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Blog Spotlight: Losing My Religion

  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.

Question #122: Lobby Hobby

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  How do you spend your time when you aren't being a tool on the Internets?
- Devil in the Details

Dear Devil in the Details,
  Although my voluminous post count belies it, I actually do have interests that don't involve telling strangers how stupid I think they are on the Internet. I like to read, I play a video game or two, and I have a lucrative business waxing badgers for private collectors.*

  The biggest chunk of my non-bastardly day is taken up by my studies. I'm in my second year of law school, which means I spend approximately eleventy million hours a week poring over casebooks.

  As part of my laws school experience, I lucked into an internship with Pennsylvanians For Modern Courts. PMC is a policy group working to reform the judiciary in Pennsylvania, and to educate citizens about how to access and navigate the courts.

  Coincidentally, we just launched a new blog, called JudgesOnMerit.org, which is all about our campaign to replace partisan election of appellate judges with a Merit Selection plan. I'll spare you my pro-Merit screed. I'll just say that I hadn't ever thought about judicial elections before November of 2007. Now I love Merit Selection like a pirate loves booty.

  If you like politics, if you're concerned about judicial fairness, or if you just want to help a bastard out, go take a look at JudgesOnMerit.org. See if you can recognize my writing when I'm not allowed to use profanity.

*You don't want to know how hard it is to get insurance.

Spooooky

  If I were of a superstitious bent, I'd find the following coincidence full of some sort of meaning. I'm not sure of what, but meaning nonetheless.

  Two bloggers, one a friend I've known for years, the other I met on the Internet a few months ago. Within 24 hours of each other, they each wrote a post explaining why they don't bother to tag their posts. The God Of Internet must have inspired them somehow.

Welcome Skepchicks and Readers

  A long-belated thank you to Rebecca and the rest of the free-thinking females over at Skepchick for graciously linking in my direction. I first discovered the Skepchicks through The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, and I've been a fan ever since.

  I'm neither as prolific nor as entertaining as the Skepchicks, but I try to do my small part to popularize rational thinking and objective inquiry. I'd humbly suggest that you might enjoy these recent items. Enjoy, and please comment if something amuses/offends/nauseates you.

Link Pimpin':
  Spend some time beneath the tracks of the Market-Frankford El with David Kessler's Shadow World. It's a video blog featuring the people who live and work in the city's Kensington section. These are folks you don't see in the "Philly's awesome" flick that runs before Imax movies at the Franklin Institute. Their neighborhood struggles like an underfed vine in the grimy shadow of the El. The videos don't editorialize; there is no Michael Moore-ish self-promotion. Just simple, revealing moments among the city's forgotten, that should be mandatory viewing for the mayoral candidates.

Blogiverse Death Watch:
  The excellent blog Table Of Malcontents is circling the drain of Interweb commercial concerns. According to contributor Eliza Gauger (see last item), parent site Wired.com will pull the plug on the Malcontents on June 30. Although there's been no official statement, one suspects that the bean counters at Wired saw the audience of deviant steampunk cephalophiles as too niche to cram into a standard demographic advertising model.

  There are a kajillion sites dedicated to sifting through celebrity stool samples, spouting political invective, or speculating on plot details gleaned from a blurry photo of the craft services table on the set of the latest Batman movie. It's telling that even a company like Wired, which purports to cater to the tech/geek/net crowd, can't make some room in its budget to provide interesting, unusual Interweb diversion for those of who don't want to hang with the mouthbreathing knuckledraggers at PerezHilton.com.

I'm Not Cool Enough To Pretend This Isn't Exciting...

  Wired.com's Table of Malcontents is one of my favorite blogs, and one of the few that I make sure to read every day. (RSS rules.) ToM celebrated last week's Steak and a Blowjob day with a contest to let readers create a holiday of their own, and a winner was me!

  I proposed Flame Shame Day, an annual day when people who post nasty comments on blogs and message boards are required to spend one minute thinking about how their snarkity affects the people it's directed against. The ToM staff liked the idea, and they're sending me a card to celebrate.

  Even if you don't want to read my winning entry, you should still check out Table of Malcontents. Odd, interesting, amusing and amazing nuggets from the farthest corners of the Internets are always on the ToM menu. Enjoy! LBB commands it!