Books for freethinkers
The Center for Inquiry has published this list of books for freethinkers recommended by well-known freethinkers.
Camp for skeptical children
The Center for Inquiry's week-long camp for skeptical kids is underway, as described by this article in Huffpo. To be clear, this is not a God-bashing camp. Rather, it is a place where the campers "share is an interest in taking a reason-guided and evidence-based approach to all of life's questions." Imagine sitting around the camp fire reciting this passage by Carl Sagan:
[W]hen the people have lost their ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
Family values
At Salon.com, Amy Benfer has roasted Bristol and Levi with an article beginning with this paragraph worthy of bronzing (the entire article constitutes a clinic on how to write, IMO):
She has been a (perhaps unwitting) symbol of her mother's ultimate pro-life commitment; he cut off his mullet and agreed to wear a suit for the Republican Convention. She spent her first year postpartum making bank telling other young women not to even think of having sex; he was dubbed "Sex on Skates" by New York magazine and stripped down to his skivvies for cash. But perhaps, like the boy who pulls your pigtail on the playground, all those differences and petty squabbles were a sign of true love; according to this week's Us Weekly magazine, it was all just a prelude to a big white Alaskan wedding: Bristol Palin, abstinence educator, and Levi Johnston, Playgirl model, have announced their (second) engagement.I am pleased that, so far today, I have kept to my pledge to avoid discussing Sarah Palin on this site. Ooops.
Mending Fences, Part IV – The many things we have in common
This is Part IV of a series of post titled "Mending Fences." Part I begins here. The many things we have in common Drawing stark lines to divide people into groups often invites suspicion and hostility. Instead of bifurcating humanity into two mutually exclusive groups--believers and atheists—we should carefully reconsider the degree to which atheists and believers are different. To the extent that we discover that we actually share interests, including a mutual interest in better understanding our differences, we dissolve big hurdles to working together. Whether we see each other as essentially similar or essentially different depends on whether we are focusing on our similarities or our differences. When we consider the ways that believers and atheists are similar, we can quickly think of enough things we have in common to fill encyclopedias. Most of us enjoy good food, good music and fresh air. We contribute to flood victims together. We throw muggers in jail together. We want our children learn to appreciate Shakespeare, mathematics and history together at school. We shop together, work together, celebrate most of our holidays together (even religious holidays) and we all struggle to understand how it was that we ended up on this spinning planet. Most believers and most atheists have another thing in common: they are both attacked by religious fundamentalists. We are so much alike in so many ways that a Venn diagram illustrating the overlap of atheists and believers would present itself as an eclipse. Truly, a Martian anthropologist who carefully observed the day-to-day behavior of most believers and most atheists would be perplexed to hear us grumbling about our differences. For that anthropologist, trying to differentiate humans based on our outward behavior would be as difficult as it is for humans trying to discern differences among the worker ants in an ant colony. Well, except for one hour per week when the believers went into a building with a steeple on top. Except for that hour, though, it would be almost impossible to tell who is who based on the way we live our lives. [More . . . ]
How much has the Wall Street bailout cost American taxpayers?
How much have U.S. taxpayers paid to bail out Wall Street? Here are many of the details, but note that $2.02 trillion remains outstanding. Also keep in mind that the TARP payments were only 10% of the total U.S. aid given to Wall Street. Be wary, then, when you hear Wall Street crowing that it has paid back much of the TARP money. Dylan Ratigan puts the topic in perspective.