I cannot now remember where I first encountered the idea that two people of equal intelligence, given the same facts, can in complete good faith reach different conclusions. It's a simple truth about the enormously complex process of trying to make sense of an enormously complicated world. I'm not just talking about opinions shaped by experience, ( Read more... )

Discovered the term "woo" at a particularly smug militant atheist blog this morning. Can't quite work out if it refers to falsifiable superstition and/or divisive OTWism, or to all forms of spirituality. These things are always confusing when you're a naturalist freethinker up to your elbows in gods. Require advice ( Read more... )

By now you may've seen the Pew Forum's graph showing the proportion of people in the US of different religious beliefs who accept evolution, but for me more interesting is their overview of different religion's official stances on evolutionVery many Christian denominations see no contradiction between God's role as the creator of the universe and ( Read more... )

As introductory books go, What Do Hindus Believe is fair to middling, but it contained a couple of eye-opening remarks about the relationship between the West, and the huge and various collection of traditions and practices called Hinduism, which particularly interested me in the light of militant atheism ( Read more... )

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2006/12/19/the-satanic-cosmology-of-jack-chick/Read more... )

Couple from the Guardian Weekly: How I lost my unfaith: "No matter how often is it repeated that religious faith is uniquely and by definition a matter of assent to propositions for which there is no evidence, this simply won't do as a description. Quite probably some or all forms of religion do involve assent to untrue propositions but so does any ( Read more... )

The Biology of Panic, Discover magazine, April 2002

In the shadow of fear, New Scientist, 6 September 2003

Gay genetics, New Scientist, 16 October 2004

Rational Atheism: An open letter to Messrs. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens from the September Scientific American

Well, reading, doing my tax, and struggling pathetically with the housework day.

Right now I'm reading up on human pigmentation genetics for cluelessch1x0r. I want to be able to convert the technical stuff into English, but I'm not sure how much jargon I can get away with. So here's a straw poll:

Poll Skience jargonIn other news, I'm even more convinced that scientists would be ( Read more... )

Great - I seem to have bounced like a galactic yoyo from pre-menstrual depression to erm during-menstrual hypomania. wheeeeeeee

Also: must report total failure to sight moon or Venus this afternoon. Not for lack of wandering the uni peering up into the sky like a madwoman.

ETA: I just invented a number so big it is funny, it is called the GIGGOL.