And keep in mind that Earth is our only habitable planet. What happens when we leave this rock and find another Earth-like planet? I have a feeling that it’d be a bit like when I started watching Doctor Who. I started off with the reboot, so my first Doctor and companion were 9 and Rose. I really liked Rose until I met later companions and had a comparison, then I started to not really care for her. I imagine something similar will happen when we get a new world. There’ll be people who will take in the beauty of the new world and go, “You know, this place is actually better than Earth. I like it more. Earth is a bit of a dump.” And then there’ll be people who will say, “This new world sucks! Earth is better! I love Earth! I’m going to write a fanfic about how great Earth is!” And the forums will be filled people arguing back and forth over which planet is better. Snarky internet reviewers (who’ve, by then, become a part of mainstream media) will come up with clever arguments on both sides, and both sides will quote and re-quote to them to death. Two camps of extreme planet fans will form: Earthies and Victors (randomly thought up a name for our first colonized planet, I think “Victory” does nicely), leaving out the vast majority of people who either see beauty on both planets or just really don’t care.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/files/2013/05/the-religious-universe.jpg

Can somone confirm/deny if there’s going to be any more Arkham Horror? Would love to add to my wall of boxes

Thanks all

Dr. Awkward is a character in Kingdom of Loathing and now I think I know why (beyond the obvious palidrome).

Here’s what I can tell you under company policy: There will be some.

Ta-dah!

In a good Christian manner, of course!

Mega Ran
Adam WarRock
MC Lars (there’s even a pic of one of my tattoos in the appropriate section on Lars’ site)
Dr Awkward

And Molly, any hints you can give about future Netrunner or XWing Minis expansions?

2. Marine biology, and specifically marine life. Sharks have always fascinated me, and if I were any good at the study of science I’d probably be majoring in marine biology to work with sharks in Australia or South Africa. Though I would like to add that for a good portion of my middle school and early high school years I wanted to go into forensics.

3. I’d have to say there are probably a lot of things that I am ashamed that I haven’t seen or read or played. These include Star Trek, I’ve only seen the new movie and am super excited for the next, but the TV show or old movies never interested me. I’ve also definitely pretended to know more about comics than I really do, though often before seeing the movies based on comics I’d read up n the comic itself without reading the comics. I wish I were into comics more, but it’s to the point where I just don’t know where to start, ad unlike Tim I don’t have friends who have great comics to lend me. Those are probably the big two, though I’m sure there are more.

4. It would probably be ghosts. I had some rather odd experiences as a child, a few that I still don’t know how to explain. I think when I began to really question religion and God I realized that the two beliefs could not co-exist and my Atheism was a stronger belief than the belief in ghosts. I still think that there are things out there that we have not figured out and understood, but it isn’t soul of a dead human being. Though I do still find the possibility interesting and enjoy joking around about it.

5. Ok so I go to school in La Crosse, WI and there is a pizza place here called Pizza Doctors. It is not the greatest pizza, but it is the best pizza experience I’ve had. The place is a pizza buffet with a lot of crazy specialty pizza. They have spaghetti pizza, big mac pizza, mac and cheese pizza, bbq chicken pizza. The regular dinner pizzas are good, but what makes the experience is the wide variety of dessert pizzas. They have a delicious PB&J pizza, oreo pizza, puppy chow pizza, and many, many others. The service is pretty good, once there’s a crowd you rarely have to leave your table because every fresh pizza is taken around the room before being brought up to the buffet table. You also have the opportunity to order which pizzas you want made. Though not perfect pizza you get your moneys worth and leave pretty damn full.

2. Bird behaviour & mating dances. Bower birds anyone? I could watch for hours.

3. My biggest geeky guilty shame? I have never seen Cosmos.

4. I believed there was a thing in my basement that would come after me if I turned my back to it. I grew out of it, maybe once I realized it never caught me.

