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http://bluecollarscientist.com/2008/03/25/asteroids-named-for-pz-myers-p...

One advantage rationalists have over the intelligent design set is that they're actually more likely to make it to heaven. Say hello to our newest heavenly bodies, Philplait, Rebeccawatson, Stackpole, and Paulmyers. That's all well and good but where are the pix?

http://canadiancynic.blogspot.com/2008/02/sometimes-good-guys-win.html

Happy conclusion to the WLU controversy. Free bananas for all.

http://acosmopolitan.blogspot.com/2008/02/eye-of-hurricane.html

[Courtesty Sandwalk:] As predicted, the Streisand Effect is in full force over at Wilfred Laurier. The campus clubs group at WLU is arguing that this all amounts to a small problem with wording- they don't like the word 'promote'. In other words, if we are to judge from the existence of other religious groups on campus, it's ok to evangelize provided you don't actually say you will in your charter. Bureaucratese at its best. Welcome to Brazil!

http://friendlyatheist.com/2008/02/01/atheist-campus-group-denied-recogn...

Wilfred Laurier University, tucked into a corner of Ontario's bible-belt, has denied recognition to an atheist advocacy group, citing, among other things, a lack of tolerance for other beliefs. No word on whether they plan to revoke the status of their IVCF group too. WLU, meet the Streisand effect.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR200712...
http://atheistmomma.blogspot.com/2008/01/atheists-enjoying-social-benefi...

How ironic that I'd stumble on these links tonight. For the past week or so, I've been considering a follow-up to one of my most popular posts- Why I left the church. After reading Dawkins, how could any died-in-the-wool atheist step foot in a church? I mean, really...

Seriously, one thing I look forward to when I go home for the holidays is to go back to the church I spent most of my adolescence in. I look forward to seeing old friends, singing hymns, the sermon, the whole deal. Why, you might ask, would a self-declared atheist have anything to do with the church? There are several reasons. The biggest is just the chance to reconnect with people I care about -- and who care about me. Case in point was the chance to reminisce about my Dad when I bumped in to a fellow out-of-towner on my last visit. Other reasons strike at what the church has to offer and where both atheists and Western Buddhists have some strides to take.

• Superficially: if you're an atheist- do you read fiction? Do you play video games? Do you get off on Tolkien or Anne Rice or whoever? Do you watch the Simpsons? Lost? BSG? Scrubs? Or maybe you prefer Dickens, Joyce, Eliot ... WHY? Don't you see these are all PACKS OF LIES??! As much as any piece of fiction can move you, touch the 'soul', figuratively speaking, so can the experience of going to church, especially if you go with an open, but clear-headed mind. But this is a very superficial and possibly mean-spirited answer- there's more...
• What's it like to surround yourself with people who are intent on being better people? How often do you find yourself in that kind of environment? Healthy, vibrant churches resonate with people who aspire to do good, to be more loving, more joyful, more compassionate. Not all churches are healthy, hence the Dawkinsian approach, but when you find one that is it's like manna from heaven, if you'll excuse the expression.
• Community. Period. I go to church once or twice a year but I know that I could count on any number of individuals from my family's church to support me in times of distress. I truly miss the sense of being part of a community of people that get together on a weekly basis to share their hopes and concerns. As a parent I'm acutely aware of this hole in our lives. Maybe I haven't made enough of an effort to finds these things in secular or Buddhist circles- certainly there's some sense of community at the kids' schools, etc, but I've never encountered anything on the scale of what you'd find in a church. Of course, there can be down-sides to a too-tightly-knit community as well...

In any case, these are all just food for thought. If as atheists and/or agnostic Buddhists we think we've got something to offer society, I hope we can be open minded enough to see that not everything the church stands for is destructive. Somewhere in the middle is a more joyful, more loving, more compassionate society. :-)

http://coolmel.typepad.com/iblog/2008/01/should-integral.html

C4Chaos has written an insightful article on the rise of the "New Atheists" from an Integralist point of view, with great links, too...

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/12/20/11-years-ago-today-the-lig...
http://joelschlosberg.blogspot.com/2007/12/meta-post-for-second-carl-sag...

The second annual Carl Sagan blog-a-thon is nearing completion. It's hard to imagine that it's been eleven years. On some level, his death is an anniversary for me, too, since I got to wondering what all the fuss was about and grabbed myself a copy of Cosmos, and later Billions and Billions. Sagan's writing was like a bolt from the blue, and planted the seeds of my atheism. It's amazing to me that it took ten years for me to 'come out'. So long, Carl, and thanks for all the fish.

Funny, this post is like deja-vu, all over again:
http://simra.net:8045/articles/2006/12/20/carl-sagan-memorial-blog-a-tho...

