A Romantic Rationalist

I haven’t written anything for a while because there were no really major issues I felt needed to be addressed. I will however, post a few observations about a number of seemingly trivial issues and maybe some additional things will come to mind as I write. Ever since I began publicly declaring myself as an atheist I have endeavored to find like-minded people, both in the “real world” and on the web and this has proven a very difficult task indeed. On a more personal note (I suppose that this is where my romanticism creeps in), I have been divorced now for 6 years, and for a time, explored the possibility of a more intimate relationship with a woman. Of course she would have to be of the same intellectual and philosophical bent as I, but finding such a someone has proven nigh impossible, especially given where I am living for the moment. There are several web sites out there that purport to be a way to meet atheist/agnostic singles, so I gav...

This showed up in my inbox recently and I had to protest and I sent my response in a Word document to all the people in the "to" field of the original email. The text of the Word document is in double quotes. "Some of you may have recently received the below as one of those annoying, endlessly forwarded emails and as a thinking human being I could not let this piece of pious drivel go by unchallenged. My comments will be in blue and all grammatical errors will be as in the original. Just think about it. How scary this can be. We all need to do our part to keep it from happening. We can change things one day at at time and one person at a time. Allah or the Lord Jesus Christ? ...A Bit Scary This is very interesting and just a bit scary ... The Muslim religion is the fastest growing religion per capita in the United States , especially in the minority races!!! This statement is not precisely true. If however, you limit the discu...

I am continually frustrated when I hear people in public forums, i.e. news programs, letters to the editor and the like, make bald assertions that in 5 minutes of web searching can shown to be without merit. This piece was originally written in response to a letter to the editor published in the Rapid City Journal the week of 22 April, 2007. My original reply was never published due to length. As I observed to the editor of the Journal , it is pathetically easy to spout a great deal of nonsense in 200 words or less but to clear up nonsense takes far more than 200 words, especially if one cares about the truth and in communicating it clearly and in enough detail to be compelling. In the original letter to which this was meant as a reply, the author asserted that it would take thousands of years for the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere to double so how could anyone be so gullible as to think there was any real danger? He sought to make his case by throwi...