British Olympic weightlifter Zoe Smith, that is. Sexist trolls expressed indignation and shock that she’s not dainty enough for their taste. She pointed out on her blog that their taste isn’t high on her list of concerns.

This may be shocking to you, but we actually would rather be attractive to people who aren’t closed-minded and ignorant. Crazy, eh?! We, as any women with an ounce of self-confidence would, prefer our men to be confident enough in themselves to not feel emasculated by the fact that we aren’t weak and feeble.

Which is much like what Ernest Adams said last week: good men are not threatened by strength and intelligence in women. What kind of men are threatened … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The economy is in the ditch, but the Templeton Foundation keeps handing out money in units of a million to finance “research” into various wings of religion.

Millions of people fervently believe in an afterlife. John Martin Fischer, a philosopher at the University of California at Riverside, is not one of them.

But Mr. Fischer does see the subject as ripe for academic research, and on Tuesday the John Templeton Foundation awarded him a windfall to make that happen—$5-million for a multidisciplinary investigation of human immortality.

It’s a great pity that atheism has no Templeton Foundation. I wouldn’t mind being handed 5 million bucks to investigate secular ethics or the roots of sexism or where to find the best gelato.… Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I’m late with # 6 in Surly Amy’s series. It’s David Niose, the president of the American Humanist Association, this time.

Extract:

The blogosphere has rarely been known for its high sense of decorum, but the vile comments recently directed toward women in the atheist-humanist-skeptic communities give us reason for pause. Occasional disagreements within our communities on various issues are to be expected, as are the fiery tempers that sometimes accompany such disagreements. Given our strong opinions and our willingness to stand up for what we believe, it would be more surprising if we went a lengthy time period without some kind of high-profile clash occurring. But still, the inevitability of conflict in no way justifies any kind of

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I wasn’t as keen on him lately as I once was, because of the conspiracy-thought and the sympathetic view of Timothy McVeigh and the like…but still, he was a hell of an essayist.

Not a very good novelist, I always thought, but a brilliant essayist. Orwell was the same. Some people just shouldn’t write fiction; it’s odd when they don’t realize it.

The Times obit says I’m not the only one who thinks so.

In the opinion of many critics, though, Mr. Vidal’s ultimate reputation is apt to rest less on his novels than on his essays, many of them written for The New York Review of Books. His collection “The Second American Revolution” won the National Book Critics Circle

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More dreck from LifeSiteNews. (This may become an absorbing new hobby. LifeSiteNews is a real swamp of nasty.)

Shock-horror: Obama wants (and says he wants) his daughters to have reproductive rights. Imagine that! He wants them not to be trapped by unwanted pregnancies if they don’t choose to be. (That’s not a tautology. Some women choose to continue pregnancies that they don’t want.) LSN wants to lose its lunch at the thought.

Mr. Romney wants to get rid of funding for Planned Parenthood. I think that’s a bad idea. I’ve got two daughters. I want them to control their own health care choices. We’re not going backwards, we’re going forwards.

We all know the word “choice” is a

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

And now a word from the bigots. The creepy LifeSiteNews reports gloatingly that a bakery in Colorado has seen a surge in business after the owner refused to provide a cake for a gay wedding. Isn’t that heart-warming? A little piece of spiteful meanness is popular in Lakewood Colorado.

Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, told local media that this wasn’t the first time he had turned away homosexuals seeking wedding cakes, but it is the first time his stand for Christian principles has resulted in so much media attention and some death threats.

What stand for Christian principles? Where did baby Jesus say don’t provide wedding cakes to gay people who want to get married? Where did Paul … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Islamists who grabbed power in northern Mali have settled in and gotten comfortable. On Sunday they stuck a woman and a man in two vertical holes in the ground, leaving just their heads exposed, and threw stones at them until they were dead. They did this in front of 200 people.

Mali’s government has expressed disgust.

“The government learned with indignation and astonishment of the stoning to death of a couple in Aguelhok by the extremists occupying northern Mali,” read a statement from the communication ministry.

“At the same time as it expresses its sympathy to the families of the victims, the government severely condemns this dark-age practice and assures that this act will not go unpunished.”

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

This is very cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h98P5Ti4xS0

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Holy crap.

A Christian guy in Largo, Florida who did a puppet show on tv has been arrested for

well

I’ll let the Tampa Bay Times tell you.

But there was another side to Brown, according to a 29-page criminal complaint filed July 20 in federal court in Tampa: The man who, as he was feeding pizza to teenagers, nursed fantasies of murdering and eating them. The one who acted out Bible stories with puppets at his church, while musing online about carving and cooking the body parts of a young parishioner for Easter.

“I imagine him wiggling and then going still,” Brown told an associate in an Internet chat session, describing his plot to kill and cannibalize a boy

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The other day I told a brief version of how Vyckie Garrison’s then 3d grader fared going to school after eight sheltered years. She tells a fuller version at NLQ.

These days, I am thoroughly enjoying my “blessings” ~ they are far from perfect as they’ve gone from passive, obedient little robots (a couple of them were more like zombies ~ and, Chassé ~ my “spirited” child ~ really reminded me of a jack-in-the-box gone bonkers ~ no matter how many times she was stuffed into the box and the lid slammed down on her, she had this quirky way of popping back up with a crazy, intimidating, you-can’t-get-rid-of-me smirk) ~ to “normal” kids with their own unique personalities,

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Eric describes an odd thought experiment in Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.

He asks us to imagine a time in the future when people have got fed up with science, have removed science from the curricula of schools and universities, killed or imprisoned all the scientists, and then government is carried out — well, how, exactly? Since science is not only physics and math and chemistry and biology, but a fairly strict methodological approach to information, how would a government function where fact checking was ruled out, and decisions were based on pure whim? MacIntyre seems to forget that science is not only composed of lists of facts, but is tied together by theory and based on experience, and that

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)