I may be wrong – if you think I am then let’s discuss the science. My challenge to those who consider themselves global warming skeptics is, if you wish to truly earn that mantle, is to focus on scientific arguments. My opinions can be changed on this topic, I really have no stake in the debate at all – except the one that every human on the planet has, which is only served by knowing the truth, whatever it is. I hope global warming is not happening, it is nothing but a major inconvenience and crimp in civilization. I would love to just continue burning fossil fuels and not have to worry about the consequences.

So if you disagree with me, show me some science. And spare me the name-calling and conspiracy theories.

link: Skepticblog » Climate Skepticism

10. SmugWallet :: Sync SmugMug Photos and Videos – As a photographer, I use smugmug.com to hold the photos that I do semi-professionally. Smugwallet syncs these photos from smugmug to my iPhone so I can show them off to people quickly and easily. As a bonus, it also syncs videos to the phone.

9. Mobile Fotos • Flickr Browser & Uploader – Sure you could use the regular flickr mobile interface, but this is nicer. A great way to look at your flickr photos and your friends.

8. NetNewsWire – This may not be the best RSS reader for the iPhone, but it does one awesome thing. If you use NetNewsWire on the mac, it will SYNC your feeds to your phone from your mac automagically.

7. Tuner Internet Radio – This is a great streaming radio app. It will stream any kind of shoutcast or streaming mp3 stream. I use it for listening to our local public radio station, and twitlive.tv

6. WordPress – If you use a blog running on wordpress, this is the perfect way to manage your posts and your comments while on the go. You can even post to your blog from this.

5. Tweetie – I’ve tried most of the Twitter apps for the iPhone, and I keep coming back to tweetie. It’s just really clean , fast and easy to use.

4. Facebook – Need I say anything else? The official facebook app is a pretty great way to access facebook on your iPhone

3. Fieldrunners – This game is addictive. It’s basically a tower defense game, you build towers of weapons in a field with the goal of keeping the enemies from reaching your gate on the other side.

2. Peggle – Peggle is the perfect game to have on your phone so you can play it while you are somewhere stuck waiting for something to happen.

1. BeejiveIM – Instant Messaging Anywhere – This app is expensive, but it is the KING of Instant Messaging on the iPhone. With Jabber, YAHOO, AIM, and even Facebook support, this can handle almost anything. And, if apple ever approves the 3.0 version of this app, we will get true push notifications of new IM messages. I’m pretty sure this would replace SMS for many people with iPhones.

This is a repost of a post I did back in 2007… I only bring it up because I got another one of these emails.. this time from my Dad… DOH!

My mom always used to tell me “Wash your hands before you eat”, or “Wash your hands WITH SOAP after you use the bathroom”. I’m sure your mom did too. This is of course good advice, washing your hands with soap and water reduces the chance that you will get a bacterial infection or catch a virus.

So I was surprised the other day to get this email from my Mom:

Subject: Fw: moons

Two moons on 27th August

27th Aug the Whole World is waiting for………….

Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky starting August.

It will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. This will cultivate on Aug. 27 when Mars comes within 34.65M miles of earth. Be sure to watch the sky on Aug. 27 12:30 am. It will look like the earth has 2 moons. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287.

Share this with your friends as NO ONE ALIVE TODAY will ever see it again .

This of course, is a viral email. A viral “meme” if you will. Anyone who knows anything about anything will read this, and if they think about it more than 2 seconds, they’ll realize it’s a load of hogwash. Mars is NEVER as big in the sky as the moon, it usually looks like a small red star it’s so far away.

But I suspect, my Mom didn’t even really read this email. Which means she fell right into it’s trap. She skimmed it, and sent it to me, because “He likes astronomy and stuff”. The virus had achieved it’s goal, it reproduced one more time.

However, when it got to me, I read it skeptically, like I do everything. I washed my hands, and it killed it. This virus wouldn’t spread past me.

Critical thinking is something you have to do always, and you have to practice it, because it doesn’t come natural. Just like washing your hands, it should become a habit.

“No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.”

Well, if Richard Carroll of North Little Rock, a member of the Green Party and a Catholic gets his way, the constitution will be amended. He has introduced house resolution 1009: AMENDING THE ARKANSAS CONSTITUTION TO REPEAL THE PROHIBITION AGAINST AN ATHEIST HOLDING ANY OFFICE IN THE CIVIL DEPARTMENTS OF THE STATE OF ARKANSAS OR TESTIFYING AS A WITNESS IN ANY COURT.

Of course, the U.S Supreme court ruled provisions such as the one in the 1874 Arkansas Constitution unconstitutional back in 1961 in a ruling in a Maryland case.

This Maryland religious test for public office unconstitutionally invades the appellant’s freedom of belief and religion and therefore cannot be enforced against him.

And Arkansas apparently isn’t alone in this, there are about a dozen other states with similar provisions lurking in the depths of their constitutions. Perhaps bringing to light these provisions might be a good tactic for atheists to let people know that we should be afforded the same religious protections as any other citizen.

