Madison Avenue is so clever these days that most commercials are, to some extent, fun to watch. Adbusters.org is working hard to top Madison Avenue, though, with its own spoof commercials. Some of these are quite well done. You'll find more of Adbuster's spoof ads here. Here's what Adbusters…
One year ago, I made my first tentative post to this blog. It was really a test more than a post, as were the handful of posts for the next two weeks. We really didn’t get running until mid-March, 2006.
In that month of March 2006, “Grumpypilgrim” and I were happy to see that, on average, 29 people visited this site every day. Probably 20 of these daily visits were me. This month (February, 2007), there have been almost 2,000 visits to this site every day. I guarantee that most of them are not me. Over the life of this blog, we’ve now published 830 posts and we’ve received more than 3,000 comments.
I am honored that so many people would take the time to visit this site and to actually stay for awhile. The average visitor reads three pages, the most commonly read page being the home page, which consists of the ten most recent posts.
I am truly fortunate to be sharing this space with my co-authors. Some of them, such as Jason, have been my friends for a long time. Others are people I’ve met (in person or electronically) more recently. I carefully read everything each of them posts to this site.
Many people ask whether I can tell who is visiting the blog. The answer is no. My traffic software does not provide me with any meaningful identifying information. It does show me, though, that most visitors are from the U.S. Next in line are “unknown,” …
February's Big Read in Missouri has selected a surprising novel--Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I should not assume everyone today has read it, so briefly it is a novel about a future in which it is illegal to read books. The fire department, because all houses are built of fireproof…
I was sent this New York Times article in which a Young Earth Creationist gets a real PhD in paleontology. How does he do it? Dr. Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he…
One of our earlier posts concerned the efforts of evangelicals to relegate early hominid fossils to the back room of Kenya’s National Museum. That post recently drew this comment from James Davenock:
It seems that many here could simply replace the name Sam Harris, with Jesus, Newton or Sullivan in their writings. Many keep quoting others in an attempt to get their point across rather than just trying to get their point across. You could say “Dave, I admire Jesus’ viewpoints” or “Dave, I admire Sam Harris’ viewpoints” or “Dave, I admire Newton’s viewpoints”. . .
The difference between Science and Religion is Science has a process by which to prove its ideas while Religion does not and requires you to simply accept or excommunicate. I have found the same smugness in both religious and science types and that is a bit disquieting.
The wise man first says “I do not know”
I started responding to James Davenock’s comment at the location of that earlier post, but it grew long enough to justify posting at this separate location.
Davenock raises a good point. I suspect that there are many non-believers out there (all of us, some of the time), who “hero-worship” people like Richard Dawkins just like many theists hero-worship James Dobson or Jesus. You can quickly spot these folks by their writings, which essentially amount to “Way to go, Charles [Darwin]!” Or “Way to go, Jesus!” This lack of thoughtful content is no more informative than the rote prayers …