” that followed “generation x,” which is me) and how lazy and selfish they are. Which might be vaguely interesting if this hadn’t been said of every generation since the beginning of time about their children. Elspeth Reeve shows articles going back …

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The Blaze (yes, Glenn Beck’s site) has a rather amusing article about John Edwards, the “psychic” fraud who makes huge amounts of money preying on the credulous and the desperate. And he tells the fanciful story of how he came to discover his “psychic” abilities and learn of “highly-evolved beings” that were all around us.

My little — okay, not so little; let’s go with “younger” — brother DuWayne is asking people to help a woman save her home from foreclosure. It’s not money that’s needed, it’s signatures on a petition and a phone call to put some pressure on the company that is trying to take the home. Below …

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While much of the loony right is claiming that Obama is going to seize all the guns, Bryan Fischer apparently doesn’t think quite so big. He says Obama is only going to seize some of the guns — the ones belonging to Christians, of course, who are forever on the verge of terrible persecution that …

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We’ve added another new member of Freethought Blogs, Ally Fogg. His blog is called Heteronormative Patriarchy for Men, which is bound to get the screeching howler monkeys of the slymepit terribly excited once again. I can live with that. Welcome, Ally!

Have you ever wondered what was the world’s first website? Apparently this is it. No graphics, only text, or rather hypertext. I think it dates from November, 1992. It’s really pretty incredible to think back on how quickly the internet has essentially taken over the world.

Mark Tracy delivers a premature eulogy for the blog at the New Republic. He takes as his starting point the move by the New York Times to reevaluate all of the blogs they’ve hosted on their site and to shut some of them down (not Nate Silver’s 538, though; it reportedly gets a huge percentage …

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We’re very excited to have a new blogger on the network, Yemisi Ilesanmi. Yemisi’s story is a pretty remarkable one. She’s from Nigeria but now lives in the UK, where she is a human rights activist and author. She’s also a poet, so Cuttlefish finally has a little competition. Check out the new blog.

My friend (and former FTBer) Dan Fincke is once again accepting students for his very unusual experiment in teaching philosophy outside of a university setting. This is something he started last year and I really think it’s a fascinating idea. As someone who thinks education should never stop, the idea of learning philosophy from a …

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Fans of irony will appreciate the AP report that says Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a big fan of InfoWars, the conspiracy website owned by Alex Jones, who claims that the Boston Marathon bombings weren’t carried out by Tsarnaev but by Navy SEALs who are part of the giant global conspiracy that is also responsible for…well, everything.

We’ve been working with the people who created the Nowtalk chat widget for blogs and we’re testing it out here on Dispatches (yeah, we did this once before and had to pull it immediately to fix a problem). So if chatting with other readers is something you think you’d like to do, try it out …

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