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The Great Debate

I went to the “great debate” – Does God Exist? – last night at Binghamton University in Upstate New York. The event was double-hosted by the Campus Bible Fellowship and the Secular Student Alliance.

Ex-Mormon Erin M. and I caught a ride with Michael McElroy, all members of the local atheist Meet-Up group, Capital Region Atheists and Agnostics. Nice trip, the both of you. I enjoyed the wide-ranging conversation immensely. Sorry I fell asleep on the late-night return trip; hey, I’m old. —Oh, yeah, also saw Rick Martin, one of the CRA&A founding members.

McElroy has an excellent recap of the actual substance of the debate on his own blog.

I’ll post the YouTube videos when I see them up. Don’t know when that will be. But meanwhile …

I thought Matt Dillahunty (host of The Atheist Experience) did a fantastic job against Christian apologist Jay Lucas.

Matt was thoughtful, open, generous, honest and funny. Continue reading “The Great Debate”

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Reason Rally: The Speech That Didn’t Happen

This is the speech I would have given, if I’d been asked to speak at the Reason Rally. No, there’s no reason anyone should have asked – I’m not well enough known just yet – but that didn’t stop me from wanting to be up on stage anyway. Saying this:

Hank’s Reason Rally Speech

Just as we still talk about the Enlightenment, or the discovery of fire, a thousand years from now, people will still be talking about this moment.

Because this is the moment when civilization left the launch pad. This is the moment when we broke free from the restraints of unreason, when the umbilical of religion finally fell away, the moment when the rocket of our true capabilities really began to thrust up into the sky.

There’s still that long, long journey ahead of us. But this is the moment when we made our final break from the insanities of the past, and people a thousand years from now will know it, and talk about it.

Or … they won’t. Continue reading “Reason Rally: The Speech That Didn’t Happen”

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Fanboy Does ‘Wrath of the Titans’

Wrath of the Titans: Whoo-boy, a serious action movie, with some beautiful special effects.

Fortunately, the Titans production team threw a bit less at us in the way of breathtaking visual intricacy — such as that of the too-frenetic Transformer movies, which I sometimes had a hard time following and lost interest in as a result.

Good stuff:

Special Effects. Being me, I HAD to like the flying horse, but there were some other effects that were even better. Continue reading “Fanboy Does ‘Wrath of the Titans’”

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Dear Friends, Bloody on the Highway

As I’ve said here in the past, I still get emails from old friends in Texas. Some of those people have gotten so goddy over the years that we seem to have nothing at all in common anymore.

Every time I get one of these things, it’s like waking up in a cold cabin with the fire gone out. I remember how warm it used to be, and some part of me hopes there’s still an ember in the coals. Thinks that if I go back to Texas someday and feed it new fuel, the flame of our friendship will burn again. Continue reading “Dear Friends, Bloody on the Highway”

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Top Five Regrets of the Dying

This Guardian article must have been written by a nasty atheist, because there’s no mention of all those people who must have said “I wish I’d spent more time in church.”

Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

If you don’t want to read the short article, the Top Five Regrets are: Continue reading “Top Five Regrets of the Dying”

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Rewinding Religion, Recreating Science

Any serious writer could tell you: Not everything you write ends up on a page somewhere. Some of the stuff just isn’t good enough. Some of it is good enough, but not germane to the piece you’re currently writing. And some of it is good enough but … just doesn’t fit anywhere.

This is a piece of a piece that never made it into my book. It’s sort of a double reject — the chapter in which it appeared was edited out of the book, but even before that decision was made, this bit was edited out of that chapter. Still, it struck me as worth saving. So, here: Continue reading “Rewinding Religion, Recreating Science”

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Rusted Pickup at the Senior Prom

I sort of keep this to myself, mostly, but I can’t tell you how often I look around at my fellow bloggers here on FreethoughtBlogs and wonder “What the hell am I doing here? What have I ever done to deserve  to be in this company?”

I even felt some of it at Reason Rally, as I watched person after person stand on the podium and say (or sing) fantastic things. When I walked around the corner that morning and first saw the Rally, I threw up my arms and said “My People!” I even know some of the people who spoke; I co-blog with a couple of them. But there were still moments when I felt unworthy. As if I hadn’t done enough  to deserve to be there. Continue reading “Rusted Pickup at the Senior Prom”

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Reason Rally Update

Reason Rally plane tickets in hand!

I live about 8 hours drive time from DC, so I was going to drive down on March 23, but I have to work fairly late that day, so I decided to fly down on Saturday morning, March 24.

Tentative plan is to meet up with a few other friends near the statue of Joseph Henry on the grassy quadrangle side of Smithsonian Castle (which is pretty close to the RR stage area), although I may end up getting there after the start of the Rally. Argh.

Originally, the time of the Rally was given as 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and I was expecting to show up at the after-event event at a nearby restaurant (Hemant Mehta has the details), but now Rally hours appear to be 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The restaurant after-event meeting is receiving the first 150 people between 5:30 and 6 p.m., so if I stay till the end of the Rally, I can’t get to the restaurant thingie.

Besides which, I’m staying in Baltimore that night, and the last MARC commuter train leaves Union Station at 7-ish.

Well, crap. I guess I’m gonna be forced to just enjoy the Rally.

 

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The Things Atheists Do

I picked up my very own Master of Christian Logic today at Unbelief as a Thought Experiment, and had a rousing set-to in comments  over weighty matters such as science and the supernatural. I probably didn’t cover myself with glory — the thing seemed to end in that snippy back-and-forth stuff and I just got tired of it. I did beg him to Come to the Dark Side, offering the standard promise of freedom and joy, but he wasn’t having any of it, intoning (can you intone in a blog comment?): Continue reading “The Things Atheists Do”