Good thing the BBC was keeping count: my heart has beaten 2 billion times in my lifetime. It also tells me I’ve just turned 30 on Mars.
Check out all the information the BBC has about you.
He tells everyone that if you question anything in the Bible, it puts you on a slippery slope to apostasy — you must believe every word is literally true or doubts will creep in, and then you are damned. He’s right, sort of. I’ll qualify that a bit, though.
Here’s a beautiful example: the story of Sandra Edwards, a serious, dedicated Christian and young earth creationist, so serious that she published a children’s book promoting creationism, who one day find herself thoughtfully reading material on the internet…and next thing you know, GODLESS.
Joseph Scrimshaw explains why using “social justice warrior” as an insult makes you an idiotface, weakshoulders, and dunceburger. Yeah, I know, they’ll just say they’re using it sarcastically, but sarcasm takes some skill to use well, and they don’t.
It’s FOX NEWS, eschewing fear-mongering and partisan politics to speak plain common sense about Ebola. Pay attention, this is rational and informative:
Guess what it covers?
The Ada Initiative fundraiser was a phenomenal success, and one of the cool results is that we’ll be having an Ally Skills workshop at Skepticon. That’s good, and I think they’re doing it right, with an expert to tell the men what to do and what not to do.
These things can go so wrong, though.
There are a lot of Christian movies coming out: we had God is Not Dead and The Passion of the Christ, and now a remake of Left Behind with Nicholas Cage is hitting the theaters. A review of the trend points out how bad these movies are, and that rather than propping up Christianity they seem to be doing a better job of exposing its stupidities.
I agree with the review, and I’m sure most atheists wouldn’t find much cause to argue with it, either. But I’d like to point out one telling phrase that emerged when the author was explaining his background.
By way of background, I have lived both irrational religion and right-wing politics. To “find myself” and salvage a crumbling marriage, I converted to fundamentalist Christianity in my early twenties. Both my religion and marriage ended up failing, but I remained supportive of right-wing social politics for several years after, because “religious values” were part of my political identity. I opposed gay marriage long after I left the church (I am very, very sorry), even though without religious motives there is no logic behind such discrimination.
You want this sprawling mess in a tidy package? You can’t go wrong reading this lengthy breakdown by Kyle Wagner, who is probably now on a hate list somewhere.
One thing I particularly appreciated was the analysis of the attempt to coopt the young gaming jerk group by conservative culture warriors and anti-feminists, in particular the ridiculous Christina Hoff Sommers. Here’s the bit where he tears apart her video.
Little ol’ Morris got that hashtag trending last night — I guess when essentially everyone in a small town suddenly starts tweeting exactly the same thing, it shows up as a bright blip in the data. It was an impressive reaction by the audience, too. These were college students who grew up with Bill Nye, and apparently even the ones who were too young to have watched his show when it was on the air got regularly exposed to episodes that were shown in the public schools. So he was welcomed like a rock star.
I got this email this morning, and I think it was misaddressed — it’s intended for the people who comment here, not me. Don’t you people have one common address that people can write to? Anyway, I’ll let you all deal with it for a change.
