What I would love to do is sit down with a confirmed creationist and watch these videos together — they’re very clear and simple and well-illustrated, with specific evidence cited. I really wonder how they would deal with it all.
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.
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What were our ancestors doing 40,000 years ago? Besides the necessaries of day-to-day living, they were making art, and some of it has survived to the present day. Every time I see one of these articles about cave art, I wonder about the rest of it, all lost: clothing, jewelry, paintings on more temporary media like hides and bark, dance and music. Those are all gone. All we have left, as fragile as they are, are a few scattered efforts preserved only by virtue of being put on rocks in deep and hidden places.
I could learn something. The Black Skeptics are hosting a conference, Moving Social Justice. This is what atheism needs.
Called “Moving Social Justice,” the conference will tackle topics beyond the usual atheist conference fare of confronting religious believers and promoting science education. Instead, organizers hope to examine issues of special interest to nonwhite atheists, especially the ills rooted in economic and social inequality.
“Atheism is not a monolithic, monochromatic movement,” said Sikivu Hutchinson, an atheist activist, author and founder of Los Angeles’ Black Skeptics, one member of a coalition of black atheist and humanist groups staging the conference.
“By addressing issues that are culturally and politically relevant to communities of color, we are addressing a range of things that are not typically addressed within the mainstream atheist movement.”
I am so tired of running in circles with people who insist that religion is evil and must be crushed, who then also declare that atheism has no implications or consequences and only means that there is no god. I would like to listen to people who actually have a goal of the greater good driving their atheism and secularism, rather than hiding behind evasions and abstractions. I’m also a bit fed up with the hypocrisy of insisting that atheism must reach a wider audience, while obliviously refusing to expand to meet the needs of more diverse communities.
We’re really, really good at making middle class white people with college educations satisfied. We need to learn that pandering to that group of people can lead to choices that make other groups unhappy.
Then you need Scroguard. For those of you who can’t afford the whole gimp suit.
You’re all dead. Your culture is basically extinct…or more accurately, has evolved into something that doesn’t involve sea-faring raids and pillaging and slave-taking, all those stereotypical things associated with Vikings. You weren’t even all that a thousand years ago — the Vikings were one aspect of a complicated culture of farmers and merchants and politicians and fishers and city builders.
So I’m afraid that if you are calling yourself a Viking now, you’re just a silly poseur*. If you’re trying to live up to Viking ideals today, you’re mistaken — no one wants to live with Vikings around anymore. Imagine a time a thousand years from now, when people try to claim the revered traditions of Americans by insisting on being called Footballers and running about in pads and cleats and punching their spouses in the head. That’s what I see in modern “Vikings”, and I say that as someone who can also claim Scandinavian descent.
I haven’t read the book since the 1970s, but mainly what I remember about Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was how badly written it was…I guess I happily forgot the details. But now Mallory Ortberg has to go and remind me.
Really, the movie might be a classic, but man, the book was terrible.
That atavistic cancer hypothesis is actually fueling the work of quacks: Orac has been getting threats from a Frank Arguello, who runs a crank cancer mill called “Atavistic Chemotherapy”.
It’s amazing stuff. It goes on and on about how cancer represents a reversion to the old cell types of single-celled organisms, and how modern chemotherapy is useless and dangerous, so he has a better formula: safe, harmless, and revolutionary. You’ll never guess what it is.
He’s treating cancer patients with antibiotics.
They announced their decision to shut down the organization and cancel future conferences yesterday. This is sad news — it has always been an innovative, interesting event, but they faced a terrible hit when one of their founders, Bora Zivkovic, was slammed with charges of harassing women, and they’ve been struggling to get donations to support the organization. I suspect they may also have gotten a bit over-extended, too, since they’d been creating satellite conferences on narrower topics at different locations (which was an excellent idea, by the way, but may not have been wise if their core operations were overtaxed).
The full announcement is below the fold.
