Did the Environment Kill Rome?

An article at Vox argues that environmental disasters destroyed the Roman Empire: “6 Ways Climate Change and Disease Helped Topple the Roman Empire,” by Kyle Harper, a professor of classics, whose article summarizes his book The Fate of Rome: Climate,...

See Me in Canton, Michigan, with Robert Price!

Muslim YouTuber Ehteshaam Gulam has rescheduled his panel talk between him and Robert Price and myself for Saturday January 13 (2018). Tickets and details are now on EventBrite. Politics, religion, and pop culture will be the topic. Including current events, and...

MythCon IV: What Organizers & Outreach Directors Need to Know

This fourth Mythinformation Con was fascinating, and overall quite excellent, even when it was disturbingly bizarre (video here). Most readers might want to know my take on the strange hour and a half of anti-feminist cult leader Sargon of Akkad battling feminist...

Why Mythicist Milwaukee Is Right and Their Critics Wrong

I’m seeing way too much fascism and irrationality on the left these days. Particularly in atheism now. We have enough of it on the right. We don’t need the left doing it too. And mind you, I am a leftist. I fully support reasonable socialism, to check and balance the...

Timothy Keller: Dishonest Reasons for God (Chapter 9)

I began my critique of Keller’s The Reason for God with an exposé of everything up through Chapter 1, then 2, 3 through 5, 6, 7, and 8. Here I will cover Chapter 9. Next will be 10 through 12. And I’ll close with one more post on the rest of the book,...

Timothy Keller: Dishonest Reasons for God (Chapter 1)

It used to be C.S. Lewis. Then Josh McDowell. Then Lee Strobel. Now it’s Timothy Keller, whose The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (published in 2008) is the number one most read defense of Christianity. So here’s why it’s bunk....

On School Nutrition: How Republicans Create an Alternative Reality

The rolling shit show that is the Trump administration, and his Trumpish ilk in Congress, produces a lot of shock, horror, and tripe. But what if we examine a single little issue that a lot of people don’t know much about: school nutrition. We’ll find a...
The Shocking Reasons Why We Should Go Nuclear

The Shocking Reasons Why We Should Go Nuclear

I once wrote about how we aren’t really doomed, per se. Things could get bad, even really bad, owing to climate change and irrational energy and environmental policies, even economic crashes, even war, even worldwide NBC war. But it won’t be an apocalypse....

More There’s No Time to Explain!

My brother-in-law Brian Parra has come out with several more episodes of his new podcast There’s No Time to Explain, and they are all awesome. He is getting some great guests and ranging over some really diverse topics. So I just had to talk about it! I was his...

There’s No Time to Explain

My brother in law, Brian Parra, has launched a groovy new podcast, There’s No Time to Explain. And I was his first interview subject (episode 1). It’s an example of my favorite kind of podcast, where we both chat about all kinds of things that mostly...

Catching Up 1: The BLM Protest

I’ve been too busy to blog about all the things I wanted to this month. From the Black Lives Matter protest to the Ophelia Benson departure to a weird John Loftus flameout currently going on. So here I’m quickly trying to catch up. First on deck: the BLM...

Fantastic Study of Gender Differences Finds White Privilege Instead

This is one of the most excellent must read articles ever sent to me (by a girlfriend who does this sort of thing for a living. You know who you are, Girl. Thank you!) I’m talking about David Roberts, “There’s a Gender Divide on Nuclear Power, but It...

Myths of Charity: The Enduring Sham of Arthur Brooks

Six years ago Arthur Brooks published Who Really Cares (which has gone through several subtitles, from America’s Charity Divide to Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters to The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism). This book is still triumphantly...

Some Good Stuff on Social Justice Responsibility

Thank you, David Wong and Miri Mogilevsky! A girlfriend tipped me off to David Wong’s really amusing and spot-on 101 on why social justice (particularly regarding structural racism and sexism) is not about white guilt but about fixing what our ancestors broke....