"No! I did not spend my life not raping and killing people, only to get to the magical sky city and find out that the sky-cookies and sky-pie and sky-baklava people get to share my sky-cake!"

Click to view

I mentioned this essay on The Sci Phi Show and said that I'd put it back at the top of the site when the episode aired so the listeners could see the illustration, so here it is ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Carl Sagan died ten years ago today. An extended excerpt from the epilogue to Billions and Billions, written by his wife Ann Druyan, was posted to the web, and five or six years ago I read it while wandering in the collapsed shell of a faith that didn't work for me. Sagan's good death influenced my development for the better as much as did his good ( Read more... )

The very best years of my education were the last two years of high school-- the years in public education. In particular, an astronomy teacher named Mr. Toll made a significant difference for the better, on my life and on who I am as a person ( Read more... )

Edge.org brought my attention to responses in the letters column of the New York Times (quoted below the cut), by the three atheists most prominently cited in the resurgence of outspoken atheism-- Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. They plead for the simplicity and gentleness of their positions, against the reputations they are ( Read more... )

The phrase "the Alpha Male Monkey" may be the most useful new explanatory tool I've encountered in years. paranthropus gave it to me in a recent LJ post about primate group psychology. It was an inspirational and motivational insight into the evolutionary biology of my psychology which has kept me up at night thinking of the implications. I wrote about it in ( Read more... )

( Behind the cut there is a video of Richard Dawkins conducting a Q&A, mostly with students and faculty from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University; I have added my own comments. If you would be so kind as to blog about it, I would like to collect comments from anyone on your friends lists. )

I may write a book someday about my experiences with experiments with Un-churches. One of the chapters would concern Universism. For those who don't know, Universism is a "religion" like Unitarian Universalism except that instead of embracing all religious heritages, it rejects all of them in favor of "faith in reason, inspiration in nature, and ( Read more... )