Category: General

I saw a youtube video of a speech that Dawkins gave that inspired me.

In a nutshell, he stated that atheists in the U.S. have the potential for a lot more political power and social acceptance. Atheists, when combined with agnostics and people who consider themselves “non-religious” form a very, very, large group of people. Large enough to rival the power that fundamentalist Christians enjoy.

What they lack is a unified and active community.

Having been an atheist since college this is no surprise to me. You get a bunch of atheists together and you get a lot of boring talk about how silly religion is.

Human beings need shared values and beliefs to build communities on. Negations are not enough for community building.

That is why I think this summer camp for atheist children is a step in the right direction. It is teaching children the values and skills of rational skepticism. I’m not 100% fan of popular skepticism, but I think Dawkins is on the right track with his summer camp. That track would be giving atheists something other than a negation to have in common.

That is what happens with religion. Religion doesn’t just take away from people, it also gives them things. Highly definable things that make them feel better. Those things generate enthusiasm and the wish to bond with like minded people.

Focusing on teaching people how to think, the scientific method, how to evaluate information and some of the wonderful secular philosophies out there can bring many empowering changes into people’s lives. Concrete changes they can get enthused about and share as a common base for community building.

This is a very amusing essay….

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Read the rest

Rachel Greenwald is a Harvard MBA who became a dating coach. Greenwald decided to study why some men didn’t call some of her clients back for second dates. Greenwald decided to take a page out of the human resources playbook and began conducting “exit interviews with these men with the permission of her clients.

Surprisingly, these men were open to being honest in response to an unsolicited phone call asking them about their private lives. Greenwald ended up interviewing over one thousand men . According to Greenwald, about 90% of the time her clients guessed incorrectly as to why these men weren’t interested.

After seeing some patterns emerge, Greenwald compiled the top ten reasons she found among her 1000 interviews. Greenwald was surprised that many of these deal breakers were easily fixed things.