5. My husband and I came across Greco’s pizza in North Bay once after one of those days where you wait too long to eat and you’re getting cranky and you can’t decide what you want but nothing that looks good is even open anymore and you’re not familiar enough with the town to know what’s available or anything and it was the best thing we’d ever had. The crust was perfect – not to crusty but not too doughy, enough sauce but not too much, enough cheese but mostly placed under the toppings so the pepperoni gets that nice crust on the edges. It was soooo good. The next time we went though the crust was soggy. Boo.

Least Favorite Doctor: Sylvester McCoy. I’ve only seen one episode of this Doctor, but, it stunned me with how bad it was. Dr. Who always seemed to be sci-fi aimed at people from their teens up to their early twenties as a demographic, the episode i watched (no idea what it was, but, it had daleks, took place in the english countryside and involved u.n.i.t.) was unbearably bad and seemed to be geared for 7 to 9 year olds. This doctor just seemed like a lackadaisical smart guy who bumbled around in a blue box. I also was not a fan of Colin Baker, he just didnt seem right for the part, i watched two or three episodes with him and was just bored.
Eccleston>Tennant>Smith>TBaker>Hartnell>McGann>Davison>Troughton>Pertwee>Cbaker>Mccoy

2) Virtual Reality encasement existence and melding the mind with the computer. There is probably a better description (maybe vr wetware or something would be close) of it but I cant think of it at the moment. Its where I want evolution to go. I want to live in a holodeck, or have a holodeck type suit or pod or something. Kinda like the matrix, except with a virtual world thats not so crappy. Its not really a specific development or study or something, but, it has elements of computers mixed with organics mixed with evolution.

3) Biggest geeky guilty shame? Sci fi or other conventions make me stabby, and its not just because of the b/o. I dont really like geeks, well, at least most geeks. I write people off for being geeky and nerdy just as quickly as I write people off for being frat boys, republicans, hippies, christians or whatever. However, occasionally, i get convinced to like people in spite of their nerdistic tendencies and on rare occasions, even because of their geekiness. Yeah, lots of self-loathing, I know.

4) craziest most irrational belief I’ve ever held? All police are bad. The government is just a conspiracy to oppress me and my peoples. Any science that the government does or any laws they enact are probably only going to be used for nefarious purposes. Most conspiracy theories hold large enough amounts of truth to be believed. How did I shed this belief? Slowly, one conspiracy at a time. but, mostly deductive reasoning, a willingness to be skeptical and challenge my own beliefs coupled with access to information (long story short: i grew up, and there was an internet I could verify stuff with and also read other points of view to see if i was missing crucial stuff)

5) Eden Pizza in Saint Paul. A tiny mom and pop pizza shop near snelling and university with amazing pizza and a decent variety of weird toppings and even weirder sauces than I have found anywhere else in Minnesota. Prices are reasonable and I have yet to have a less than amazing pizza from them. My standard from them is an 18″ with shrooms and spinach, but using a mixture of their normal tomato sauce and the creamy garlic sauce….ggggggg. (side note, i could drink the sauce from punch pizza by the gallon, and also Luce has that Garlic Mashed Potato pizza thing that I would have mentioned, but, its really only related to pizza by shape and name and crust)

1. My favorite Doctor from Doctor Who is Patrick Troughton. That’s pretty much a standard answer among a lot of classic Who fans who don’t share in the Tom Baker nostalgia. Patrick Troughton could have just imitated Hartnell – playing a younger version of the Doctor (as regeneration was known as rejuvenation at the time) but he didn’t. He made the character his own and improved on what Hartnell had done before him. Matt Smith, who might very well be my second favorite, has said in interviews that he was influenced by watching Pat Troughton in Tomb of the Cyberman – and you can see it both in wardrobe choice and performance (especially in Series 5 when Matt Smith was still finding the character.) Troughton is the archetypical Doctor for me and doesn’t, in my opinion, have any of the unique character flaws that each subsequent Doctor brings to the table thereafter.

