#FtBCon! Tomorrow!

The FreethoughtBlogs online conference starts up tomorrow at 5pm CST with an introduction by the fabulous Debbie Goddard, followed by a fabulous line-up of fabulous speakers that doesn’t stop until 8pm Sunday. I’m going to be a desk-chair-potato most of the weekend, writing up stuff, preparing for a talk, composing an exam, that sort of thing, so this is going to be perfect — I’m going to clear a spot off on my desk, prop up the iPad there, and stream all the talks to entertain and educate me through my drudgery.

That’s one of the nice things about this online con. I can stay comfortably at home, get work done at the same time, and also, if I miss anything good, it will be preserved forever on youtube, so I can watch it on my time. You should flick on through. Check out the schedule, there’s guaranteed to be something you’ll find interesting.

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You wouldn’t expect a young earth creationist to be numerically accurate, would you?

We all had doubts about that economic impact report commissioned by Answers in Genesis for their Ark Park: it was clearly biased towards inflating revenues. Ken Ham goes around claiming that it will draw two million visitors/year, when the Creation “Museum” itself draws an eighth of that, and its attendance is declining. No one should be surprised that an independent assessment predicts much, much lower numbers.

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Makayla Sault, killed by religion and gullibility

It’s always sad when a child dies of cancer. Makayla Sault, an 11 year old Ojibwa girl, has died after refusing chemotherapy for her treatable cancer. She claimed to prefer indigenous medicine, although actually it was her parents who insisted on it, and strangely, this indigenous medicine consisted largely of megadoses of Jesus.

But guess who gets the blame for her death?

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I’m really beginning to like these satanists

A Florida county planned to allow religious groups to hand out Bibles in public schools. Atheists planned to take advantage of the required religious freedom to hand out secular material as well, and the school board was unfazed — yeah, go ahead, you can send out your tepid separation of church and state pamphlet while we give ’em a whole book of lurid sex and violence and gay stonings and babies smashed against walls.

But then the satanists offered to send out Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities, a little coloring book, and…

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Why do we die?

I finally got around to finishing Greta Christina’s Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God. It’s good! This book is the sort of thing atheism needs more of: an acknowledgment that the phenomena most important to human beings can be addressed effectively without imagining fantastic supernatural creatures. Atheists have this reputation of being nerds all wrapped up in abstract concepts and making arguments against the superstitious props that people claim to find useful in day-to-day life, and it’s good that some of us make the effort to show that no, we do deal with real-world concerns, and no, your myth is actually a terribly ineffective way of handling that problem.

So I guess it’s not surprising that my strategy for coping with death isn’t in Greta’s book. I take a developmental and evolutionary view of death.

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