See note at bottom from Richard Carrier.
This person was very anxious to contact me and get a reply, and sent me a couple of messages on twitter and in email. I gave him a shot. I shouldn’t have bothered.
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…
I finally got around to finishing Greta Christina’s Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God
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.
St Louis, at the Gateway to Reason conference. You can go too, 31 July to 2 August, and it’s cheap! $25!
There’s a furious argument going on between Tom Flynn, who hates Christmas and thinks no right-minded atheist should have any truck with a religious holiday, and Beth Presswood, a confirmed atheist who loves the Christmas holiday. I agree with Flynn that the day is thoroughly tainted with ongoing religious garbage, but I also agree with Presswood that the season is in the process of being totally secularized, and that we ought as atheists to keep up the pressure to strip away the superstition and reconstruct the day to serve our completely human needs.
SGU is still an excellent podcast, of course (and by the way, they’re being sued by a quack and could use your support), but Rebecca Watson has amicably left the show. It was a smart move on her part — she has an identity that isn’t defined by SGU, so she didn’t need it anymore.
Like rice paper, I guess. Neil deGrasse Tyson made a couple of light-hearted tweets on Christmas that prompted an awful lot of whining. From the reaction, you’d think he’d posted this joke:
I don’t even think that’s particularly offensive, but Tyson’s jokes were tame, even compared to that.
Several years ago, I attended one of Kent Hovind’s seminars in St Cloud — it was genuinely the worst talk I’ve ever heard. It was over-long, it was shallow, it was a succession of lies, and it was full of really bad cornpone jokes — some of which were anti-semitic or marginally racist. It was terrible.
It seems the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree. Kent Hovind’s son, Eric, was affiliated with a pair of clowns spawned from Creation Science Evangelism, in something called The T.R.U.T.H. Group. They put out YouTube videos, including this one from several years ago. These are really bad YouTube videos. Prepare yourself for some astonishing trash.
Oh, joy. David Brooks has blessed us with a Christmas column this week, titled The Subtle Sensations of Faith. You can tell already that it’s going to be a lump of drivel in your stocking, can’t you?
