More childrens’ books, please

This looks worthy: Annaka Harris has a kickstarter project for a children’s book, I Wonder.

I Wonder is about a little girl named Eva who takes a walk with her mother and encounters a range of mysteries – from gravity, to life cycles, to the vastness of the universe. She learns to talk about how it feels to not know something, and she learns that it’s okay to say “I don’t know.” Eva discovers that she has much to learn about the world and that there are many things even adults don’t know – mysteries for everyone in the world to wonder about together!

This is the kind of thing we need more of — get them young, and get them thinking.

It’s not skeptics, atheists, or gamers: it’s the whole culture

One thing we do have to move beyond is this provincial idea that sexism and harassment are just a consequence of a few jerks within a new movement: it’s not. It’s widespread. I think atheist culture is actually better than the norm, but the outside world acts as a giant reservoir and buffer for the creeps to flourish…and it allows them to be legitimately surprised when anyone stands up to them. They get away with it everywhere else, so gosh, atheists must all be prudes and wilting lilies.

So once again, we get another tale of violated boundaries, this time from the gamers. I’ve put it below the fold in case it’s triggering, but one thing I found notable about it is how the woman involved is wracked with guilt and shame afterwards, and actually experiences a lot of doubt about her part in the incident. She is totally blameless. (That does not stop a few of the commenters for blaming her anyway, of course.)

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A triumph for Black Atheists of America!

Good news: they’ve been given $10,000 by the Stiefel Freethought Foundation to improve science education for kids in low-income neighborhoods.

Ayanna Watson, President of BAAm, says she’s excited to get started in the fall. “We’re in the process of selecting nearly a dozen schools to donate equipment. We were able to give squid dissection kits, DVDs, and other materials to the students, allowing them to learn about their own waterways and wildlife. We want to do this kind of thing for other students around the country.”

Notice: Atheism + science → squid. It’s inevitable.

Canadian tragedy

The Parti Québécois won an electoral victory yesterday, and unfortunately the victory celebration for Pauline Marois was interrupted by a man opening fire with a rifle, killing one person and wounding another. When will people learn that murder solves nothing?

I’m afraid I know little about Quebec politics. The killer apparently shouted, “Les Anglais se reveillent. (The English are awakening) There’s going to be payback” in French, with an accent, as he was hauled away by the police. Whose side is he on? Or does it even make sense to discuss the political alignment of a demented mass-murderer-wannabe?

Visit for the trains, stay for the science

I’ve been to the UK a few times now, and I have to say that one of my favorite things about the place is visiting a huge wrought iron train station and hopping onto a train for a long ride through the countryside. I think my ideal for a pleasant British vacation (“vacation”? I don’t know what that is any more) would be to just ride around the country for a few weeks.

So Robin Ince hooked me by starting his story with a train ride (I now want to travel from London to Cornwall), but the real message is about a fundamentally human principle of science: curiosity, inquisitiveness, exploration.

Democrats growing a spine?

I don’t know. I’m skipping yet another political convention — if the Republicans were engaging in non-stop lying, I was afraid the Democrats would engage in non-stop cringing — but the reports I’m reading today make it sound like they were talking strong and standing up for, for instance, a woman’s right to choose and against economic inequity to some degree. Here are a few highlights, and this was Michelle Obama’s speech:

It was a good speech, delivered well. That speech was also well-received by the troglodytes at Fox News, who have decided that Michelle Obama is a “wookie”, a “pig-person”, and fat. Get used to it; that (R) stands for (Racist).

I’m not hearing much about the military and Guantanomo, though, and they’re not slamming the 1% as thoroughly as they should. I’m tempted to at least have the thing running in the background on my TV tonight while I get other work done…except for one thing.

Are they all going to end their speeches with “God bless, and God bless America”? Because that makes me gag with its stupidity and insincerity.

Why I am an atheist – Dee

When I was in grade school, I had a friend who convinced me that she could see and talk to ghosts, and also switch bodies with animals and let their spirits talk to me through her body. I believed this for months, if not more than a year. I guess I was a pretty gullible kid, but I thought it was pretty exciting to be able to talk on the phone to my dog or her cat or the ghost of the girl who lived in my house.  Eventually, though, I noticed inconsistencies in her stories and decided to subtly test whether she was truly doing what she claimed. When she put me on the phone with my dog, I would start a conversation about something that had happened in my home that day that I had not discussed with my friend.  My friend, of course, was not able to play along convincingly. I never told her that I knew she was lying to me – I had no other friends and didn’t want to lose her. That friend grew up to be a pathological liar and I don’t talk to her anymore. But this embarrassing-in-retrospect experience taught me that it was a good idea to test things before believing them, and that everything worth believing was testable.

I wasn’t raised religious by my parents, and in fact I was basically ignorant of how widespread religion was until I loudly proclaimed my disbelief in God in my sixth-grade language arts class to the horror of my thirty fundamentalist Christian classmates. Until then, I thought that religion and church was something people on TV did, a fantasy along the lines of mom making everyone a big hot breakfast before school while dad read the newspaper. But I still had lingering spiritual curiosity – I would read about people who talked to spirits, or try to find pictures of the Loch Ness monster, or let my wacky “medicine-man” neighbor try to manipulate my aura to set my spirit free of the chains of sadness and self-doubt. Like my childhood friend’s little fantasy, the idea that something supernatural and unexplainable was out there was attractive. But I kept noticing that for every amazing story, there was a skeptical viewpoint that got harder and harder to ignore. And as I had long suspected, the stories that people tell themselves to justify their beliefs God and religion just didn’t add up. I recognized that I’ve never seen or experienced anything that couldn’t be completely explained by science, and that this was not a coincidence.

In the past few years I have realized that I’m not just agnostic, I’m an atheist and a skeptic. Web sites like Pharyngula, whatstheharm.net, sciencebasedmedicine.org, and even XKCD have helped me crystallize my views. Now I’m that annoying person that points out to friends that their homeopathic remedy contains no active ingredients, that acupuncture doesn’t do anything, and that for every Bible verse that offers a rule on life, there are many more that don’t make any sense. I’m not an expert on everything, but I try my best to be well-informed and present evidence rather than opinions and anecdotes. I’ve found that the more I understand about our physical world, the more comfortable I am, and I have promised myself – the embarrassed, misled child, the curious college student, and my present self – that I will learn as much about it as possible.

Dee
United States

The Bill Nye story is not true

You may have heard that Bill Nye, in a flurry of profanity, challenged Todd Akin to a debate. Enticing as the story sounds, I hate to tell you…it’s completely made up. False. Phony. A bit of lazy satire.

It seems to be spreading everywhere. Let’s nip it in the bud right now.

Also, I’ve met Bill Nye, and had dinner with Bill Nye, and that article did not sound like Bill Nye at all.