A couple of DWcon committee members, including Jerry Elsmore, kindly arranged permission for me to film this year's convention Church of Om service, featuring Lionel Fanthorpe and Mole as celebrants. I'll get my camcorder recording converted into Flash files as soon as possible and up on this blog. For my (admittedly bad) filming of the previous 2008 Church of Om service, DiscWorld convention, please see this blog post for Part A, comprising sections 1 and 2, then the blog post for Part B, comprising sections 3 and 4,...

There's often heated discussion on the complex relationships between science, religion and society, including on what the greatest human accomplishment has been. Some will claim science as the greatest human achievement to date, as does Alom Shaha in a Cif piece in the Guardian, but I don't agree; while science is incredibly useful and fascinating, science is not what makes us human or worthwhile. I tend to think it's ethics, or advanced symbolic art, which would be the real contenders for the title...

I had an interesting conversation with Terry Pratchett yesterday at one of the Klatches at the 2010 DiscWorld convention (which started Thurday and ends today, Monday); the Klatches are small group discussions with the speakers at the convention, speakers like Terry Pratchett, Jack Cohen, Lionel Fanthorpe, Ian Stewart, and so on). I asked Terry Pratchett about his ideas of the New Atheists, and his answer was, "[on this] I support the church", meaning basically that although he himself is an atheist,...

Just catching up on things a bit; first of all had a great time meeting up with Never, and Lifelinking and his family (all incredibly nice people), in Glasgow. Spent a couple of days looking around the Loch Lomond area, Stirling Castle and so on, but I will blog about all that with photos separately in a few days' time, once I get back to Germany from the DiscWorld convention, which is where I now am at, in Birmingham.

Also today I travelled down to Cheltenham for part of the day...

There was a small part of the DiscWorld convention yesterday, but the main part begins today. I hope to be able to film the Church of Om service on Sunday, and to be able to get into some in-depth conversations with some of the authors who will be present, such as Terry Pratchett, Jack Cohen, Ian Stewart, Lionel Fanthorpe etc., over the next 3 days.

Today though, for part of the day, I make a bit of a side-trip excursion out to Cheltenham to meet up with a couple of other bloggers....

A subject that came up recently is how one can tell hallucinations apart from reality. This is going to be a very complex subject, and I am blogging while on the road, so I cannot do as much as I would like or give as much detail and links as I would like, but bear with me and we'll start on the subject. It also ties in with how to tell dreams apart from reality, as in connection with my blog posts on the movie Inception.

The factors to keep in mind are:

• Hallucinations

...

Very interesting talk on the ethics research of Eric Schwitzgebel, professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside (UCR), and Joshua Knobe of Yale University, on BloggingHeads.tv. Schwitzgebel has been doing research on whether ethicists behave better than the norm; the answer seems to be no, they behave much like anyone else. With grateful thanks to Jean Kazez for bringing up this talk; you can also read Eric Schwitzgebel's own blog, or see his homepage for links to his research,...

I've blogged before about the music of a friend of mine, Kim O The Concrete Jungle, who is a member of the Hangout and Hub boards, and who lives down in Sydney, Australia. He's just done some new self-recordings. Here's a link to my previous blog post on Kim and his music, and here's a link to Kim's own official website. Now here below are the videos of his new self-recordings, enjoy!




...

So now I'm off to Glasgow, will meet up with fellow atheists, humanists and anyone else who wants to there! (See my previous blog post on this).

I will be arriving in Glasgow in the afternoon today, and will stay there till the morning of Wednesday 25 August, when then I go off to Birmingham. I will still be blogging, when I can. I am still contactable, through email and PM, but it may take me a day to answer.

The debate on faith schools in Britain has been heightened by the Richard Dawkins documentary, "Faith School Menace?", shown in Britain on Channel More 4, on Wednesday 18th of August -- you can see it online here, or better still (especially since that one is only available to those inside the United Kingdom) see it on this blog post in the videos here below, in four parts. Answers back to Richard Dawkins have been made by Erfana Bora, in a Cif piece on the Guardian, titled "Dawkins is wrong: faith...

