[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIqk4agzKPE[/youtube] This little Harpers-Index-like compilation with compelling music is a full bag of potato chip tidbits of numerical exposition. The numbers seem accurate. At least those numbers that I have the background to know from other reputable sources. But what do they mean? The video simply concludes that change is…
Here's a short, well-written essay on one of the major problems with what now passes for "education": [W]e provide students with a meager curriculum which overemphasizes test taking, which neglects the essential and perennial issues of being a human being and which fails to give students a means of expressing…
Information Reliability. This is a pet peeve of mine. Stephen Jay Gould was a stickler for finding out where ideas "that everybody knows" came from, and often finding the original source to be dubious. I am writing today because of a recent Mallard Fillmore cartoon proclaiming that "new reports give…
My daughters and I have started to watch some of the episodes from the Star Trek Voyager series on DVD. We are not disappointed at all. All of us are finding that the series contains well-written, thought-provoking, stories. Here is a topic that might seem unrelated to Star Trek: According to…
Ebonmuse (one of our authors, who also writes thoughtful posts at Daylight Atheism) recently interviewed Dale McGowan who has edited a book of essays on raising a child without religion. McGowan’s book, Parenting Beyond Belief, will be released next month.
The book features original essays by Richard Dawkins, Julia Sweeney, Penn Jillette, Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, Michael Shermer, and more . . .
This book looks to be of superlative scope and quality, covering a wide range of important topics: religiously mixed marriages, secular education, humanist ceremonies, moral instruction, teaching children about death, and more. [B]ooks like this may well be at the forefront of the “third wave” of atheist activism – atheists moving into society, living alongside everyone else in openness and honesty, establishing a set of social structures that can directly compete with and provide an alternative to religion.
Ebonmuse’s post intrigued me enough that I placed my order for a copy of Parenting Beyond Belief. I look forward to reading it, then discussing it on this site.
In the meantime, I’ve been busy raising two open-minded daughters (aged 6 and 8 ) without the benefit of McGowan’s book. Notice that I’m not really trying to raise them “without religion.” We regularly discuss various religious traditions. On several occasions, I’ve taken my daughters to churches (not just weddings and funerals). One of my daughters received 1 1/2 years of her kindergarten and 1st grade school education at a neighborhood Catholic school. …
