Bible lessons

Everyone reads Genesis, the racy bits in the Song of Solomon, the various Jesus tales in the Gospels, and when you’re really stoned, Revelation. But what about those more obscure chapters, where some old time prophet with a funny polysyllabic name raves against extinct city-states and tribes who haven’t followed his preferred bizarre ritual?

Don’t waste your time slogging through archaic language to read them in the Bible. Let Jay Pinkerton do your summarizing and interpreting for you.

There is some crazy stuff in those books, I tell you.

There’s more to atheism than Hitchens, you know!

We got back from Madison later than I’d expected yesterday, and it’s no fun to have to scramble to compose a lecture in a car, and then rush to assemble the data after midnight for an 8am class. But I have survived! Now I have to go drink a few liters of good black coffee, and while I do that, you can catch up on the godless goings-on that I missed.

  • It’s time for the latest Humanist Symposium. I’m not a humanist myself and have mixed feelings about the philosophy (which can be summed up as “not enough squid”), but it’s a good part of our godless community.

  • The Carnival of the Godless addresses the theme of morality this time around. I wish we could just strip the issue of morality from the discussion altogether, but we can’t…because the religious falsely claim to have a moral system based on their superstitions.

  • The Freethinker Sunday Sermonette discusses the recent polls that show the declining popularity of Christianity. Simple reason: people can think scientifically.

Pick on some other discipline for a while, will ya?

This is mere satire, but it would be much more interesting if Ben Stein were to challenge Newton, rather than Darwin. It would be just as absurd, but I think physicists need more abuse than just a few flaky zero-point energy guys and the New Agers using the word “quantum” in every sentence.

And hey, where are all the chemistry abusers? Won’t someone criticize Boyle and Lavoisier?

Hitchens at FFRF

Somebody recorded the Hitchens talk, and has uploaded the first parts of it to YouTube. I’ve put what’s currently available below the fold; this only covers about half of the talk, I estimate.

I know there has been a lot of talk about his state of sobriety, but it’s all baseless. He looked perfectly normal up there on the podium, and there was no sign of impairment that I could detect. Judge the man by what he says, not his imagined blood alcohol level.

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FFRF recap: heroes of the revolution, Hitchens screws the pooch, and the unbearable stodginess of atheists

We’re about to leave lovely Madison, Wisconsin and the Freedom from Religion Convention. So here’s a short summary: it was a good meeting and I was impressed with most of the speakers; Christopher Hitchens “pissed off” most of us as he promised to do, and the organization of the meeting could have been greatly improved.

Now the details.

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Cross that solution off the list of alternative energy sources

One source of fuel hydrocarbons in the 19th century was the whaling industry. I guess that won’t work in the 21st century.

According to industry website SaveTheWhales.org, a sperm whale could produce 2000 gallons, or 47.6 barrels, of oil. Thus a touch of long division tells us that we will need to slaughter approximately 630 million sperm whales each year in order to completely replace our petroleum production. Since there are only an estimated one million sperm whales currently living on Earth, wiping out the entire species would power the global economy for about half a day.

Too bad. I wonder how much oil we could squeeze out of puppy dogs and bunny rabbits?

Freethinkers are a happy and generous people

Last night, I attended talks by Katha Pollitt and Julia Sweeney here at the Freedom from Religion Convention, and I learned that the godless are a happy, humorous, good-natured group — even if I weren’t philosophically inclined this way myself, I’d want to be a member of this community.

Then this morning, I checked in on my DonorsChoose challenge and discover that you’re all generous and charitable, and that you care about kids and education. I’m having a grinch moment right here…my heart is growing a few sizes larger, and I’m pretty sure it’s not a symptom of congestive heart failure. We met my initial challenge to raise $10,000, and then some.

So then, because this particular atheist is a cruel taskmaster, I simply bumped up the challenge amount to $20,000, and added a bunch of new grant requests, including some that asked for tools to do developmental biology in the lab, and some on fossils. So if you haven’t yet kicked in, you’ve still got an opportunity.

If that isn’t enough for you, or if you’d rather not have your donations going to a group labeled “freethinkers”, check out the Scienceblogs leaderboard — there are lots of unfunded proposals in those other guys spaces. I told them they should have tapped into the charitable goodness of the godless if they really wanted to draw in donations.

Oh, and many thanks to Phil for drawing in the astronomy crowd. Even people who stare into the cold, unfeeling void for fun are glad to help a good cause.

And thanks to all of you!