I discussed the art of Alfred Grimm and the Huenxe Bruckhausen parish church window (in Germany) a bit in a blog post a couple of days ago. Now it's time to show some details of that church window in Dinslaken here (this is part of the positive engagement blog-ring call); if you haven't seen my post before, here is linked my blog post explaining, "Religious art, humanist art: the art of Alfred Grimm, and the Huenxe church window, in Germany".

First off, the church window divides down...

The video of Phil Plait doing his speech on, "Don't be a dick", at the TAM 8 convention is now up, and courtesy of the JREF and Phil Plait, I will embed the video of his speech here. It's only Part 1 of the speech, around half an hour of what was a speech which was one and a half hours long, and Part 2 and 3 will be coming along later. I covered his speech before and some of the reactions to it, including linking to a small partial transcript of it, in a previous blog post of mine in, "On why not to be a dick; Phil Plait at TAM 8, and the weird reaction from PZ Myers; snarky rudeness, civility, abuse issues among atheists and skeptics"....

I've come across by accident some fascinating interviews (shown at the bottom of this blog post) of Professor Lord Robert Winston, who is a British medical doctor, and also a professor and scientist in such fields as Fertility Studies, stem-cell research and gynaecology. He's come out with a new book, "Bad Ideas?: An Arresting History of Our Inventions" (British edition, USA option), which as far as I can see simply revolves around the truth that most technological advances have more than one side...

Evil is something I blog on every now and then, and I am also writing here about Ron Rosenbaum once again, in a sheer coincidence having written about a column of his in a blog post of mine just a couple of days ago. This time round, it's about the famous phrase invented by Hannah Arendt, "the banality of evil", and about Hannah Arendt herself, and Martin Heidegger, and about Ron Rosenbaum's view of Arendt and her ideas, and his own phrase, "the evil of banality".

Ron Rosenbaum wrote...

As part of the outreach blog-fest I'm suggesting, this blog post of mine is on religious and humanist art (humanism coming in religious as well as secular contexts), specifically featuring the art of Alfred Grimm, a German artist, and the main stained-glass window of the Lutheran church of the EKD parish of Huenxe Bruckhausen, whose church is in the small town of Dinslaken in northwestern Germany (near the border with the Netherlands), using photographs I took myself a few years ago.
...

An idea I had recently, inspired by a couple of things including the blogging of Rev'd Lesley and her own discussions with atheists, and a discussion on a blog post by the Naked Pastor, and a discussion with the Church Mouse on his own blog, as well as the fact I get sick of only arguing about things all the time, and I would like to do something as positive as possible without compromising any principles, and encourage other bloggers to do the same. My idea is simply an inter-blog-fest for a week...

Leo Igwe is a humanist who has come under much attack for trying to protect children from abuse, rape and murder in Nigeria from Muslim and Christian extremists. It is reported that he has earlier been brutally attacked by members of the Liberty Gospel Church, a Christian extremist sect led by Helen Akpabio. The Liberty Gospel Church has been reported to have held witchhunts against children, and many hundreds if not thousands of children have been murdered in Nigeria as a result of the witchfinder...

In a bit of a low blow to Hogwarts, Harry Potter, and J.K. Rowling, they're all losing their Dragon-King, Dracorex hogwartsia, whose biology Latin name means, "Dragon-King of Hogwarts". This unfortunate event is caused by a team of paleontologists who now believe that Dracorex hogwartsia is only a juvenile of Pachycephalosaurus. The Dracorex hogwartsia (pictures and links below) is a dinosaur with a rather beautifully bizarre set of horn-like projections on the back top of its head.
...

Greta Christina, an atheist and activist, recently was a keynote speaker at the Secular Student Alliance conference in July in Columbus, Ohio, USA. Her speech was titled, "What Atheists Can Learn from the LGBT Movement" ( LGBT = lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender people; in short, the gay movement plus others).

Here linked is Greta Christina's blog post on it all; the video of her speech is reproduced below at the end of this blog post. I cannot find any transcript or sufficient...

Ron Rosenbaum, a journalist and author, had a piece published in Slate magazine on June 28, 2010, titled, An Agnostic Manifesto , which was a shout-out for agnostics to have a make-over of their public image. Ron Rosenbaum would like to see agnosticism more widely recognized as "... radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer". Ignoring the problems with his reasoning for a moment, there was one bit which was...