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"And kiss the missing link goodbye."

I'm new here <insert nervous wave of acknowledgment to rest of the forum> but I figured some of you fine folks could maybe answer some questions I have surrounding Ardi.

I'm not really sure why all of the news sources are saying "This is crazy; this changes everything" when as far as I can tell Ardi is entirely something to be expected for that point in humanity's evolution. She's not the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees-- she came along about 2.5 million years after that ancestor (and so after those species diverged), which is a pretty big chunk of time considering that Lucy only came along about a million years after Ardi and yet she had shorter arms, a bigger brain, and was full bipedal.

So it's probably very likely that the actual common ancestor was, if not exactly half human and half chimp, at least significantly more chimp-like than Ardi. Right?

Religion creates another atrocity, god is great, eh?  Listen Muslims and Christians... stop the fighting.  You're both wrong, it's time to act like rational grown-ups and throw off your archaic belief system, you are destroying civilization, and will continue to do so until we're gone.  Abandon your superstitous nonsense, and evolve already!  Ask yourself, what solid proof to you have to believe in your God.  If what you have is a holy book, remind yourself that hundreds of holy books exist for hundreds of gods, and you don't believe in any of them, so obviously a holy book is not sufficient proof.  Throw off your superstitious nonsense, and embrace things you know exist like humans for example.  Make no mistake, today millions of folks around the world who have no belief in a god are sad for the people who were affected by this needless loss of life, just as we've been sad about all the other atrocities committed in the name of religion throughout the ages.  Our thoughts are with the billions who have been negatively affected by religion since the dawn of time, and always are.  In fact my life is dedicated to ensuring these sorts of things don't continue to happen, you can start by breaking the cycle... throw religion off today!  

I must've heard the words "an atheist can do no good" hundreds of times in the last few years.  It must be so hard to imagine how atheists can do good without the upstanding moral code imparted to us in the Bible or the Quran.  Sure I wouldn't sell my daughter into slavery, or kill a man simply for being gay, but I can do other good things instead. 

I'm proud to donate clothes to Goodwill and give money to charity.  But I take a bigger sense of pride in atheist volunteers which was created to unite and showcase acts of goodness by the men in black who apparently can do no good.  Well the door to that argument is being shut more and more everyday as atheists aren't as scared as they once were to show their face (we have religion to thank for our original fear).  We used to do acts of kindness simply because we liked doing acts of kindness.  But after being accused so often of being no-do-gooders some of us decided to show off what we've been doing all our lives while letting others know we don't believe in a god.  We believe good deeds are the work of men.  If good deeds are the works of god, well certainly bad deeds are as well.

I'm particularly excited about the recent developments in Austin with Texas American Atheist President Joe Zamecki at the helm.  He and his crew have been hitting the streets to hand out supply packages to the homeless.  Some interesting video has been shot along the way.  It's interesting to hear how often the homeless use the name Jesus or God in a positive manner while receiving free goods from a non-believer.  You'll have to check it out for yourself.  Details of the Austin Atheists Helping the Homeless are here.  (you can digg and stumble that page)

Thanks Joe, you're a blessing from your mom and dad!

I feel the need to highlight the recent trials and tribulations of Sunsara Taylor with the Ethical Society of Chicago as she is a friend of mine, and this issue is of obvious importance to her.  Sunsara has given me the fuel to give brief mention to a past issue I feel that the Ethical Society of Philadelphia helped hinder the advancement of non-believer unity in Philadelphia.  If you can believe it Sunsara is even more of a rabble rouser than I am, while she staged a scene, I quietly backed away and just pretended it never happened.  Today I speak up, because of Sunsara.

About two years ago a group was formed called PhillyCor, I'm close with quite a few people involved in the forming of the group.  The group was formed to connect local freethought and humanist groups, and RRS is based out of Philadelphia. Being that we had the largest global presence of any of the groups in Philadelphia it made sense for us to be involved, and we would've embraced the role.  We would've adapted to fit within the groups model, we would've helped raise money, and most importantly spread the word on a much larger scale than the group was capable of.  In fact this is the first time I ever link to the group, because when the opportunity arose for RRS to be in the group, the Ethical Society essentially stated it's us or them.  

