I received the following from a friend of mine, who sent it to his local paper as well. I’ve asked his permission to post it here, in its entirety. It concerns an issue which, while we may hope represents an unfortunate part of our history long outgrown, still rears its…
The Templeton Foundation is promulgating a set of short essays by twelve prominent thinkers and writers. I’ve recently noticed these essays in several magazines. Templeton asked the following question to its panel: “Does the Universe Have a Purpose?” The answers ranged from “yes” to “not sure” to “unlikely” to “no.” …
Okay, perhaps I'm being a bit harsh. But I found some videos on YouTube purporting to show simple homemade tricks for getting power from essentially nothing. The culprit calls himself HouseholdHacker These are very slickly directed and composed, very amateur-looking videos, full of straight-faced monologue and how-to demonstrations, illustrating nothing…
Writer John Scalzi recently visited the Creation Museum. He has written his report, assessed his impressions, and concluded...well, you should read his conclusions for yourself, here. I do not have Mr. Scalzi's flare for describing expensive nonsense in such finely satirical, subversive, and somewhat detached a manner. There is also a…
Words have great power to frame thoughts. Here's a good example reported by Ebonmuse of Daylight Atheism, reporting on the recent Secular Society Conference in NY: The conference organizers next played a rare audio recording of [Carl] Sagan reading the famous passage, Reflections on a Mote of Dust, from his book…