What argument is most convincing to plant the seeds of doubt (or, rather, faith) in an atheist’s mind?
Do you mind if I restate your question while retaining its original intent? It might be more interesting to phrase it this way: Atheists on this site have kindly submitted questions for me, but what questions would I ask an atheist? As I pondered that issue, I decided to send emails to some of my friends to get advice on what they would ask. Here are a few of their replies — all of which I agree would be excellent to ask a skeptic. If they’re considered fully with all of their implications, they might indeed plant some seeds:

Historian Gary Habermas: “Utilizing each of the historical facts conceded by virtually all contemporary scholars, please produce a comprehensive natural explanation of Jesus’ resurrection that makes better sense than the event itself.”
These historical facts are: (1) Jesus was killed by crucifixion; (2) Jesus’ disciples believed that he rose and appeared to them; (3) The conversion of the church persecutor Saul, who became the Apostle Paul; (4) the conversion of the skeptic James, Jesus’ half-brother; (5) The empty tomb of Jesus. These “minimal facts” are strongly evidenced and are regarded as historical by the vast majority of scholars, including skeptics, who have written about the resurrection in French, German, and English since 1975. While the fifth fact doesn’t have quite the same virtual universal consensus, it nevertheless is conceded by 75 percent of the scholars and is well supported by the historical data if assessed without preconceptions.

Let’s take these so called “facts” in order shall we?

1. Assuming you can trust the accounts of Jesus existing and being crucified in the normal Roman way, I’ll grant him this one. Be aware though that there are no ROMAN accounts of this. But the romans crucified lots of people, perhaps this one just didn’t get recorded.
2. Hrm, this is interesting, okay, I’ll even grant you that the disciples might have believed he rose and appeared to them. But just because people believe things, doesn’t mean they are true. People believe lots of incorrect stuff.
3. Okay, so Paul believed to. I’m beginning to see a trend here.
4. Ah, and so does James. Geez, that’s almost 14 people so far!
5. Okay, just for humor’s sake I’ll grant you an empty tomb. Of course, there are lots of explanations for that. Perhaps the tomb was looted? Perhaps these so called “believing” disciples believed so much that they faked the empty tomb. Both possibilities are more likely than any supernatural event… And that’s just off the top of my head, there are probably dozens of more likely explanations that don’t require magic.

Philosopher Paul Copan: “Given the commonly recognized and scientifically supported belief that the universe (all matter, energy, space, time) began to exist a finite time ago and that the universe is remarkably finely tuned for life, does this not (strongly) suggest that the universe is ontologically haunted and that this fact should require further exploration, given the metaphysically staggering implications?
“And, second, granted that the major objection to belief in God is the problem of evil, does the concept of evil itself not suggest a standard of goodness or a design plan from which things deviate, so that if things ought to be a certain way (rather than just happening to be the way they are in nature), don’t such ‘injustices’ or ‘evils’ seem to suggest a moral/design plan independent of nature?”

“ontologically haunted”. LOL. (He means “there is a god”, I think he just wants to sound smarter than he is, either that or he wants us to imagine god lurking in the shadows ready to jump out and go BOO.). Anyway, on to the point.

I don’t know why people keep saying the universe is fine tuned for life. Have they looked around? There’s a large portion of our planet that isn’t very hospitable to life. Most of the solar system is downright hostile to life. Even probes sent to Venus MELT within a few minutes of landing. That’s not to mention the vast miles of interstellar space, and all the stars, and black holes, and quasars, and pulsars and well, you get the point. The universe is pretty hostile to life.

As for his second point. I don’t believe in the existence of objective morality in the same way I believe in the objective reality of say, a rock. Think about it this way. If there were no human beings. Would anything be EVIL? Good and Evil are concepts that humans use to describe actions and behaviors we like or don’t like. That’s it. I can’t emphasize this enough. “Meaning” is something human beings assign to things. “Meaning” is not a thing like a rock is a thing.

Talk show host Frank Pastore: “Please explain how something can come from nothing, how life can come from non-life, how mind can come from brain, and how our moral senses developed from an amoral source.”

Let’s take these in order as well.

Something from Nothing:
Well, as nobody is really claiming this, I’m not sure what you mean. At least SCIENCE doesn’t claim this. If you’ve heard a physicist talking about something coming from nothing, they were probably paraphrasing. The Big Bang is all about all the matter, time and energy being created from a single thing, a “singularity”.. That’s sure as hell not “nothing”. As for where the singularity came from? We don’t know. But we certainly aren’t claiming we do know. Only theists do that.

Life from non-Life:
This is called the theory of abiogenesis. Much is not known of the actual process.

Mind from brain:
Well, where pray-tell do you THINK that the mind is? Floating in a cartoon bubble outside our bodies? In another dimension? In a supernatural realm? If so, how does it communicate with our body? Through what mechanism? Ah, you don’t know. Then why are you making the claim? Also, see Functional MRI studies.

