The Atheist Blogger

On 29th June at 23:00 (UTC+1) I will be holding the second book club discussion of the chosen book this month: “I Sold My Soul on eBay” by Hemant Mehta.

Work out your discussion time using this handy chart. I messed up last time so I’ll explain how to work it out. The time for London is the time we are going for (UTC+1 at the moment). So find the difference in times between London and your nearest city, then just calculate what time it will be for you when London is at 23:00 using that difference.

Ewan (our server guy) is still working on getting an irc server for the website, and I’m now paying him in pizza so *hopefully* it will be up and running for the third discussion. So, as before we will be using the temporary channel over at MSGPlus.

To save myself typing all the instructions out again I have created a helpful page which contains all the info.

http://atheistblogger.com/irc-server

Keep your fingers crossed because since this month’s author is an atheist blogger and well known in the atheist blogging community, I have asked him if he would like to be part of the discussion. So if you would like to talk to Hemant about his book, atheism, the Secular Student Alliance, or anything we get onto now is your chance!

After the discussion, I will create a forum thread so that other people who couldn’t make the IRC chat can voice their opinions of the book.

Finally, we have to decide a book to read for July. This poll will be open for 7 days and the result will be confirmed on the 1st as per usual.

Only one other book was suggested in the submission forum so we have three books up again for the vote. Like last time:

Please don’t vote unless you intend to read the book and/or contribute to the discussion!

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I have mentioned in this poll that the book “Exmormon” is free for all reviewers and the book club is covered by this. I don’t want to try and alter people’s votes, but this would be a great opportunity for anyone who doesn’t want to pay for a book to join in.

Having said that, the other two books look very interesting as well!

Regular visitors will notice that the theme has changed quite a bit in the last few hours or so. I’ve been working on streamlining the website for a few weeks now, starting with reducing the number of articles on the homepage to 5 instead of the default 10. Today I firstly removed the second sidebar (on the left) and merged it with the original single sidebar, then noticed that the theme I was using (which admittedly I just saw on a whim) was very out of date. The current version is faster and in my opinion looks much better.

I’ve tried to cut down on as much content as possible, which included a load of JavaScript cuts. I’ve also changed the default font to Verdana (backup fonts: Arial, sans-serif) because Georgia was getting annoying. Hopefully the blog now looks better and loads faster.

The forums theme will remain the same until I upgrade the actual forum version to MyBB 1.4 which is on the verge of release. There are a load of style changes within the MyBB package so I don’t see any point in changing the theme twice in quick succession.

One final thing. If you notice anything I have missed or something that looks odd please contact me as I probably made a few errors when altering the upgraded theme myself. I’ve gone through the basic pages so everything *should* be ok, but as they say, pobody’s nerfect.

I mentioned two weeks ago about Bill Maher’s new film “Religulous” which come out later this year. It seems that the studio went all out designing a website for the film.

A direct parody of Beliefnet, Disbeliefnet.com has the slogan “You won’t believe what people believe”, and at this current moment has a poll on Christian Morality. You can’t actually vote in the poll so I decided as a tribute to the genius of Bill Maher, I’d recreate it here:

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I highly recommend going over and checking out the “Blasphemy Box“, which contains links to website, videos, articles that are absolutely brilliant!

Thanks to Friendly Atheist!

Only 2 people voted for the book club poll, which made me rethink the entire voting process. Next vote will therefore be held around 23rd June and will be open for 7 days to give people more of a chance to check their RSS feeds. The result of this month’s vote was chosen by a coin toss, and the Queen’s head signalled Hemant Mehta’s book.

It’s available on Amazon and luckily I bought the book a few weeks back to read over the summer. The discussion will take place at the end of the month, but I will post more information nearer the time.

Enjoy the book!

Even though only 2 people turned up for the live discussion (a result of oversleeping and differing timezones) I have had a small number of people contact me saying that they have either read the book or are finishing it and will participate in the forums discussion.

Only one other book was suggested in the submission forum so we have three books up again for the vote. Like last time:

Please don’t vote unless you intend to read the book and/or contribute to the discussion!

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Discussion will be on 31th June unless something comes up. I’d also like to form a mailing list of regular members so we can better organize ourselves. Please contact me through the contact form using your *real* email address and tell me that you want to be added to this list.

Voting lasts 24 hours.