My least favorite Doctor for me has to be Peter Davison. I don’t know what it is about him or his era – he just rings so ‘blah’ and plain to me. He gets swept up in events as a bystander – he’s not individual or revolutionary, and he often gets overshadowed by the drama of his companions and their bickering. Maybe if I rewatched his era all chronologically in transmission order instead of scattershot as I experienced as the VHS and DVDs were released in the 90′s/00′s, I may change my opinion, but until then, I’ve got to go with Davison as least favorite.

2. Answered on the podcast but I have to go with terraforming. That’s really not science, more so engineering or application of science, but I find it fascinating. I mentioned I think terraforming Venus interests me more than terraforming Mars (maybe it’s my nostalgia around the Ray Bradbury short story “All Summer in a Day”) but I recognize that the practicality of terraforming Mars presents fewer problems – although surface altitude radiation levels aren’t fully understood yet.
Terraforming is happening on Earth too: in 2012, a US businessman named Russ George conducted a private, large-scale, terraforming experiment just off northern British Columbia, which may have been in violation of various international agreements. 100 tons of iron sulphate was dumped into coastal waters, which George claimed increased algae growth over 10,000 square miles, in an effort to boost the local eco-system and fishing industries.

3. Also answered on the podcast but for me, my guilty shame is Harry Potter. I’ve read the first four books (and am about a third done with book 5) and have only seen the first four movies. I feel like I’ll get around to reading and watching them all at some point but I’m in no rush to do so. It’s all been spoiled for me anyhow (my own fault for taking so long) so now, it feels like an exercise in “needing to complete this course to level up my geek cred.” My version of Harry Potter, growing up, was both “The Dark is Rising” sequence by Susan Cooper and “The Chronicles of Prydain” by Lloyd Alexander. For me, I find those universes more fascinating/fun/appealing from a childhood fantasy/magic perspective. When I got around to Harry Potter, I understood how they appealed to a newer generation but I had heard these fantastic mythological tales before, in other trappings, just as generations before me were probably more into Tolkien, Lewis, etc.
Another guilty shame for me – I haven’t yet watched Seasons 3 or 4 of Torchwood, nor have I seen any Sarah Jane Adventures post-series 1. In due time!!

4. Also answered on the podcast but I have to go with the whole “Astral Projection” experience I had when I was 19 living on campus at Hamline University. I had the sensation of being outside by body and that there was another presence restraining me. Read the Wikipedia article on Sleep paralysis to get a better understanding of what this phenomenon actually is. It was pretty terrifying at the time and it kept me locked in a pseudo-science/deist mindset throughout my twenties.

5. My favorite pizza place is hands down, Mama’s Pizza on Rice Street in St. Paul. Just a little hole-in-the-wall place that has great pizza (square cut, lots of cheese, decent amount of sweet tomato sauce, and lots of toppings – similar to Chanticlear Pizza, for some of you long-time Minnesotans). Mama’s also has great spaghetti and meatball dinners that you can get with a thick layer of cheese melted over it – and these are all you can eat Mondays and Tuesdays. At the end of the meal, if you dine in, you get free mini ice cream cones for dessert. It’s owned by an Italian guy named Tony – he’s got a picture of his mom on the wall and this great (cheesy?) bas-relief wall sculpture of Italy takes up one entire side of the small dining area. Runner up would be John’s Pizza Cafe Ltd., which is at the 3-way intersection of Dale, Como, and Front) in St. Paul. Get their gigantic stromboli or calzone, decedent!

2) Who is your favorite atheist character?
Granny Weatherwax, from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Witches on the Disc absolutely know the gods are real, but they don’t worship them. They do their best to avoid any sort of contact with supernatural beings. Here’s Granny, talking to her partner in witching, Nanny Ogg: “I don’t hold with paddlin’ with the occult,” said Granny firmly. “Once you start paddlin’ with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you’re believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble.”
”But all them things exist,” said Nanny Ogg.
”That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ‘em.”

3) What is your geekiest hobby?
I like designing books. I’ve started converting public domain texts from the Gutenberg Project into print & ebook layouts, for fun and for practical experience.

