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This has obviously been around for a while, but I just found it: Your Purpose-Centered Life: A Plan for Authentic Living
I haven't delved into the podcasts too far yet, but so far it looks really promising. Sort of a "spirituality" for us atheists. Not in a woo-driven, "higher power" way, but sort of a way to help you determine what your purpose is. Interesting stuff.
The fourth edition of Skeptical Parent Crossing has been posted at The SkepDad Blog.
Experiments headed up by psychologist Jesse Preston of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her colleague Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago provide some data to support the argument that the conflict is inherent, or hard-wired. They found that subjects apparently cannot easily give positive evaluations to both God and science as explanations for big questions, such as the origin of life and the universe, at the same time.
There's a lot of stir around atheosphere about President-Elect Obama's choice of Rick Warren, and for a while, I agreed with most of it that it was truly a horrible choice and a bit of a slap in the face to those who elected him. However, Dale McGowan over at The Meming of Life has a really interesting take on it, and what he says has caused me to reevaluate the situation. Could it truly be a very different kind of politics, beyond just a change from the Bush administration and their neocon puppetmasters?
For all his wrongheadedness on key issues, Rick Warren has shown a willingness to reach across the aisle, to open lines of communication when others have refused, often angering his team in the process. Obama has seized this opening despite their differences. In so doing, he may help moderate evangelical attitudes toward him. By co-opting one of their generals with a gracious gesture of inclusion that goes beyond the usual tokenism, he has quite possibly made it easier to move forward on several fronts. And progress on those fronts matters much more than the opportunity to pack the inaugural moment with partisan purity.
In Mesa County, CO, there's apparently some stirrings of trouble around the invocation said at each County Commission meeting. Instead of doing the constitutionally correct thing and actually eliminating the invocation, the Chair of the commission decided that she would just bang her gavel after the prayer, as if that means the commission is not endorsing the prayer at all. The city of Grand Junction had already created a policy for random selection of "spiritual leaders" around the community to give the invocation and to request that they leave the word "Jesus" out of the prayers, and the county could have basically used that same policy to avoid lawsuits, but chose instead to be cheeky about it. Now, apparently, the ACLU is considering a lawsuit.
I have an idea-let's eliminate any prayer, invocation, meditation, goat-burning or any other type of religious ceremony from government meetings. Either that, or atheist and secular humanist groups around the country need to start flooding their local governments with requests to have humanist celebrants, atheist group leaders, etc. give the opening invocation.
Vjack at atheistrevolution has posted on the benefits of we atheist bloggers helpng each other out. I agree with him completely. I've been especially busy the past few weeks so haven't been blogging much, but will pick up the pace in 2009. In addition, I'm committing to posting comments on others' blogs.
