Day: March 19, 2005

Conservative Atheists on the Net

Ron Battista posted reply to my Hannity/Silverman post.

Battista runs an interesting blog, Suspension of Disbelief which has a tagline of “An Atheist Who Is Tired of Atheist Activists.” Can I get an amen to that? 😉

Anyway, Battista links to a number of atheist conservatives such as The Secular Republican, and there’s even a Yahoo! Groups list, Conservative Atheism.

My wife, who is a pagan, and I often discuss this sort of problem, as she gets a little tired of seeing complete nutcases being represented as spokesmen/women for her religious views. But at least in that case, there’s not nutty American Pagans group that the media always turns to. We poor atheists have for too long had to live in the shadow of Madalyn Murray O’Hair and the American Atheists doing their best to convince the country that every atheist was a stark raving loony nut who stayed awake at night worrying about the horrors of “In God We Trust” on our money.

Plus AA tended to promote crackpot ideas from their obnoxious view that religious people were idiots or worse to lending credence to Holocaust revisionist nonsense. In many ways, the AA paralleled another partially-right but equally nutty group led by a charismatic women, the Objectivists. Did anyone ever see Madalyn Murray O’Hair and Ayn Rand together?

BitTorrent Dr. Demento Download Site

Update: The originally linked site no longer exists.

This page hosts BitTorrent downloads of the Dr. Demento Show, including a Torrent for the latest show that tends to show up on the Wednesday or Thursday after the show is broadcast. I live in an area where the Dr. Demento Show hasn’t been broadcast in decades, and it is nice to be able to download the entire two-hour show.

BTW, this is the sort of show that begs to be offered as a podcast. The number of stations airing it has declined steadily as radio has been increasingly consolidated.

I Wish Everyone Would Die

I read Technology Review’s February profile of aging research advocate Aubrey de Grey, but missed what Paul Boutlin calls their “bitchy” editorial slam of de Grey,

But what struck me is that he [de Grey] is a troll. For all de Greys vaulting ambitions, what Sherwin Nuland saw from the outside was pathetically circumscribed. In his waking life, de Grey is the ­com­puter support to a research team; he dresses like a shabby graduate student and affects Rip Van Winkles beard; he has no children; he has few interests outside the science of biogeron­tology; he drinks too much beer. Although he is only 41, the signs of decay are strongly marked on his face. His ideas are trollish, too. For even if it were possible to perturb human biology in the way de Grey wishes, we shouldnt do it. Immortality might be okay for de Grey, but an entire world of the same superagenarians thinking the same kinds of thoughts forever would be terrible.

You have to really appreciate a magazine willing to say, “I hope everyone dies.”

And what’s the deal with “he has not children”? Does not having children still relegate one to pathetic status in this enlightened age?