4) What is your favorite sandwich?
Rye bread, margarine (just enough to keep the bread from getting soggy), Gulden’s mustard, and my grandmother’s baked beans. I still haven’t been able to recreate the beans, as it requires washing the beans, soaking them overnight, washing them AGAIN, and then cooking them in a casserole with ketchup, molasses, brown sugar, etc., in a low oven for about eight hours. She only made the beans for Thanksgiving, so it was a once-a-year treat.

5) What is the stupidest thing anyone has said to you about your atheism/agnosticism?
No one has actually said anything outright stupid about my lack of belief. My mom does occasionally push a bit, but it’s never anything stupid or annoying.

It almost approaches a middle-ground. In one meeting, there’s people who are saying, “God helped me,” and then there are people who are saying, “I wouldn’t have gotten through last night if my family hadn’t helped me.” When the secular people talk, the god-fevered people politely listen, and then the secular people do the same for the other group. Everyone there realizes that it’s more important to over come the addiction than it is to proclaim that God/this higher power is the thing that helped you over come it. Now, I say “almost approaches a middle-ground” because they still do encourage you to seek a higher power and it’s clear that while there are other acceptable form of the higher power, they want you to think of God first.

Look, lemme show you:
E=MC^2 <- Not science
E=MC^2 Psalm 18:28 You, O LORD, keep my lamp burning; my God turns my darkness into light. <- SCIENCE

WHY DON'T YOU GET THAT?

the trials of ted haggard is also quite good.

You guys also had a little discussion on Mormons and Battlestar Galactica, it goes back before the new series. There are strangely lots of genre stuff in Mormon influences, Twilight ect.. http://mormonartist.net/issue-13/introduction/

Strange, you would think scientologists would do more.

These might even be on youtube or netflix. Again, great show.

my concern has always been that I’d get kicked out for scoffing too loudly. then it really would just be a waste.

Morals: as I say, “If the only thing keeping you from a murderous rampage is your belief in god, by all means remain religious“

Bob’s comment about stars we could not see if it were not for the lens effect of other bodies in space made me think of some of the “Symphony of Science” videos, a couple of which brought a tear to my eye the first time I saw them http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zSgiXGELjbc

I also wanted to tease Molly about having a “moment” while running since exhaustion is one of the tricks used by cults…

Hey, why not throw a link to your podcast here in the comments?

And their privilege is to be taken seriously, despite saying such things. If I say “Ksárul bless you” I lose credibility, I look like a fool. If I say “Manwë damn you” I may not even be understood. But if I say “God bless you” I’m seen as empathetic and caring, despite invoking a character no less fictional than Manwë. JudeoChristians are privileged to be grounded in the culture.

So how come someone isn’t an “asshole theist” because they push their “God” on you by saying “God bless you”?

Would it be fair for me to say “Ksárul bless you” whenever someone farts. When they ask I could say, “In my religion we consider it polite to bless someone when they release something they should have kept secret, so Ksárul, the God of Secrets, bless you.”

You mentioned in the most recent episode (#33) that you’d like to talk to a recently out atheist. I don’t know if I fit the bill, as I’ve been out (90% out) for about a year and a half. I was a devout Christian for my first 37 years. Now I’m probably a borderline “Asshole Atheist.” I’d love to be on the show and talk about it though.

One disclaimer, I have my own atheist podcast, so I can’t say that my motivations are 100% altruistic. That being said, I’d love to come on and talk even if I can’t make a quick plug. Regardless of whether or not you’re interested, I’ll be mentioning your show since I think it’s really good. No guilt trip intended, and no reciprocity expected.

Keep up the awesome job all.
Martin

I would the life energy I lost seeing that movie back!

Scott

I do want to be clear that I didn’t object to the religion in the film. It was historically accurate. No problem there.

Rather, I was bothered by the fact that it is human nature to thank GOD when it is PEOPLE who are responsible for the good thing that happened. It is one of the things I find insidious about religion because of the way it implies we aren’t capable of good deeds without the intervention of god.