The Atheist Blogger

Woah! A whole two days of nothingness on the blog. It feels empty to me so I guess it probably feels empty for my readers! I have an excuse though:

Refurbishing an entire house is hell.

Not literally hell of course, for obviously no such place exists. However if I were to believe in a hell, it would probably have me cleaning and tidying a student house for all eternity. All my housemates have arrived now, and in addition to all the house-keeping, we’ve been setting up phonelines, internet connections, and routers. We now have cable running through the entire house which on two occasions has nearly caused me to break my neck (it gets caught around my feet easily).

A couple of days ago I got a visit from a representative of the UK Brights who came to talk to me about our plans to hold a “Brights Awareness Week” at the university (part of my student group Atheist & Agnostic Alliance). Our hope is to hold an event that beats the crap out of the Christian Unions “Jesus Awareness Week”, which is why we have started planning so many months in advance.

Finally, I totally missed the book club result for September, which is:

Biblical Nonsense by Dr. Jason Long

Luckily it is a book I suggested in the forums, and therefore I already have it in my bookcase. Its available on Amazon though. Preliminary date for discussion is Saturday 28th September.

So this months book is “The Demon Haunted World” by Carl Sagan, and the discussion will be held on Saturday 30th, at 23:00 UTC. Again, if you need to work out your time follow these steps:

1. Visit the website http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/
2. Scroll down past the first table of countries and you will see another box that has the words “Current UTC (or GMT/Zulu)-time used: “
3. With the time/date shown in that box, you can work how how far ahead or behind you are of UTC.

Everything will be confirmed nearer the time.

Now for the vote for Septembers book.

Do not vote unless you wish to read the book or take part in the discussion!

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Voting lasts 7 days.

The forum discussion for Daniel Dennett’s book “Freedom Evolves” is up. Apologies to anyone who went to the live discussion, which I had put an hour later so that Aussie readers could get out of bed. It seems people still thought it was the same time, so I showed up an hour “late” and nobody was there.

Just so everyone knows for future reference, the book club live discussion is now taking place at midnight (UTC+1). So if you go to this world clock website and scroll down, you will see the time written in UTC. When that time is 23:00, it’s time for the discussion!

Voting for Septembers book will take place tomorrow.

This month’s book club discussion will take place tomorrow (Sunday 27th July) at Midnight UTC+1. For people who want to figure out what time that is where you live, use the handy world clock. UTC+1 corresponds to the current time of London on the site, so simply work out the differences with your nearest city.

As always, use our guide to the IRC server to get connected to the chat, and I hope to see some of you there!

With 2 votes ahead of the other books, Carl Sagan’s book “The Demon Haunted World” is the chosen book for August’s book club. Just to make sure everyone is up to date on the new book club voting system:

This book is for August. It will be discussed at the end of August, probably on the 30th. This new system gives you the rest of July to order the book online or buy it, and then you get the full alocated time (August) to read it. The book is available in paperback from Amazon.

The next vote will take place on August 1st for September’s book. Please submit book suggestions to the forums.