Saturday, September 29, 2007

Random 5 from the Atheist Blogroll

As part of my effort to promote the various blogs on the Atheist Blogroll, I will attempt to pick five blogs at random, and then profile them here on Deep Thoughts. I will not get my geek on by describing how I wrote a macro in excel with a random number generator to pick five blogs. Nope, I will not tell the story. I want to tell the story - because figuring out how to do new tech stuff is fun... Maybe some other time.

#1

The law of unintended consequences reared its ugly head on the very first blog,  Serendipity by Lary Crews. Serendipity joined the Atheist Blogroll in April. When I visited his blog this morning I found that Larry is sick with a 24 hour bug, and that he does not display the Atheist blogroll in his sidebar. I left Lay the following message.

Lary - I am sorry to hear that you are under the weather. I hope you return to health soon. I am afraid I have some bad news, I removed your blog from the Atheist blogroll this morning. Our minimum requirement for membership states that you must display one of the various version in your sidebar, or at least link back to the blogroll. I could not find any reference, so I was forced to remove you. If you would like to be reinstated, well... you know what to do.

#2

Our next blog is Nut Watch, a blog after my own heart. Nut Watch did not join the blogroll formally. I found them a few days ago via a link to my blog. I added Nut Watch when I saw they were showing the full Atheist blogroll in their sidebar.

Why do I like Nut Watch? They write about religious nutballs!

Nut Watch is already on my daily reading list, as are  Stappado and the Daily Atheist - all written by Strappado.

#3

The Dorset Humanist Blog joined September 22 so they qualify as a new find. This blog is written by Chris Street and may be one of the better blogs to join our ranks in the last year. I've only had time to read a dozen or so entries, each one has been informative.

Chris is promoting the freethinkers flicker promotion "Calling all Freethinkers" on Flickr. I plan on loading my photo, but first I need to hire a face model.

Since the Dorset Humanist blog is an outstanding new member of our blogroll, I will cut Chris some slack on not displaying the blogroll in his sidebar. Let's hope he puts it up.

#4

Faith in Honest Doubt joined just a few days ago on the 25th.  I find much in common with this blog - like a distaste for the war in Iraq. Several posts highlight the folly of this mismanaged and unjust war. Take The Iran Roll Call for instance:

Here is a listing of how Senators voted on Wednesday's  sense of the Senate" chickenshit back-door declaration of war on Iran. I'm glad to see I am represented by an actual Democrat, Ron Wyden, who voted Nay; I was already aware of that other Senator, Gordon Smith, and already intended to vote for whatever Democrat opposes him in 2008, even if it's a yellow dog, a pink heart, a green clover, a blue diamond, a cartoon leprechaun, or an indeterminately-aged box of Lucky Charms.

What are we going to do if Iran actually fights back?

Oh, I worry too much. They'll greet us as liberators and toss roses at the feet of our troops.

My own Senators split:

  • Boxer (D-CA), Nay
  • Feinstein (D-CA), Yea

Way to go Feinstein.

#5

My fifth and final blog of the day is Church of Integrity. A proud Atheist Blogroll member since April. I was impressed with this blog because it has a clear founding statement.

In the Church of Integrity we believe that ethics are deeply connected with biology in the sense that we, humans, are preprogrammed with certain ethics that have helped the species to advance and survive for a long time. For example then most people agree on that murder is bad. We are not so naive though to think that the world is black and white. We teach ethics that we believe almost everyone can agree on. Examples are that murder is bad and that you should treat others as you want them to treat you.

Church of Integrity does not post frequently, but when the do post, it is worth a read. Take their post on Atheism for example.

The atheist movement is on a rise. We believe there are many different reasons why people become atheists. Many are frustrated with how religion seems to bash and pervert science as some religious groups have done with the theory of evolution. In the Church of Integrity we of course base our world view on science so you shouldn't end up with any frustrations like that here.

Read More...

That's it for my first survey. I will try to do the same thing every weekend when time allows. Please let me know if you have any suggests for improving the format.

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5 comments:

vjack said...

I'm simply baffled that your PageRank isn't much higher than it is. It does look like your Technorati rank has entered the top 10K. That is a good sign. I wonder why your authority isn't higher? In any case, we will continue to promote you too.

Rikertron said...

I really like the idea of your introductory paragraphs instead of reposting posts from the original sites (which is sorta how I assumed, for no good reason, it would be done)

That keeps the space on your page manageable and it prevents you from enduring the potentially toilsome chore of finding a small snippet of our writing to stand as representative of our blogs.

Good stuff!

Anonymous said...

Good stuff! Don't mind me, but isn't there a little bit of favoritism here, since you immediately took the first blog off the blogroll but you gave the third one a pass because you liked it? It's not a knock on you, sir, it just made me wonder.

Anyway, I think the weekly Random 5 is great! Keep it up!

Mojoey said...

TeenA - the first blog dropped all atheist content because of pressure from Christians. I checked by email. The other blog - he gets a month before I take it serious.

Anonymous said...

Oh, I understand. I agree, you're justified in taking him off the blogroll. Thanks for letting me know!