Not all are lists of ten, but here are my entirely biased votes for 2007's best:

Robotics blogs

Simra.net, duh. ;-)
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics http://smart-machines.blogspot.com/
The Streeb Greebling Diaries http://streebgreebling.blogspot.com/
Robot Perception and Learning http://nturobots.blogspot.com/ (just a reading group, but it's always interesting to see what research groups are reading...)
RoboSci Blog http://www.dudek.org/dudek.org/blog
The NXT Step http://thenxtstep.blogspot.com/
Microsoft Robotics Studio Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/msroboticsstudio/default.aspx
Robots-Dreams http://www.robots-dreams.com/
Trossen Robotics http://blog.trossenrobotics.com/

Buddhist blogs

The Level 8th Buddhist http://buddhanerd.wordpress.com/
Integral Options Cafe http://integral-options.blogspot.com/
A Hoodie Monk http://gomyo.livejournal.com/
Blogmandu http://zenunbound.com/blogmandu.html
Buddhist Geeks http://www.fallingfruit.tv/buddhistgeeks
Forest Wisdom http://forestwisdom.thaipulse.com/ (not sure this link is still valid...)
Progressive Buddhism http://progressivebuddhism.blogspot.com/
Wildmind Buddhist Meditation http://www.wildmind.org/
Zencast Blog http://zencast.wordpress.com/
thinkBuddha http://www.thinkbuddha.org/
No Impact Man http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/ (not overtly Buddhist but definitely focused on mindfulness)

Atheist/Non-theist blogs

The friendly atheist: http://friendlyatheist.com/
Pharyngula http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/ (from my daily reading I'd expect to see more atheist blogs on this list, but now I realize it's just been Pharyngula clogging the airwaves...)
Darwiniana http://darwiniana.com/ (I've never really been able to figure this one out, and I'm not sure that atheist is the right pigeonhole, but it's good reading nonetheless.)

Sci/Tech

Strange Maps http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/
Bad Astronomy http://www.badastronomy.com/
Slashdot http://slashdot.org (still kickin', imho, after all these years... am I dating myself?)
BoingBoing http://boingboing.net
Freakonomics http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/
GeekDad http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/

Vancouver and/or Politics

The Tyee: http://thetyee.ca
Bowen Island Journal: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/miscellany/bijournal/blogger.html
Pete McCormack's Blog http://www.petemccormack.com/blog
North Vancouver Politics http://northvancouverpolitics.blogspot.com/
The View from Seymour http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/seymour/
theleftcoast.ca http://theleftcoast.ca/blog
Matthew Good http://www.matthewgood.org/

Posts on simra.net

(as voted by your clicks):
Dear Apple: Why does iTunes library management suck so bad? http://simra.net/blog/itunes_is_crap
Impending IBM layoffs... http://simra.net/blog/node/101 (rumor mongering)
RCMP: up is down, black is white, war is peace, etc, etc. http://simra.net/blog/node/333
Howto make a sailboat from a milk carton. http://simra.net/blog/boat_fun
Bizarre Sex Organs (nature rocks!) http://simra.net/blog/node/217
Mr Woo grows robots http://simra.net/blog/node/185
JPod to become a TV show http://simra.net/blog/node/157
Why I left the Church http://simra.net/blog/node/145
Deal reached on UBC Golf Course http://simra.net/blog/node/331
Blueberry picking, mindfulness and outrage. http://simra.net/blog/save_formosa_nursery

Other people's lists:

Top astronomy photos: http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/12/13/top-ten-astronomy-pictures...

Time's One List to Rule them All: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/top10/article/0,30583,1686204_169...

Person of the year: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear

Best underrated blogs: http://www.fimoculous.com/archive/post-3535.cfm

Best sex blogs: http://reversecowgirlblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/best-sex-blogs-2007.html

Best music: http://www.metacritic.com/music/bests/2007.shtml

Utne Independent Press Awards: http://qa.utne.com/2008-01-01/Media/Winners-of-the-2007-Utne-Independent...

