An excellent read: The Game That Let Me Mourn My Lost Faith. A former Christian describes his gradual abandonment of faith in the context of a video game about religion that he’s playing, and it’s subtle and complex…both the game and his loss. The games weren’t actively forcing atheism down his throat — they often had fictional religions embedded in them — but they did make him think about alternative explanations, and realize that maybe there were other ways to understand the world outside that bubble of Christianity.

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American Atheists is doing it again: they’re attending CPAC. I’m at a loss — this is simply incoherent, and sends the message that the atheism movement is so broad it is meaningless, it can encompass any philosophy, including explicitly anti-humanist ones. So why bother?

And weirder still, look who they’re sending.

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Isn’t it nice of a Southern Baptist minister to expose his ignorance with a question?

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Otto West: Apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it.

Michael Egnor read my post on how medical publications avoid using the word “evolution”. He just didn’t understand it.

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Vantrú, the Icelandic atheist organization, has unilaterally decided co-opt all the children born in that country and automatically enroll all Icelanders as atheists. I guess that means the percentage of atheists in Iceland will leap from roughly 10% to nearly 100%.

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Last year, Creation Ministries International announced a new documentary called “Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels” which was supposed to be revolutionary and like no other creationist movie. Did anyone see it? Anyone? I didn’t, but I just ran across some notes on it, so I rummaged around the web to find out what happened.

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And it’s about time. Soon is a dishonest hack, one of the climate change deniers who exploited his prestigiously titled position as a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (Oooh! Sciencey!) to claim authority in attacks on more credible climate scientists, and he’s been very popular on the denialist side of things.

Now his own boss is admitting that he violated disclosure principles by failing to reveal his industry connections. You might be wondering what connections, and how much did he get?

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Here it is. I haven’t watched it, so maybe it sucks.

Man, I hate TED talks. I know there are some good ones, but like anything, 99% of them are crap, and the garbage gets gobbled up with the same fervor as the jewels.

So I get this blurb from a book publisher, promoting a new book coming out about evolution, by some guy whose main claim to fame seems to be that he’s a “TED all-star” (I looked a little deeper: he’s also a businessman who runs a biotech investment company). The email was titled “George Clooney’s wedding isn’t just unfair, it’s unnatural selection”, which set off alarms all over the place — klaxons and those whoop-whoop howling noises I’d hear from the fireboats on Puget Sound. (Actually, every morning my inbox produces a cacophony of bullshit, so this is nothing suprising.)

I was curious, though, so I read it instead of hitting delete.

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