Expelled Exposed, a website set up by the National Center for Science Education to counter the lies in the creationist propaganda film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
I'll be haranguing you about this more thoroughly in the near future. In the meantime, check out Expelled Exposed, and you'll know why I'm foaming at the mouth and biting chunks out of the walls.
Like a lot of atheist agnostic skeptic humanist freethinkers, I didn't just wake up one day with morning wood and the realization that god was kind of a silly idea. I was raised in a church. We went every Sunday. I sang in the choir, performed in plays, and went to camps during the Summer. (We were Methodist, the plain toast of Protestant denominations). While I don't ever remember being wholly enthralled by visions of an omniscient, miracle-slinging, invisible sky-grandpa, it didn't occur to me to really question the idea until long after I'd ceased to be a regular churchgoer.
Notwithstanding the people who make the most noise on the Internet, the world isn't cleanly divided into true believers and soulless atheists. There are a lot of people who are in the midst of a long fall away from a childhood religion, and there are also nonbelievers who come to (or back to) some religious faith. People on either side of the divide may yell the loudest, but there are plenty of interesting perspectives that fall somewhere in the middle.
My new favorite representative from the middling masses is frequent Skepchick commenter Improbable Bee. Her blog Losing My Religion tracks her trajectory out of her religious upbringing toward a more skeptical, evidence-based worldview.
I'm sure that I'm biased because of the direction in which she's heading, but she's talking about it in a thoughtful, articulate way that's very appealing. She's wrestling with more intense versions of a lot of the things I faced, but she's far more insightful than I was. Regardless of your place on the believer-skeptic continuum, it's worth your time to take a look.
In case the small army of volunteers wandering about the city haven't made it out to your dank cave, today is the last day to register or update your voting records if you want to participate in the Pennsylvania presidential primary on April 22nd. This might not be terribly exciting for the Republicans, but Democrats should be peeing their pants in anticipation of the chance to cast a vote in a contested primary for the first time since Jesus created dinosaurs.
Try not to let the fact that the Democratic nomination is going to be decided by the superdelegates dampen your spirits, guys.
I find it absurdly fascinating that, in a close contest, where every single vote should theoretically be invaluable, the Democratic party has found a way to make individual voters irrelevant.
