Al Jazeera America
Kiss me, I'm an atheist
Al Jazeera America
In Pope Francis' Christmas address, he extended a surprise olive branch to atheists. But the reach was backhanded. “I invite even nonbelievers to desire peace,” he offered. Even nonbelievers? How magnanimous. Religious tolerance has increased ...

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Godsmacked: I'm an atheist at a hardcore Christian academy
Salon
When conversing about my atheism, I invariably feel like I'm at an AA (Atheists Anonymous) meeting. Not that atheism is a disease to cure. It's just that when you talk about it to people who believe in God, or God forbid, are religious fundamentalists ...

Not that it ever is, but now…it’s the corruption. Christie, McDonnell, and — you knew this would happen eventually to one of the dumber conservatives — Dinesh D’Souza has been indicted for violations of campaign ethics.

My big worry now with the Republicans in such disarray is that there won’t be much competition in coming elections, and stupid Democrats will nominate dull, moderate-conservative, ‘safe’ candidates.

The Week Magazine
How to be an honest atheist
The Week Magazine
n a controversial column from last March, I argued that most contemporary atheists are being fundamentally dishonest in claiming that godlessness "is not only true but also unambiguously good for human beings." It most certainly is not, I claimed ...

Teen Muslim convert defies atheist family
The Local.se
It was a different approach to teaching Swedish teenagers about the world religions that sparked something in then 16-year-old Jenny's mind. Born and raised in a party-loving, affluent, and atheist family, Jenny had not been interested in Islam before ...

Can you really 'try on' atheism for a year?
CNN (blog)
(CNN) - Ryan Bell, a one-time Christian pastor, says he didn't expect his yearlong experiment with atheism to get much attention. "This wasn't intended to be an international journey that was done in public," he told CNN's Brooke Baldwin last Wednesday.

Guess who just got a vaguely threatening Freedom of Information Act request demand? Me!

You may recall that bizarre letter slipped under my door by John Geiger, editor of the right wing campus rag, the North Star. In it, he blithely accused me of stealing a print run of his newspaper because the distribution locations smelled like chloroform and other sciency things, and because I’d written a post expressing my contempt for the disgusting racism he exhibited.

I thought it was a joke. But no, he has enlisted something called The Alliance Defending Freedom For Faith For Justice to come after me. They sent a letter. Here’s the relevant part:

Pursuant to Minnesota’s open records law, MINN. STAT. §§ 13.01 to 13.99, we request access to and a COPY of the following documents and data:

1. Video surveillance of all cameras near the following locations on the University of Minnesota Morris campus from 12:00 a.m. on November 22 to 11:59 p.m. on November 23, 2013:

a. In the tunnel between the Science building and the Student Center; and

b. In the Humanities Fine Arts building; and

2. Written communications, including electronic, sent or received by UM- Morris Professor Paul Z. Myers that refer to the “NorthStar,” “North Star,” or John Geiger; and

3. Written communications, including electronic, sent or received by UM- Morris Chancellor Jacqueline Johnson that refer to the “NorthStar,” “North Star,” or John Geiger.

Do we even have video surveillance cameras there? I have no idea. Anyway, I was happy to oblige, did an email search for those terms, and came up with all of…about a dozen items. Most were references to the North Star STEM alliance; one was a message to the whole campus from our chancellor deploring the allegations of fascism and racism published by the North Star, and that was actually the only correspondence at all that mentioned Geiger. Other than Geiger’s own letter, of course.

There won’t be any evidence of a conspiracy, or that I stole their dreadful papers, because there wasn’t and I didn’t…but one thing we know, wingnuts love to make noise about dreadful sneaky conspiracies against them and the American Way.

Besides, I have an alibi. I was in Benghazi, extorting money from Bill Clinton’s mistresses to invest in the Whitewater project, and also gathering fake temperature readings for Al Gore to fool everyone into believing climate change is real.

First US atheist university chaplain: a legacy of kindness
Religion News Service
Tom was a trailblazer—an openly gay man working as a professional atheist in a time when both of those things were far more stigmatized than they are today, he founded the Humanist Chaplaincy in 1974 as a home for Harvard's atheist, agnostic, and ...

Aww, the poor Discovery Institute. They are so oppressed and censored that they are now asking for nominations for Censor of the Year. Because, as you know, criticizing creationism and expecting science teachers to have basic competence in their fields is tantamount to silencing alternative views.

They do admit that the majority — the vast, overwhelming, Jebus-crushing majority — of scientists accept evolutionary theory, but they put a paranoid twist on it.

Yes, a majority of scientists who will speak openly will you tell you, if questioned, that they accept the Darwinian account and reject the scientific alternative of intelligent design. But the statistical fact of such a majority is the result, in no small measure, of rule by fear. For every story of a scientist or teacher silenced that we have covered here, many, many others could be told — but the censored scholars and instructors are careful about keeping safe from further threats and reprisals, which means keeping quiet.

First, we aren’t “Darwinians” any more. Evolution is much bigger than Darwin imagined. Could these goobers someday learn that? I recognize Darwinian processes in evolution, but I also appreciate others.

But more importantly…”rule by fear”? Nonsense. The training of biologists and biology educators involves learning a great deal about the evidence and studying the research that lead to the conclusion that life evolved. The only thing we might be afraid of is looking ridiculous and uninformed if we were to promote the ridiculous and uninformed ideas of Intelligent Design creationist clowns.

