I just got home at this absurdly late hour, after an exceptionally miserable long day of screwed-up air travel, but I'm still going to try to get up by 9a to listen to Atheists Talk radio.
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A bit early yet, but as I'm traveling the rest of the month, here's my top 5 over the last month.
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2. Why is the swine flu vaccine so late…
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This video from Xperia Studio very effectively conveys how data visualization can both leverage and challenge our conceptions of "reality." The night sky we've seen since childhood, like everything else we see, is just a tiny slice of the spectrum - only what we can perceive with our limited…
Welcome home,PZ !
Between exchanging cooking recipes and music vids we had a nice day here while you were in transit LOL.
Welcome back, PZ! We all missed you and had an evo-devo party here. :)
Wot no bacon?
Welcome back, PZed.
And Pete Rooke used your blog as a confessional of sorts, but he was probably just tired and exposed a vulnerable side of his personality. Maybe he's on his way to dropping the fantasy bullshit(!). After the radio broadcast, if you're not wired on caffeine, pull the plug, crash, hide away for hours....cheers and welcome back, btw.
Welcome home... in the literal and blog senses. Glad to hear you made it back in one piece. Everyone had fun and almost everyone was well behaved. Sorry about the crackers strewn about.
Welcome home, and Happy Monkey.
"I'm still going to try to get up by 9a to listen"
Yeah, sure! For once I don't believe you PZ. (Despite the canards you being a reincarnation of the devil I think you are human after all).
Entirely off topic. But hilarious.
Audio, Obama quoting 'Ray' in audio book.
http://www.aprilwinchell.com/2009/02/05/barack-obama-is-tired-of-your-m…
Back on topic, sort of. Atheists talking. If Dawkins was recorded at Minnesota, Oklahoma or elsewhere on his current speaking tour I've yet to find it. Anyone know ?
Well, at least you got home somehow or t'nother. With today's messed-up airlines that's almost a semi-miracle.
Good to hear you made it home. We were getting worried about you being stuck along the way.
I'll have the podcast up fairly quickly after the show, so if you want to catch a few winks, feel free. I expect a few calls on this one, though, as we are going to be discussing morality (or the lack thereof since Madalyn Murray O'Hair ruined America,) with a Conservative Christian.
People in the Twin Cities who liked last week's show on Star Trek can join a http://mnatheists.org/content/view/293/1/ at our monthly meeting later today.
Air travel carries huge inconvenience and massive carbon footprint, but I admire your dogged persistence to do it anyway. I rather imagine the last dodo tasted a bit stringy.
Welcome back, PZ.
So I'm listening to the radio show at PZ's suggestion. (Please don't tell the streaming police, I lied about my zipcode to stream it here in WI.) Does anyone else think this creon guy is a total idiot‽
ihedenius, Dawkins was filmed in Minnesota. I'm not sure who did the filming, though. I haven't seen it yet either.
Dawkins had his own film crew with him. I would keep an eye on the Richard Dawkins Foundation for updates.
PZ - I'm glad you made it home safely. It is nice of you to give so many presentations in various locations even though it necessitates travel and you live a distance from a major airport. Your work is very appreciated!
PZ flew about 1,700 miles in order to cover a direct distance of approximately 450 miles or approaching 4 times further. Only humans would concoct such a transportation system and profess intelligence (design).
I notice on my bottle of Kelpie seaweed ale, the following info:
CT, VT, DE, OR, MA, NY, ME 5c refund.
MI 10c refund.
Yay for MI!
Although I can never remember whether its minnesota or missouri, and which one is ME?.
Also, can I collect the dime by mailing the empty from scotLand?
I just listened to the podcast, and I thought many of his arguments fell somewhere between No True ScotsmanChristian and complete ignorance/misrepresentation of Christian theology. For instance, he suggested that Christians' moral proscriptions of sexual behavior (e.g., homosexuality) are fundmentally concerned with health. I assume this means he would dismiss someone like Fred Phelps (whose signs don't say God Worries That Fags Will Get Sick, after all) as no true Christian. But even more temparate, ostensibly reasonable Christian objections to homosexuality (and other non-God-approved sexual behavior) aren't based on health or any other pragmatic concern; they're based on sin, which is all about compliance to God's (arbitrary, from a secular POV) will, not to any earthly pragmatism.
In addition, he claimed that the church didn't forbid divorce, just required certain (strict) conditions to be met. I suppose as a Protestant, he might honestly be ignorant of Catholic theology, but if I understand it correctly, Catholics believe divorce is not only forbidden, but impossible: That is, the merging of souls God performs in a marriage is supposed to be so total and permanent that mere humans have no power to reverse it. The church doesn't forbid married couples from separating, but it considers them still married, and considers any subsequent marriage invalid (because they're still married to their original spouses, in theological terms) and any future sexual activity adultery. The only way for Catholics to legitimately separate and "re"marry is if the church rules that some defect prevented God from ever performing his irreversible magic in the first place (IMHO, annulment is the biggest nudge-nudge-wink-wink scam imaginable, but the church at least pretends to take it very seriously).
Further, he talked about how the real moral answer to divorce is "being careful who you marry in the first place," without recognizing the (IMHO self-evident) fact that it's religion's insistence on an irrevocable lifetime contract as a precondition for sex that drives people into inadvisable marriages in the first place.
So, all that may seem like arcane details, but it seems to me that if you're going to set yourself up as a spokesman for Christians generally on the supposed decline of moral values, you ought to at least know what huge numbers of Christians actually believe about moral questions.