This weekend I heard an incredibly interesting story on NPR’s This American Life titled “Almost Human Resources” (Act 3). The story was all about the issues surrounding chimpanzees in the human world surpassing their usefulness and how we should care for them. Apparently this now includes retirement homes with TVs.
This story, along with a recent [...]

I’ve had several people recently ask me about the reason for the name of this website and domain.
Let me first state that, no, I do not believe in any form of incorporeal, spiritual, immortal, or otherwise supernatural “soul.” There are many reasons that I disbelieve in a soul, but you can find a sufficient, if [...]

Dr. Jim West has implicitly claimed that because evolutionists often defend the theory of evolution so passionately and vociferously (or as he puts it, with “religious zeal”), then that must mean that evolution is “doctrine” 1. (his post title: If It’s Not A Doctrine, Why Are People So Defensive?).
I hear this argument all the time, in [...]

Thanks to PZ Myers at Pharyngula for finding this one.  I post it here for the simple fact that this is side-splittingly hilarious! Go get your giggles on.
Excerpt:
Malwin dismissed critics who claimed that smashing animals together at high speeds was cruel to the animals. He said, “The animals won’t be feeling anything. The collision will [...]

C. L. Hanson over at Letters From a Broad: The Adventures of a Friendly Ex-Mormon Atheist Mom Living in France Switzerland (I love that title) has composed the 98th biweekly edition of Carnival of the Godless, a blog carnival containing a myriad links to thoughts on atheism or tangentially related topics. This edition is particularly [...]

Update: This essay can now be found on the NPR “This I Believe” website.
Recently, I wrote an essay for This I Believe, an NPR radio series that asks Americans to answer this simple question. My essay has not yet been reviewed; however I doubt my chances of getting selected on the radio program. It is [...]

Most people who believe in the presence of a soul, also believe that that soul contains some sort of information about who “you” are. They believe that it contains some essence of your self, your memories, your personality.
However, there now exists within the realms of neuroscience, a plenitude of evidence that such a soul does [...]

All life and human experience is devoid of meaning. The Universe is nothing more than an enormous cosmic accident. It is an accident that will be corrected in due course, as the Universe and its inhabitants are fated to be destroyed in an equally pointless cataclysm of some kind or another – whether it be [...]

I’ve recently been reading “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a nineteenth-century Russian novelist, and I came across the following quote:
“Remember always, young man… that science which has become a great power in the last century, has analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of [...]

Update: 8/2/2008 – I wrote this stuff many years ago – please note, that modern quantum machanics seems to support the idea that true randomness does in fact exist, which renders all possibility of a deterministic Universe impossible. I am still not so certain that I believe that deterministic laws do not underlie the apparent [...]