Top 25 Censored Stories of '07: http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2007/index.htm

Happy reading, and best wishes to one and all in the new year. :-)

A slew of links for you tonight:

http://positiveliberty.com/2007/12/consider-me-fascinated.html
Victimless leather. Where can I get me one of these coats? (Or, more geographically relevant to me: a set of waterproof shoes made from a single, seamless sheath of vat-grown animal skin culture.)

http://www.landoverbaptist.org/news1207/goldencompass.html
http://friendlyatheist.com/2007/12/06/the-golden-compass-vs-the-holy-bib...
The heresy of the Golden Compass and what it teaches us about talking animals vs. what the Bible has to say on the subject of talking asses (present company excepted).

http://thestoneoftear.blogspot.com/2007/12/teen-birthrate-goes-up-for-fi...
The ultimate, hands-down winner for reasons to dislike the Bush administration. It's one thing to send your sons overseas to slaughter innocents, another to ring up a budget deficit so enormous that your currency begins to collapse, but when your misguided policies have a demonstrably positive (in the numerical sense) impact on teen birth rates, it's time to impeach. See also:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/216/gallery/22667-a22650-t3.html

... but in case you were looking for more reasons:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/06/cia-destroyed-interr.html

The good news is the Dalai Lama is indicating that reincarnation has new rules:
http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=70,5514,0,0,1,0

http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2007/12/film-golden-compass.html

The Golden Compass is getting lots of attention because the coalition of the wingnuts has declared war on its atheist anti-church allegorical nuances. Which gets me thinking... this guy was an outspoken atheist- why weren't his fiction, movies, radio shows, lectures, etc, ever the subject of controversy?

http://coolmel.typepad.com/iblog/2007/09/creepy-library-.html

C4Chaos plans to read and review the growing stack of A-list Atheist celebrity books out there. Could be interesting...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_handler/20070919.html

In an otherwise unremarkable article about Deepak Chopra's new book (all about the 'afterlife', yo), Richard Handler drops this line:

So imagine the terror of the unbeliever who thinks extinction is his future.

http://thestoneoftear.blogspot.com/

The Stone of Tear is one of my favourite new additions to my reader.

I'm certainly elitist. What's wrong with being elitist, if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?

Check out their latest post on science vs faith:
http://thestoneoftear.blogspot.com/2007/08/science-vs-faith-faith-wins-i...

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=423C1809-E7F2-99...

This month's Scientific American has a great open letter from Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic to Richard Dawkins and his fellow rational atheists that perhaps they ought to tone down their message. It goes without saying that Dawkins and friends are not very diplomatic and Shermer contends that the movement would benefit from a few less bridges burned.

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-08-08.html#feature
While we're on the topic of the Skeptic, here's a great article on the political spindoctoring of science as it relates to sex and violence in chimp and bonobo societies. Pic possibly NSFW if your workplace bans photos of monkeys copulating.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/08/keep_doing_this.php

Pharyngula is my newest favorite self-described godless liberal. Here he discusses 'The great evacuation', what happens when church kids go to college (they stop going to church, duh). Focus on the Family is hoping to counter the trend by hosting conferences aimed at bolstering kids' ability to defend their faith. Pharyngula argues that the last thing FoF ought to be doing is improving teens' critical thinking skills, if they want them to retain their allegiance to the church.

While it's true that I pretty much stopped going to church when I left home for school, the seeds were planted at least three years earlier. In most cases, I think the process of waking up, looking around and seeing things a bit more clearly takes a considerable amount of time and patience. Definitely, getting out on your own can help catalyze the event, but even after four years of college I did not consider myself an atheist.

... which brings me to another interesting story- the journey of an LA Times religious columnist from man of sincere faith to a man full of serious doubts:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lostfaith21jul21,0,3530015,full....
[courtesy BoingBoing]. Enjoy!

http://www.whydoesgodhateamputees.com/

I first stumbled onto this site a few years back, but it's grown a lot and toned down its cynicism somewhat. Nowadays, "Why won't God heal amputees?" is a repository of gedanken experiments to try out on the question of the existence of an omnipotent power in the universe. If you're interested in probing the nature and/or existence of god(s), this one is for you. :-)

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/...

An interview with Richard Dawkins as he launches a new show tackling the age of gullibility. Astrologers and fringe-medicine quacks beware! All your planets are belong to us.

http://mojoey.blogspot.com/2006/09/join-mojoeys-atheist-blogroll.html

I've joined the atheist blogroll. Isn't there some Groucho Marx line about avoiding clubs that would admit you as a member? Enjoy!

http://lotusinthemud.typepad.com/sujatin/2007/07/on-dawkins-delu.html

A lengthy and interesting review of Dawkins' The God Delusion, from a Buddhist perspective. The article concludes with the observation that extremist secular societies have been at least as horrific, if not more so, than extremist religious societies. This dovetails nicely with my own observations that maybe human nature is not well suited to life without God, whether real or imagined.

http://www.control-z.com/pgs/why_no_longer.html

This site outlines 25 'reasons' to abandon Christianity. I'm amazed that someone would go to all the trouble to articulate in detail so many sound arguments. My own rationalization pretty much begins and ends with this reason and this reason, which are basically what all the other reasons are predicated on.