The Atheist Blogger

Just something people might be interested in. The first draft of Charles Darwin’s book “Origin of Species” is online at Darwin Online. Read more about the story at BBC News.

It’s quite amazing the size of this archive though:

The online archive about Charles Darwin is so vast it would take someone two months to view it all if they downloaded one image per minute.

I’ve been playing around with this idea for a few weeks now. Initially it started as something for my campus group (Atheist & Agnostic Alliance) to do once a month, but I’ve been thinking about expanding it online first to see what the reaction is. The idea will work thus:

• On the 1st of every month, a vote will be held to select a book relating to atheism, agnosticism, belief, religion etc. For cost reasons we will try to only pick books that have been published in paperback, and that can be found in libraries.
• Over the course of the next month, we read the book individually.
• At the end of the month we “meet” in an IRC channel (like a chat room) which ewanm89 is setting up on the server. It will be a safe environment and well moderated so that anyone of any age can participate. I will provide more information about how to get access when we get the channels set up!
• In the channel, we will discuss (for as long as we want) the book that we read over the month. I will then publish sections of the comments on the forums in a new thread, where people who either missed or couldn’t participate in the chat can post their comments on the book.
• We will also collect titles of other books and set up a new vote to decide the next book to read.

The idea of this is to get more people reading good books about atheism and belief, and for our opinions on such books to be shared amongst ourselves. If the online book club is a success, I will be including it in a monthly activity for my own campus group, and possibly other campus groups could do the same.

If you are interested in joining the book club, please join the forums and introduce yourself. You can submit book ideas in the new Discussions forum, which will also be used for the discussion of books read in the club.

Please start suggesting book titles for the first vote, which will be held on 1st May.