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What I'm reading now:
The God Virus: How religion infects our lives and culture
God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible by CJ Werleman
The God Virus: How religion infects our lives and culture by Darrel W Ray
Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life (this is excellent. Well written and fascinating. Highly recommended)
God Is Not Great (Hitchens is extremely erudite but I agree with him a lot here. Excellent so far)
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Listening to the audio version. Excellent!)


What I just finished:
Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language
Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism (Recommended. The first half is a great read. Thorough and detailed but easy to understand.)
Letting Go of God (I listened to the audio version. It was poignant and funny. Highly recommended!)
His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass) (best trilogy I've ever read!)

Series

Happy Atheist Love

Dark Chocolate and Other Tidbits of Goodness

dark-chocolateIf you’re like me, and you enjoy dark chocolate, then I have some studies to share with you! I think they’ll be helpful for the holidays as well as generally beneficial throughout the year. If you don’t like chocolate (WTF, just kidding), see below for swine flu info, and other linky goodness.

Dark Chocolate Helps Ease Emotional Stress: A new study found that eating about an ounce and a half of dark chocolate a day for two weeks reduced levels of stress hormones in people who felt highly stressed. The chocolate also partially corrected other stress-related biochemical imbalances. “The study provides strong evidence that a daily consumption of 40 grams [1.4 ounces] during a period of 2 weeks is sufficient to modify the metabolism of healthy human volunteers,” the scientists say.

That led me to a study from last December. It’s rather small and involves self-reporting, but it could [...]

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

Skeptical thinking is such a wonderful tool to have. It means you don’t get scammed or BS’ed nearly as much by shoddy news or dodgy advertising. You also get to save money because you’ll be less apt to buy gimmicky cure-alls that do nothing but drain your wallet and give you false hope. In his book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan wrote about this. It’s called the Baloney Detection Kit. (see below for an excerpt)

Michael Shermer recently made a great companion video talking about The Baloney Detection Kit: (approx. 14 min)

Here are the 10 points from the [...]

Interesting Randomness

WooT!I’m sorry for neglecting you, my friends. You see, exciting things are afoot here and I am super busy herding cats. I’ll fill you in on Tuesday and you’ll see what’s been keeping me so busy. :-D WOOT!

So for today, I’m going to link to some interesting stuff that you might enjoy.

Here’s an interesting bit of religious nuttery: Maine diocese asks catholics to fast against gay marriage. The article also mentions how lame fasting is for catholics: They get to eat one full meal in the day, up to 2 snacks and they can drink all they want. WTF? How is that fasting? That’s more than I eat in a day normally!

On a much happier note, Mutations make evolution irreversible! Researchers resurrected (pun intended?) ancient proteins to find that evolution can only go forward. Very wicked [...]

What Are You Doing November 19?

I have a MISSION for all heathens across America for November 19. Please watch the following video: (it’s 6 minutes long)

Pharyngula wrote about this the other night and noted that the giveaway is now 100,000 books at 100 universities, that Darwin’s text will remain intact, and the 50 page foreword will be rewritten to be more fair to atheists. (Does that mean it will be 50 blank pages?)

Here’s what I would love to see [...]

Mr. Deity and the Skeptic! (Michael Shermer)

Mr. Deity is awesome. Here’s the latest with guest Michael Shermer, PhD:

If you haven’t seen all the episodes, they do sort of build on each other. You can subscribe to them on iTunes (search for Mr. Deity) or you can go to MrDeity.com to catch up. Season 2 is only available there now, I believe. So go watch them and get a [...]

Skeptic? Atheist? Then Help Fix Wikipedia

funny-dog-pictures-skeptical-dog-does-not-believe-youI read an article by Daniel Loxton, editor of Junior Skeptic, which was about how skeptics need to pitch in and help make Wikipedia, the people’s encyclopedia, a science-based resource. He says the skeptical movement has a great opportunity to help propagate accurate and scientific information with this public resource that is so widely used.

It’s free and easy to contribute either a small correction or whole pages. You just need to be able to cite references. If you can add a resource to the page, you can even link directly to good skeptical websites for people. You don’t need permission, and with simple edits, you don’t need any coding skills.

Best of all, it’s rewarding and fun to use your skeptical knowledge to enhance an essential public resource. Furthermore, we know from our internal traffic statistics that people really do follow up on the skeptical [...]

How You Can Know There Is No God

funny-pictures-your-cat-is-the-destroyer-of-curtains

Ha, as much as I would like to take credit for this beauty…

It’s by Wayne Adkins:

There is no God. How could I just make an assertion like that? Why wouldn’t I say “I believe there is no God” or “I don’t believe there is a God”? After all, I am making a negative assertion, an assertion that something does not exist. To prove that something does exist, one need only provide a single example of a things existence. But, we are often told, to prove a negative assertion, an assertion that something does not exist, one must conduct an exhaustive search of the universe or have complete knowledge of everything. So to prove God does not exist, we are often told, one must possess god-like abilities. This is rubbish. A negative assertion can be proven.

Take the case of square circles. I can [...]

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