Moral from aMoral:
I guess the best answer to this is to say that humans are not the only creatures to have a morality. The great apes definitely have morality, and as you look around the animals kingdom you see lots of animals with differing moral “codes”. I will say that you only see these in the social animals ( like the apes ). This was probably an evolutionary advantage long ago.

Historian Mike Licona: “Irrespective of one’s worldview, many experience periods of doubt. Do you ever doubt your atheism and, if so, what is it about theism or Christianity that is most troubling to your atheism?”

Actually, this is funny. I rarely doubt my “atheism”. Once I had run through all the logical problems with God existing, I was kind of done. I had far more doubt when I was a Christian and Deist.

Author Greg Koukl: “Why is something here rather than nothing here? Clearly, the physical universe is not eternal (Second Law of Thermodynamics, Big Bang cosmology). Either everything came from something outside the material universe, or everything came from nothing (Law of Excluded Middle). Which of those two is the most reasonable alternative? As an atheist, you seem to have opted for the latter. Why?”

I’m not going into the something from nothing thing again. I’ll just say it this way.

There’s no such thing as Nothing.

Also, quit using a false dichotomy. You forgot the choice that science actually shows.. Everything came from a singularity. The singularity BECAME all the matter and energy in the universe. In other words. Things that exist, exist. Things that don’t, don’t.

I didn’t email Alvin Plantinga, considered by many to be among the greatest philosophers of modern times. But based on his assertion that naturalism is self-defeating, we could formulate this question (thanks to William Lane Craig for some of the concise wording): If our cognitive faculties were selected for survival, not for truth, then how can we have any confidence, for example, that our beliefs about the reality of physical objects are true or that naturalism itself is true? (By contrast, theism says God has designed our cognitive faculties in such a way that, when functioning properly in an appropriate environment, they deliver true beliefs about the world.)

Ah, Plantinga. I recently finished reading his tome “Warranted Christian Belief”. He sure can fill up pages with words. I’ll have a long post soon on his work. So for now I’ll just say this. Learn how science works. Do some actual science experiments. (They can be simple ones) Think about how you know what you know. If you do the work, you’ll eventually understand. Here’s the trick. Human perception was evolved for survival and not for truth. We use the methods of science precisely because our senses and brains are so bad at discerning what is true. This is why we have things like double-blind studies. You trust the data, not your senses.

However, it looks as though the Little Rock chapter is being invaded by the pseudo-scientific world of “Complementary and Alternative Medicine”. The three ‘scientists’ who will be speaking Tuesday night are Wesley Pilcher, a team leader from Whole Foods Market, D.J. Lynch a hypnotist from Arkansas Hypnosis, and Martin Eisley from Evergreen Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. Mr. Eisley will also be speaking on the local public radio station (KUAR 89.1FM) at 6:05pm tomorrow night about the Science Cafe.

Hopefully they will be taking callers, I’m going to attempt to call in to ask questions concerning their use of the term ‘science’ to describe what it is they do. I’ll try to record the episode and post it somewhere if possible (if KUAR doesn’t post it on their own).

Reasons Greetings Everyone,
Lately I have not been emailing the group, but I thought this was worth the exception.
Earlier today I was interviewed by Fox 16 regarding our “Beware Of Dogma” billboard
that’s up now next to the Main Street bridge traveling from Little Rock’s River Market
heading into North Little Rock. The reporter told me that the story would run at 5:30 and
9pm tonight, Tuesday. I just saw the tail end of the 5:30 piece and it seemed as if
it was the lead story, which is great. I wanted to tip you all off in order that you may
tune in during the 9pm broadcast to catch it, or even set your DVR’s.
The official press release from the FFRF was issued today, which is officially HumanLight
and Festivus, I also issued the local press our own release stating our intentions for
erecting this billboard.
If you were unable to attend this last weekend’s HumanLight celebration but would like
to have your picture taken with others from this group, the FFRF has sent out postcards
announcing that we will gather (again) this coming Saturday at noon for another group
photo. We will gather in the US Bank parking lot at the foot of the main street bridge
in North Little Rock. It’s right in between where Main Street forks apart it’s north and
south bound traffic.

After a bit of searching, it looks like FOX16 has posted it on their website.

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Story Here

Below are some links to other stories on the sign.

Arkansas News

Arkansas Times

This time it’s South Carolina, but the plate is going to look just like Florida’s old one.

Actually though, I don’t have a problem with this cross plate… as long as you allow any group who can get 400 orders to get a plate. Which means atheists in South Carolina ( I wonder if there are 400 of them ) should band together and order a plate with the scarlett A on it.

What bother me worse is Arkansas’s plate, which I’ve written about before.

It contains a picture of the Arkansas state capitol building with the slogan “In God We Trust” at the bottom. To me, this is more a violation of the first amendments establishment clause than one saying “I Believe”. After all the “I Believe” obviously refers to the person driving the car, not the state. While “In God We Trust” implies the collective state government of the people.

Follow the link below to read the whole story about South Carolina’s new license plates.

Cross could adorn state license plates