I do not have a blog. I only want to share a thought I had over dinner by myself thousands of miles from home:

Clarity of thought, appreciation of reality - these are the elements of understanding. As Carl Sagan said

"... abandoning your most cherished delusions and following where the facts take you, THAT is at the heart of science". Beautiful.

I stumbled on this video the other day. It's worth watching.

A scientist whose field is brain studies talks about her personal experience of having an epiphany during a brain stroke. It's touching, and there's nothing supernatural in what she went…

URGENT special request. Please pass along to relevant people. I have spoken to hundreds of people who have great stories to tell about how religion impacted their sex and sexuality. I cannot say much right now about why the urgency and who this is for, but trust me, it will be worth it.  I need people who have compelling stories about how religion impacted their sex life.  Contact me immediately with a 3-4 sentence description and whether you are willing to do one or more of these…

This is going to be short. I figured I'd like to consider something.

Natural disasters in the last month:

April 27th: Huge thunderstorm spawned 137 tornadoes, 180 dead (US, Alabama), Dead fish hauled away in NY

May: Dead fish washup, Mississippi flooding.

May 3rd and 4th: More dead fish wash up.

May 3rd: Deadly tornado, New Zealand

May 15th: 6.5 Magnitude earthquake, Papua New Guinea

May…

I've been doing some research and found that the world actually is coming to an end! Holy bandwagon, Batman!

That's right...the planet Earth will possibly end in 4 to 7 1/2 billion years. We're gunna party like it's 19,000,000,99!

Assuming our dear home avoids being flung around like a pool ball in the collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, the leading thought is that the Earth will be sucked into…

For the last couple days I've been working on writing a comedic parody of the life of the character Jesus. I won't tell you my storyline yet, but rest assured it's a laugh to write and hopefully it will be to read when done. An interesting consequence though of this project is that it's giving me the closest look I've had at the gospels since I was a kid and I'm noticing things I never did before.

The first observation--I'll put more later--is the frequent recurrence of…

A narrative essay by – Heather Spoonheim

War stories often relate extraordinary tales of soldiers who have survived the grimmest of odds. As we zoom in on a soldier hanging on for dear life in the belly of a landing craft headed for Omaha Beach we can hear the screams of those being blown to bits in the landing crafts around his. As the front wall of the craft drops…

In reality, nobody expected the rapture.  At least, almost nobody.  Impending doomsday theories are good lead stories, and they're fun to... well... make fun of.  And that's what everybody did.  The atheist blogosphere was full of scathing editorials.  Rapture parties were scheduled all over the country.  The Black Nonbelievers of Atlanta furnished refreshments for what turned out to be a huge event sponsored by the …

Hi there! I didn't know Atheist Nexus had a blog option. Well, I guess I will just take a minute to share about some of our successes here in outreach for Center for Inquiry.

I recently discovered Reddit, something that I had never even really heard of before. It is a fun way for people to share all kinds of interesting and funny things on the internet. I made a profile to post some CFI links to make sure that I am doing my outreach job and spreading the word about different…

The New York Post did a story on our research on Saturday.  Too bad we had to compete with Rapture Day.  I think our message has more practical value.

New York Post

In the grand scheme of the universe, and the scale of our evolutionary time line, humans are young. Extremely young. Infants, struggling to stand on our own two feet. We know almost nothing of what there is to know. We can comprehend only a smidgen of what there is to comprehend. Our minds still struggle to accept the reality of our existence, our insignificance. We must evoke magical beings to fill our understanding, rather than accept that we simply don't…

I have this friend who I love dearly.  And she's pretty Christian.  We have a lot in common otherwise - we're both moms through adoption to three year old train enthusiasts (hers is a boy, mine is a girl).  We're both liberal Democrats, pro-choice feminists, supportive of the LGBT community, mouthy and smart. 

But she's a serious Christian.  Not a fundie like my brother and his wife, but she belongs to an Evangelical church and she is serious about it.  We rarely talk about…