As you may already be aware, recently the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention websites were the target of a significant DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, which began on Monday 19 October.

This is a call to all non-believers and advocates for freedom of speech to join us in a global co-ordinated minute of prayer with the aim of inundating God (in this context, the Christian god, God, as distinct from the Greek god, Zeus, the Egyptian god, Ra etc etc) with so many useless prayers that it causes his divineness to go offline as as result of our own DDOS ('Divine' Denial of Service).

The prayer minute will be at exactly 8pm (Eastern Standard Time) and 9am (Greenwich Mean Time) on Sunday 8 November 2009.

The prayer can be about anything you want (but say it as frequently as possible in the minute we have assigned to ensure DDOS is achieved) or to whomever god you want. Its mostly directed at the Christian god so as to ensure we don't get too many return to senders from other gods.

Join the facebook group here.

Today is the day, on the Don Imus show Bill Maher referred to himself as an atheist very explicitly for the first time that I am aware of.  

Here is his page on Celebrity Atheists with the update: http://www.celebatheists.com/wiki/Bill_Maher

NOVEMBER 2009 ON IMUS - MAHER REFERS TO HIMSELF AS AN ATHEIST

November 1, 2009 on Imus, Bill Maher finally accepts that the term atheism describes him best when relating to Richard Dawkins and his atheism lacking absolute certainty:

"Neither me nor my girl believe in God or marriage, so there's not gonna be a big church wedding... I always say I don't know. Even Richard Dawkins a man whose name has become synonymous with atheism says he puts a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being absolute certain there is a god and 7 being absolutely certain there isn't, and he says even he's a 6.9. Because no one knows for sure what's out there. He says yes there could be a god and there could be a spaghetti monster out there, but it doesn't look like it. To me it was always great fodder for comedy. There isn't a week that goes by that there isn't something hysterically funny if it's not tragic, having to do with religion. My recent favorite example was at the Michael Jackson Memorial Stevie Wonder said 'we needed Michael but God needed him more.' And I thought really God needs people, God needs singers, God is up there saying 'Jesus, nothing on, get that Michael Jackson up here.'

Imus then asks if Hitchens is a 7. Bill Maher responds "he may be, I think we're just talking semantics at some point, we are all atheists (referring to Dawkins, Hitchens, and himself), which means we don't believe in a deity, we don't believe in a magic spaceman, and we think people that do, have a neurological disorder and they need help."

And on religion in general he said "When I hear from people that religion doesn't hurt anything, I say really? Well besides wars, the crusades, the inquisitions, 9-11, ethnic cleansing, the suppression of women, the suppression of homosexuals, fatwas, honor killings, suicide bombings, arranged marriages to minors, human sacrifice, burning witches, and systematic sex with children, I have a few little quibbles. And I forgot blowing up girl schools in Afghanistan."

Hi everyone, I've had this idea in my head for a long time to propose new/useful words to replace a mishmash of other words which end up causing confusion and otherwise being unhelpful. Let's try it.

Today's word is 'unapologetic', and it is intended to replace: militant, aggressive, outspoken, shrill, rude, uncivil, strident, 'new', fundamentalist, evangelical, etc.

Usage: "I'm not a 'new' atheist. I've been an atheist all my life/for many years. I'm simply unapologetic about my atheism. I've done nothing wrong, and I have nothing to apologize for it. Additionally, I've read and heard lots of apologetics arguments for theism and I find them unconvincing. I'm an unapologetic atheist."

The idea behind this word is simple. It tries to grasp the underlying change in 'tone' that the so-called 'new atheist' movement has taken on, starting with groups like RRS and authors like Sam Harris. The key point is that we are no longer standing back and being quiet about our atheism for fear of offending people. If you get offended by our criticism of your beliefs, that's too bad. We're not going to say we're sorry, because we think such criticism is actually very important and worthwhile. You are not your beliefs. We respect you as a person, but we don't necessarily respect your beliefs.

Unapologetic has two meanings. 1) We're not sorry. 2) We are not convinced by apologetics arguments and are willing to make our counter-arguments publicly known.