My skin is at stake!

The Stiefel Foundation is backing a huge charitable donation: they want to give $1,000,000 to cancer research. They need godless atheists to join in, though, to show the world that we care and we can get things done, so Todd Stiefel has started a recruiting drive on Reddit to bring in donors and participants in a charity walk. We need 5,000 more people to sign on this week to meet the goal. And we’re volunteering our flesh and, umm, hair to motivate you. Let’s get some Pharyngula people involved!

our goal this week is to go from 400 to 5,400 people on the Foundation Beyond Belief international team raising money for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. We need your help. Please join our team at http://pages.lightthenight.org/2012/FBB. Please encourage your friends and local freethought groups to join as well. If we make this viral, we can hit this stretch goal!

If we are able to add 5,000 people before the end of Saturday, July 14, I will shave to a mohawk while at Camp Quest South Carolina next week. Additionally, PZ Myers and Hemant Mehta will get tattoos. (Watch their blogs today for proof.) Yeah, they are more braver than I am.

I also want you to know that while Hemant was trying to decide what sacrifice to make, I came forward with my plan to get a tat if we reach 5,000, and then he succumbed to his competitive instincts. Hey, Hemant, if I said I was going to jump off a cliff…?

But heck yeah, I will go through with it — in a tasteful, discreet way — if enough people step up and sign up for this endeavor.

(NO, you have absolutely no input on where or what tattoo I get. I’m not brain-damaged.)

Blogathonery

I guess I don’t understand the mechanics of this, but it looks like Jen and Hank and Natalie are simultaneously blogathoning for SSA? So all the activity at FtB today will be elsewhere than here, so I should just take a nice nap?

Of course, if someone would just donate $13,206 to the SSA we’d reach their goal and it would be all done.

Another fundraiser!

So @rhysmorgan and @whatkatie_did are also having a fundraiser (it seems like everyone is!), this time to benefit a rape crisis organization for England and Wales. It’s called the Fuck the Patriarchy Readathon, and they’re promising to read 20 books and blog about them this month. The books are all over the place, from Twilight to Catch-22, so the reviews should be entertaining.

For his participation in this cause, the usual suspects are raging that Rhys Morgan is a “little skeptic twat” and “mangina”, so you should support him just for that. Don’t you love how these guys go out of their way to confirm our perception of them?

Blogathon Week 2012

It’s starting this weekend: the craziest bloggers in the atheist/skeptic blogosphere are going to be doing marathon scribbling from 9 June to 16 June, all to raise money for the Secular Student Alliance. Look over there on the right: there’s a widget installed to make it easy for you to click and contribute money to a good cause…and they’re already over the halfway mark before even starting, thanks to a donation from the Stiefel Foundation. Look at the schedule — you’ll see which blog to tune into and when to see non-stop conversation. You can help by donating, or also by simply participating — show up in the comments section at 3am to inspire them to keep going.

And the word “interfaith” is nowhere in sight…

This is how it is done. The Todd Stiefel Foundation is rallying freethinkers to help raise money for cancer research, sponsoring the Light The Night Walk through the Foundation Beyond Belief, to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. They are doing this as a secular organization, for a secular cause, and they are making an effort to clearly define this as a freethinker-led initiative…although, of course, religious people will be warmly welcomed as friends and colleagues if they wish to join in.

I’ll be promoting this more in the near future and will be deciding whether to support a team or create one of our own (there is none near Morris, Minnesota), but I’ve got to hold off a bit — we’re in the last two weeks of the semester and grading and other work is consuming everything right now — but I wanted to let everyone know now. Don’t wait for me, get out there and see if there is a team near you that you can join.

The goal is to raise a million dollars for cancer research. I know we can do it.

Help Talia!

She’s four years old. She has a crippling congenital disease. She needs a wheelchair. Chip in a few bucks if you can.

If you’re interested in that sort of thing, she has congenital pseudoarthrosis — it’s a malformation of a limb bone to form a pseudo-joint. Basically it’s a broken bone that doesn’t heal together, with the broken ends instead healing over to form a false articulation…it’s like trying to walk around with a permanently broken limb. It’s treated surgically, either with splinting (which doesn’t always work), or amputation. It’s serious stuff, and a wheelchair is just part of the necessary work to give a little girl some mobility.