But do help them out. Nominate those science educators who have done a great job of informing the public about the absurdity of creationism — because that’s the Discovery Institute’s working definition of “censorship.”

Examiner.com
George Soros, atheist, funds American youth evangelical trips to Israel
Examiner.com
Despite being a known atheist, billionaire George Soros has taken quite an interest in Christian Evangelicals, as revealed yesterday on media mogul Glenn Beck's radio show by Pastor John Hagee, founder and national chairman of Christians United for ...

Nature has posted a rebuke to one of their employees for outing a pseudonymous blogger.

We would not normally comment on a point of view expressed by an employee in a personal capacity and in their personal time. However, as Nature was mentioned in a recent personal Twitter post by a Nature editor, it is necessary for us to clarify our views and policies. Firstly, we are pleased that the editor in this case has apologised to Dr Isis for the language used and for the fact that her identity was revealed. We also wish to make clear that both the language and behaviour are contrary to Nature’s principles and codes of editorial practice, and indeed contrary to the practices of all our editors. We encourage civility and respect on social media by our employees, and hope for similar standards from those we interact with. Blindness to the status of research authors is enshrined in our editorial selection policies and practices, as is the respect for, and protection of, anonymity. We take our responsibilities to our authors and reviewers seriously and we protect the identities of anonymous reviewers, manuscript authors or authors of magazine articles. Our policies on anonymity are detailed on our author and reviewer services pages: http://www.nature.com/authors/index.html. We continue to listen to reactions and are carefully considering the issues. The history and circumstances are complex, so we will not be commenting further on the specifics at this time.

The only comment directed at the offending employee begins with “we are pleased”. Wait, did I say “chastised” and “rebuked”? My error. I meant to say “lovingly stroked.”

This is how Nature‘s reputation gets dethroned, you know.

One of the advantages of working at a small university that puts a variety of disciplines cheek-by-jowl in a single building is that I get exposed to all sorts of different stuff. It sometimes has its downsides — I’m on an interdisciplinary search committee, so next week is consumed with seminars in statistics and computer science, all very mathy, that will sorely strain my brain — but I get to learn stuff all the time, which makes me happy.

So this semester I’m always trundling stuff up and down between the second and third floors for my genetics lab, and the third floor is where all the chemistry labs are taught, so I run into these cool posters that I have to stop and stare at every time I go by. They’re cartograms of the periodic table of the elements from webelements.com, and yes, you can buy them for yourself ($10.14, cheap). Unfortunately, the thumbnails available on their site are fairly low quality and don’t do justice to them — they’re very pretty posters.

So here’s some perspective for you, two periodic tables where each element is proportionally scaled by abundance (the product of the big bang!), the top one of abundance in the universe, and the bottom one showing abundance in earth’s crust (products of nucleosynthesis in exploding stars).

That’s what the universe is all about: thinly distributed hydrogen and helium in a vast space, with traces of heavier elements occasionally forming in energetic accidents.

Also, any time I see a periodic table anymore — which is all the time — I am reminded of that awful debate with Jerry Bergman in which he claimed that Darwinists were trying to criminalize the periodic table because it revealed that all the elements were irreducibly complex. That’s how out of touch with reality those guys are.

What Has Bill Nye So 'Frightened'? 'Science Guy' Reveals Why He's Ignoring ...
TheBlaze.com
Since “science guy” Bill Nye's upcoming Feb. 4 debate with anti-evolutionist Ken Ham at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., was made public a few weeks ago, atheist activists have spoken out fervently against the initiative. Nye responded to ...

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Last night, or 11.4 million years ago, a star exploded in galaxy M82. These photos are about a month apart.

I’m looking at that and thinking, “I bet it was warm there.”

It’s expected to get brighter over the next few weeks, to the point where it might be possible to see it with your home telescope or even a pair of binoculars. Over eleven million light years away, and the supernova is going to be faintly visible from my yard.

Revise my earlier sentiment: I bet it was really warm there.

It’s cold and windy out there, and I can’t feel my toes right now, and so I’m thinking…

Yeah.

Atheist Afghan Granted Asylum in the UK
Christian News Network
“Freedom of belief for humanists, atheists and other non-religious people is as important as freedom of belief as freedom of belief for the religious,” he said. “But it is too often neglected by Western governments who focus too narrowly on the rights ...

Atheism trending across the nation
Oaklandpostonline
The growth of atheist groups at universities is very noticeable in America, but in other countries the numbers have been higher for a long time. According to a study published by adherents, a website that contains numerous statistics regarding all ...

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Atheist Guilt
The League of Ordinary Gentlemen (blog)
I am a non-native atheist: I was not born into atheism, but as a result of deep philosophical and political differences with the inhabitants of the land of Christianity, as well as with some of its founding principles*, I chose to immigrate to it in my ...

The Undergraduate Atheists' Thesis
Science 2.0
So it was with some interest that I recently read a piece by David V. Johnson at 3QuarksDaily, entitled “A refutation of the undergraduate atheists,” which promised to deliver some guilty pleasure for my weekend readings. It did deliver, but only in ...

By David MacMillan. The author has a B.S. in physics from the University of North Alabama and once wrote a very positive review of the Creation Museum. It’s rare to see a prominent scientist or educator agree to a public debate with someone from the creation science movement. Giving equal time to both sides might be a foundational principle of American dialogue, but it paints the issue as more of a controversy than it actually... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung