Some atheist readings

While I deal with a recalcitrant computer, here’s some interesting links for you to read.

DanJ follows up on the “moderate theist” vs “fundamentalist” schism as touched on in my last post, and asks a number of uncomfortable questions of them.

Ben Stein got EXPELLED from the New York Times for being involved with that shady credit report scam company. My heart bleeds.

Chuck Norris apparently hates atheists for trying to change the fundamental nature of America, since both the pledge and the motto contain “God” — oh wait, both of those were changed less than 60 years ago, during the Red Scare.

Richard Dawkins has an interview with John Mackay. Mackay is a fundamentalist who has made up a series of lies and has been able to espouse them without paying a shred of taxes on his income for 20 years. Zdenny shows up in the comments to miss the point. Hilarity ensues.

Good news, everyone! There’s no such thing as atheism or secularism! We’re all just idolators! No more need for great rifts and differing approaches, now we can all just worship a golden calf or something.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, a huge survey of nearly 6000 people (that’s one for every year the Earth has existed!!1) shows that atheists and other freethinkers are more satisfied with life than religious folks. It is also covered here, where the focus is on our bright shiny Colgate smiles.

Also, here’s a tiny taste of the crazy that is waiting to be sampled over at the Creation Museum.

Update: Last minute addition to the reading list, Lou FCD had also weighed in on the “moderate theist” thread, started over at Almost Diamonds, for which my “obstacles” post from yesterday was a direct continuation. If I had known at the time that he’d posted this, I definitely would have linked it directly, because it’s incredible. I absolutely adore posts that make their points by linking individual words to examples from history, there’s something fun about ctrl-clicking as you’re reading to open each link in a new tab. Reminds me a bit of an advent calendar, only with civil rights activism as your candy.

Some atheist readings
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Sunday Atheist Readings

Here’s a collection of interesting links found on the interweb tubes, most of which I’ve discovered by following the Twitter feed for #atheism. A bunch of them have come from elsewhere in the blogosphere, but there’s so damn many on my reading list that I figured I might as well just post them all and let you figure out their origins. Frankly I’ve already lost track.

There’s a ton of stuff to read here… grab some coffee (since atheists, and especially atheist goats, can’t live without coffee!), take your time, and enjoy!

Continue reading “Sunday Atheist Readings”

Sunday Atheist Readings

Random Crap That’s In My Tabs

Today I will launch a semi-regular (by which I mean a whenever-I-feel-like-it) feature, wherein I itemize a bunch of stuff that’s in the various tabs in my Firefox. I have this habit, you see, of keeping certain tabs open over a number of sessions, either because I want to eventually blog about them, or because I’m not done reading them and keep getting sidetracked on other sites. This might include blog posts with ongoing discussions, as well. Consider it a catch-all kind of post. As such, it’ll go under Current Events just because there’s usually going to be a news piece or two.

Continue reading “Random Crap That’s In My Tabs”

Random Crap That’s In My Tabs

Blogospherics

I’m a bit late to pointing people to this thread, but Minnesota Atheists put up a top-ten list of their favorite anti-hymns — songs that can be best described as the orthogonal opposites of the more popular God-praising ones like “Jesus Take the Wheel”. The comments have a number of fantastic suggestions, and one of the commenters put together a bunch of them into an “Atheist Manifesto” playlist at playlist.com. This is going to be my soundtrack for the workday in all likelihood.

The comments on this post at Greg’s, which I’ve linked to on the Two boats post I put up a few days ago, has spiraled well out of control and evolved into a perfect example of back-biting and in-fighting where an eloquent writer but poor debater who purports to be an atheist, questions our “faith” in science being capable of comprehending everything in the universe. The worst part about this thread is that Nathan Myers (no relation to PZ) fundamentally misunderstands everyone’s arguments repeatedly, assigns greater import to their application to our belief systems than we do ourselves, then follows it up with the insinuation that he’d had sex with DuWayne‘s girlfriend, the lovely and intelligent Juniper Shoemaker, exposing utterly his inability to argue a point effectively without resorting to a modification of “yo’ mama”. This backlash ought to convince anyone interested in debating that “oh yeah, well I screwed your girlfriend” isn’t exactly going to win you any friends. It also, sadly, had to come on a thread where the main thrust of the original post is that incivility toward religious folks is sometimes merited where their religion directly hinders scientific progress or education of children.

Mike Haubrich has also written a fantastic post deserving of much attention right now, explaining exactly how he came to educate himself in science in order to counter creationist nonsense. He hits the nail right on the head — the so-called “New Atheists” aren’t the problem when it comes to science education and adoption in the US, the problem is people being kept from the real answers, being fed caricatures of science as being “the devil’s work”. You might have to skip through the Kent Hovind stuff, but I won’t blame you.

And over at How Good Is That, Jim Gardner posted an insightful article about the disingenuousness of people who claim to be “former atheists”, who abandon their understanding of non-belief (which is not founded in rationality to begin with) to instead fall to their knees and worship the warrior god of the Bronze-age middle-eastern tribes. The comment thread is especially illustrative of how hateful and bigoted certain creationists can be, with Zdenny claiming that atheists are incapable of loving their children.

Oh, and to round things out so we’re not only linking stuff to do with religion, here.
As a cyclist (well, a lapsed cyclist I guess), I know full well the importance of wearing your helmet. Greg Laden illustrates what can happen if you are not properly equipped and something unexpected happens.

Also, Toaster Sunshine (AKA Mad Scientist Jr.), and DuWayne at Traumatized by Truth, prepare for the first wave in their plan to subjugate Canada to finally obtain universal health care, gay marriage and sex in canoes The American Way: through military conquest. The first wave mostly involves mind control of moose, for some reason. To arms, fellow Canucks! Don your polar fleece plaid shirts and fire up your chainsaws, we’re at war!

Blogospherics

A whole lot of linking to Greg Laden for some reason

Here’s Greg’s most recent posts about Linux, because you all need to learn this stuff and how useful it is if you ever hope to be cooler than Grandma with her desktop icons and “start” button.

Concepts:
Cat – for outputting files’ contents and other such manipulation
Cups – the print spooler that, unlike in Windows, you can actually configure!
cut, sort, and other great tools for processing CSVs or text files
How closed-source software is like CHILD ABUSE (plus a real-life, really-happened, story about how Microsoft embarassed me at work!)
How to escalate privileges using su and sudo

He’s got a lot of other great newbie tutorials hidden in amongst the politics and flame wars, so go check it out. The Congo Memoirs are a great read, as well. (And yeah, I’m involved in that flame war now. And worse, I don’t think I’ll have the stamina to beat this asshole, either.)

A whole lot of linking to Greg Laden for some reason

Super Linking Post!

I have a ton of links to share on a bunch of disparate topics, all of which deserve their own proper post but honestly I’m still swamped.  It pains me to know that I am depriving you, my loyal readers, of my opinion on everything, because I know how some of you live and breathe for those opinions.  So, I’ll give a short blurb with each.  Savvy?  And as an added bonus game, you can guess who or what led me to each link, and I bet you’ll be surprised.  LET IT BEGIN!

Continue reading “Super Linking Post!”

Super Linking Post!