I accidentally encountered a new (new to me) atheist-hater yesterday. Very unpleasant guy. I was curious so I followed the link to his blog, and found this winsome little essay.

Let me make a loud and clear statement that a James Lee or Jared Loughner type would or should understand. A secular humanist seeks to improve human welfare upon our planet while atheism is amoral and only claims to be a lack of belief. Isn’t it clear that these two men lack respect for human life? So they can rightfully call themselves atheists but should be denied entrance into a humanist organization. Yet the above humanist organizations welcome and recruit atheists who may or may not respect human life.

A “faith school” in Birmingham.

Holding the children’s attention is a man in Islamic dress wearing a skullcap and stroking his long dark beard as he talks.’You’re not like the non-Muslims out there,’ the teacher says, gesturing towards the window. ‘All that evil you see in the streets, people not wearing the hijab properly, people smoking… you should hate it, you should hate walking down that street.’

He refers to the ‘non-Muslims’ as the ‘Kafir’, an often derogatory term that means disbeliever or infidel.

A snapshot of the worst kind of schooling imaginable – training in hatred of all people who are outside the favored group.

This school is required by its inspectors to teach tolerance and respect for

You do know about the EagleCam, right?

EagleCam

It’s a camera high in a tree at Norfolk Botanical Garden in Virginia, trained on an eagle’s nest 8o to 90 feet up a loblolly pine tree. There were three eggs; one chick hatched Saturday, another hatched Monday, the third is due to hatch any moment.

It’s enthralling. You can see whichever adult is on the nest get up, a fuzzy bobblehead appear, then the other fuzzy bobblehead join it, then the adult rip bits off a fish (fly-covered, at this point) or a squirrel (caught yesterday) and offer them to one or the other fuzzy bobblehead, who will eat it. You can also see the older bobblehead attack the younger one. … Read the rest

Anthony Grayling said more about this possibility of evidence for god question.

I don’t think that every effort has been made to look for evidence and none has turned up…You and Richard think it’s an empirical matter whether there are deities (or fairies? goblins? consider why you think the latter are zoological non-starters) and I think it’s a matter of coherence of the concept…

And, I find, so do I. The more I think about it the more I think that.

The point is that ‘god’ is not like ‘ether’ – it is not amenable to empirical investigation, and does not occupy a slot in some systematic framework of thinking about the world that might be improved on in