So the world has a new pope: Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit out of South America. He’ll be assuming the papal name of Francis I, which nicely calls humility and peace. Here’s hoping those actually are the hallmarks of his papacy.

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Over at FB, Kaylee asked for the Latin version of “You can has cheezburger.” That’s one of ( Read more... )

My friend Dan Fincke is moving his blog on atheism from its old home on the FreeThought site to Patheos. You can find him at ( Read more... )

Atheist blogger Pharyngula shared a taxonomy of several different kinds of atheists ( Read more... )

A few days ago Dan Fincke and I sat down for a debate as part of his blogathon to support the Secular Student Alliance. It was the first time I'd done anything of the kind, and I'm trying to look at it in terms of what I can do better, both in terms of setting up the interview (I'm not nearly the night-owl I thought I was, for one thing) and of ( Read more... )

Yesterday I posted some graphics I had created to go along with my SSA interview for tonight. mrowe kindly took the "Hamlet" quote and turned it into a real work of art:

( Read more... )

I need a graphic for my interview with Dan tomorrow night - actually a photo, but I'm a bit uncomfortable passing pictures of myself around. I mean, I do it occasionally but I try to minimize it and keep it to friends. So I started playing around with an illustration of Smaug done by John Howe and some of my favorite quotes that might be ( Read more... )

My friend Dan Fincke is doing a blogathon to support the Secular Student Alliance. This is a cause near and dear to my heart. There are lots of reasons for this - partly I think religion (and humanity generally) is better off when the smartest people in all groups think long and hard about our institutions and core beliefs. Iron sharpens iron, as ( Read more... )

The other day at FB, Dan Fincke posted a quote that has stuck with me. Specifically:

"Dear liberal, enlightened Christian: I'm not lumping you in with fundies - you are. Get a new name and new holy book to selectively cite." (Matt Dillahaunty)

This is actually a topic I've thought about a lot myself, and I hinted at it in my post on gender last night ( Read more... )

Recently I read an article about Miley Cyrus and how she wasn't acting like she was twelve anymore. Miley says some really interesting things about what it means to find yourself when you're a child-star, and also talks about sex and the double-standard women face in Hollywood. Now, say I posted a link to that article here with a comment along the ( Read more... )

My friend Dan Fincke has an interesting post up about "covert" atheists and theists. He starts by describing two types of atheists:

There are at least two broad kinds of avowed atheists who take two distinct kinds of stances on the status of their belief. One is the atheist in the widest possible sense-one who claims to passively lack any belief in ( Read more... )