Let’s see…where am I? Oh, yeah. Springfield. Skepticon. My talk went OK, it was an all-science talk, and maybe disappointed those who expected me to lasso a god out of the sky, set him on fire, and stomp on his smoldering carcass. Afterwards, the party went on for quite a while. I was supposed to referee a drinking contest between Rebecca Watson and Richard Carrier, but they both faded pathetically early, forcing me to continue on for both of them.

No sleep for me. I ended up shooting the breeze all night long with DJ Grothe and Amanda Marcotte and Bug Girl and a few others.

Now I’ve got a long day of travel ahead. I expect to simply sleep through it all.

I must catch a plane, but here are a few short notices I didn’t want to neglect.

• Godless folk are trying to establish an atheist discussion site, and they need votes for approval. Help ’em out if you’d like.

• Phylointelligence is a new site organizing essays to summarize and explain the evidence for evolution. Take a look!

• Jeff Randall is an activist for secular humanism and skepticism who has fallen on hard times — his friends are fundraising to help him through a current crisis. Help if you can.

This would be his birthday, if he hadn’t died in 1996. We’re just going to have to celebrate his life without him.

You’ve got one more day to vote for Christie Wilcox to win a $10,000 scholarship. Get in there!

If you haven’t voted for Christie Wilcox yet, get on over there and help! She’s got the lead, but it’s slipping right now.

Think of it as practice for tomorrow, when all you Americans will get out and vote for the good guys. Right? Right?

Or at least the not-so-evil guys. We’re just trying to keep the riff-raff out of control.

Don’t you know Halloween is supposed to be creepy scary? Yet people keep assaulting my senses with adorableness!

OK, maybe the Hello Kitty shirt is a little bit chilling.

If you happen to be up around Thunder Bay, Ontario, you might see these jack o’lanterns glowing in the yard of Corinne and Kevin.

Here’s another one, sent to me by Sarah:

And it is so cute and adorable. A while back, I laughed at the theocrats of Christian Governance. Apparently, the exposure stung, prompting one of them to write a whiny little rant. Here’s how it begins:

It has been very interesting engaging with atheists over the past couple of weeks. They came looking for us, finding our website, it seems, due to exposure by a PZ Myers, a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota. Mr. Myers is brash about his own atheism, declaring that his website is about “Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal.” If these people are his “disciples,” he, as a professor, should be thoroughly embarrassed.

What, you may ask, could people have done to embarrass me? As he rages on and on, what really annoyed him is that people asked for evidence to support his claims, and are out to make creationism look silly. As if that is difficult.

These atheists would also demand that you lay out the material backing up your position. If you told them to go and look for it themselves because you know how easy it is to find on the internet, or if you even just tell them, that if their interest is genuine, they should just keep reading your own website, you again got accused of not having a defense, of not having rational reasons to back up your claims.

On numerous occasions, I accused these atheists of engaging in guerrilla warfare, trying to wear down their enemies by sucking them into a long, drawn-out battle, demoralizing them at the same time with fraudulent accusations and sarcastic, mocking criticism. I am sure that if I bothered to look, I’d find a book somewhere called “Atheist Battle Strategies Against Christians.” The tactics used by some of them were so repetitive and robotic, as though they were brainwashed disciples of some cult leader.

Poor fellow. I can see why he was getting battered about with demands that he back up his claims: he’s wonderfully evasive. It’s a pointless cranky essay in which he gripes about being asked for evidence, yet never actually gets around to mentioning what the evidence is for, let alone actually telling us what his evidence is. Oh, right, it’s somewhere else in the dominionist glurge on the website. Read it all to find out…that no, it isn’t.

I think you should start out your day with tales of fatherhood, since I did. Sometimes my mailbox is a very depressing thing.

• What do you do when your son has seizures? Take him to religious authorities for diagnosis.

  “When my son first began suffering from this problem I took him to sheikhs to recite Qur’an on him but most of them became scared when they heard the female voice telling them that she was a royal jinn and that no one can exorcise her unless Turki dies,” he said.

  The father said a sheikh advised him to tie his son’s arms and legs with iron chains and to read Qur’an on him. “We did this. My son became quiet but is totally unaware of what is happening around him. He does not talk and is now unable to harm anyone,” he added.

  He’s been kept in chains in the basement for six years. Therapy successful!

• A father has to discipline his children. When Mousaa Sidime’s 13 year old daughter balked at doing her mandatory prayer routine — this apparently wasn’t just some quick “I lay me down to sleep”, but something tedious that the girl hated — he responded with a slap. A slap that required calling the police.

  “When we got there the girl was bleeding around her nose and she has been in a coma ever since,” David said.

  The situation has been resolved and she’s out of the coma. She’s dead.

  Prayers work! Now an innocent little girl is in heaven, getting slapped daily by a god who wants more of those prayers and praises.

• Daddy knows best what to do with little girls’ uteruses, too. Let’s not ever allow abortion under any circumstances, because there’s never any case where a girl would be better off with an abortion. Like this heartwarming case of paternal concern.

  It’s a simple story. A neighbor of a 13 year old girl expressed his natural urges and raped her. She got pregnant. Said neighbor had gotten his rocks off, he was done with her, and told her that it was not his responsibility. The little girl had no support, could get no abortion (this is in Peru, where abortion is almost completely prohibited), and in total despair, tried to commit suicide by throwing herself off a building.

  But wait! This story isn’t awful enough yet. She didn’t die. She did suffer serious spinal injuries, though, and in a real surprise, she didn’t lose the pregnancy. So the hospital refused to operate to save her from paralysis because it would put the fetus at risk, despite the fact that a therapeutic abortion was recommended in her condition. No go.

  LC: I Have To Tell What Happened To Me from Center for Reproductive Rights on Vimeo.

  Hey! What happened to the rapist baby daddy? I don’t know.

It all sounds so depressing, doesn’t it? Unless, of course, you’re a happy and oblivious member of the patriarchy. Then it’s all cool.

I just have to remind everyone now and then that we are trying to raise money for science education in the public schools, and I do have a donation page where you can pick specific grant applications you like and give them your cash.

If you’re feeling competitive, there’s also a leaderboard page where you can see the contributions made by other science blogs. Pharyngula is leading, of course, but I’m feeling lonely…I seem to be the only participant from Seed Media so far. You might think about doing some nagging yourself and tell those other ScienceBlogs to get in the act and join the group.