Here is a great interview with Richard Dawkins. It is good to see a Dawkins interview in which he is actually allowed to speak.
Part1
Part2
Part3
Open Medicine is a new open-access Medical Journal. It is free to access and no subscription is required. They have released two peer-reviewed issues so far. One of the ideas behing Open Medicine is to promote international collaboration and dialogue.
I believe that projects similar to this are very important for society. I am still disappointed that good scientific literature is not available to the masses. Currently, it is only available free and practically to university students. The general population should not be getting their science news for newspapers’ “pseudo-science” sections. It is amazing how many articles that use bad science get publish in peer-reviewed journals. This bad-sciense is amplified in the newspapers and pseudo-science articles that the general population read.
Stop reading the newspaper and start reading a journal!!!!
Here are some scary quotes from the book “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris. I can’t understand how these beliefs have spread in a time when there is a great deal of scientific evidence.
“Only 28% of Americans believe in evolution (and two-thirds of these believe evolution was “guided by God”). 53% are actually creationists.”
“Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.”
“The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.”
If I was to write a book on atheism, I would have wrote this exact same book. It’s a good thing for the athiest movement that Dawkins himself wrote it and I didn’t. The book doesn’t bring up new groundbreaking ideas. It reinforces old ones.
This book really changed my point of view on moderate religion. It was previously my opinion that moderate religios faith was not that big of a problem in this world. Dawkins clearly shows how even moderate faith creates the environment in which some people are going to take the word of religion seriously and become extremists. If there aren’t any moderates then there wouldn’t be any extremists.
‘The god Delusion’ is an excellent read, that I highly recommend to anyone.
Links:
richarddawkins.net
Here is a video of me tree planting. I have been a planter for two summers now, replanting the cut blocks of British Columbia. This video shows some unusual planting. We were planting through a dead pine forest that hadn’t been logged.
Welcome to my first post on my first blog. I realize that this image has been widespread around the blogosphere, however i still believe that it is good material for a first post. This flowchart pretty sums up my view on the world. 
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