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Damned monkeys. Stop gawking, put the cell phone away, and flee. We get these things up here in Minnesota, too, and one thing you will not get from me is a video showing it off. I’ll be in the basement, hiding under a mattress.

Sikivu Hutchinson has a new book, Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels, and she was recently interviewed about it. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? That humanism can be culturally relevant to communities of color. Traditional mainstream white-dominated freethought/atheist/humanist models don’t offer an adequate basis for social justice. They don’t address the intersection of women’s rights, civil rights, anti-racism, heterosexism, the racial wealth gap, and educational apartheid. … So while there are numerous grassroots atheist groups spearheading their own projects, the movement as a whole continues to be publicly defined by a handful of superstars and their limited vision. The absence of historical and sociological context for atheist politics, and its disconnection from social justice activism, will keep it in the lily-white one-percent column. I have no patience for single-issue white male atheists who inveigh against the backwardness of organized religion as the fount of all evil and then have the luxury to retreat into their segregated ivory towers, insulated conferences, and highly-paid seminar bubbles. In Godless Americana I address the lived experiences of some of the most religious communities on the planet in one of the richest nations on the planet. I probe the sociological context for faith traditions and hyper-religiosity in American communities of color. I have this grand, optimistic vision of humanity’s future, and escaping the dead-end lies of religion is part of it. But mostly what I see are people — all people — given the security and knowledge to live lives with true meaning, where they can grow and learn and engage in productive struggle, fighting to make the world a better place with every generation. I have my causes and my biases, but I don’t see how we can achieve that goal by having the causes and biases of a narrow subset imposed on the whole;...
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It’s the lovely Pink Dragon millipede — it’s bright enough to belong in the girls’ aisle at the toy store. It also squirts cyanide at you if you annoy it.

Hey, we added a couple of male bloggers here…I thought we were supposed to be man-hatin’ banshee feminists? It’s surprising but true, though, that some people with a Y chromosome and a penis can actually care about social justice. Say howdy to Ally Fogg and our very newest addition, Tauriq Moosa, who helpfully explains how to pronounce his name in his first post.

Moore, Oklahoma has been completely flattened by a tornado. Homes and businesses have been destroyed, but also a couple of schools and a hospital. And here’s a time-lapse video of this monster ripping through the countryside. Action News 5 – Memphis, Tennessee What can we do? I mentioned it to Foundation Beyond Belief — go to the “Crisis Response” link and tell them you want to contribute to the relief efforts. If enough of us do that, they’ll set something up to take your godless donations and send them to where they’re most needed. And then send them money! Zingularity also has a post on the catastrophe. Foundation Beyond Belief now has a crisis response page. You can make charitable donations there. The death toll is at 51 and rising, with at least 20 dead children.