The Atheist Blogger

Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist recently started a new meme where you listed your last 20 emails and what they say about you. I’m starting a new one, only this time it’s with current browser tabs. The reason? I broke my own record today, with 100 tabs open in Firefox.

Taberrific!

The tabs open were as follows:

• 17 Google Searches.
• 10 Wikipedia Articles.
• 9 Facebook.
• 7 of this site.
• 3 Slashdot.
• 3 Gentoo Wiki Articles.
• 2 YouTube Videos.
• 2 Amazon.co.uk Items
• 2 Problogger Articles
• 2 Chicken Girl
• 2 Atheist Forums
• 2 Discomforting Ignorance
• 2 Amiable Atheist
• 2 Splendid Elles
• 1 RichardDawkins.net
• 1 Google Video
• 1 Atheist Experience
• 1 Barefoot Bum
• 1 Southern Electric
• 1 Least I Could Do
• 1 Joy Of Tech
• 1 ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH…MY EYES!
• 1 xkcd
• 1 Comedy Central
• 1 The Daily Show
• 1 Explosm
• 1 Times Online
• 1 Friendly Atheist
• 1 Pharyngula
• 1 Daily Mail
• 1 Royal Holloway University of London
• 1 Conrad Koppitz
• 1 SSH reference site
• 1 Revver
• 1 Perl Reference Site
• 1 Division By Zero
• 1 Raytractors
• 1 Powers of 10
• 1 Google Android Mobile
• 1 Atheist Stats Site
• 1 Rapture Ready
• 1 Java API
• 1 Dmitry Brant
• 1 Gutenberg.org
• 1 BBC News Article
• 1 My Blog Log
• 1 Sanity Project
• 1 Hot Chicks Dig Smart Men
• 1 Government e-petition

What did I learn?

I use Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook way too often, and I need to learn how to use the “close tab” button on Firefox.

What next?

If you are as geeky as me and use a browser with tabs (sorry I.E 6 users) then write a blog post with your tab list. It was fun to see which sites I visit most, and I get to link to my favourite ones!

Freethoughtpedia is meant to be an encyclopedia for free-thought related things, such as atheism. Their article on atheism however, is filled with misconceptions and wrong definitions.

They firstly define atheism as a “lack of belief in a deity” when the universally accepted definition is that of “disbelief in gods” (note the singular vs plural). They use this definition to make the following case:

Likewise a Christian may be a strong atheist towards the Hindu gods.

This is a massive error in a definition. It is true that Christians are strong disbelievers in the Hindu gods, but that does not make them atheists. You cannot be both a Christian and an atheist because Christians are theists, and the two are incompatible. Atheism rejects all gods, not specific ones.

The next misconception is the one that being agnostic means you are “not sure” about the existence of gods. However, they take it to the max with this paragraph.

Furthermore, agnosticism is a type of atheism. Mainstream media and many people will rarely make note of this because many choose to use the term agnostic to describe their lack of belief due to the negative connotations the media associates with the term atheist, but technically agnostics are atheists: You cannot believe in something you are not sure exists!

Agnosticism is not a type of atheism. It does not cover disbelief in the existence of gods, it covers whether or not the existence of gods can be known. For instance, if I were to claim that outside reality (the universe as we know it) there existed a fairy cake, you would have to be agnostic about it. There is no way currently that we can see what is outside reality (or if indeed there is an outside), so you cannot either prove or disprove my statement. The same applies to God. Since God is supposedly unseen and unobservable, we cannot detect it, and so one must remain agnostic about it to be rational.

The second thing that should be noted about this paragraph is that you can believe in something if you aren’t sure it exists. Knowledge implies belief, not the other way around. Knowledge is often considered a subset of belief, mainly because it is the result of rational justified belief. To have knowledge you must first believe it to be true, otherwise it just wouldn’t work. However, you can believe in something without having knowledge of it. This is precisely how science works. If scientists simply gave up believing in their theories because they hadn’t got enough evidence to prove them, then we wouldn’t get anywhere.

Technology works on the same premise. People look at a current system / product and say “I believe I could do better than that”. They then go away, start thinking about how to approach the design / implementation, and eventually come up with a better system / product.

There are some that claim you can be an “agnostic theist“, implying someone believes in gods but recognizes that the knowledge of gods’ existence may or will never be known. While this is technically true, we are unaware of any practical use of such a term, as the generic definition of [deist] seems to fit that bill.

They manage to get a correct definition of agnosticism into their argument against agnostic theism which seems a bit bizarre, not to mention contradictory. There are plenty of people who are agnostic theists, and an argument from ignorance isn’t going to work for an encyclopedia. As for the definition of a deist, it is simply a person who believes that there is a god (or gods) but they have no control over the universe. They simply created it and for whatever reason do not (or cannot) control anything in it. These people are not theists, and whether they are agnostic or gnostic about their beliefs depends on whether they think the evidence for such a god is available.

I think the idea of a freethoughtpedia is great. As long as sources are cited and proper definitions are used. Free-thought means you do not subscribe to any doctrines. Dictionaries do not count as doctrines, neither do any form of research paper. Use them. At the moment, freethoughtpedia looks more like conservapedia than wikipedia, and everyone knows which of those is the more reliable…

Digg-like site for atheists, “The Atheist Spot” has been holding a series of interviews with atheist bloggers. The latest ones have been all “foreigners” (i.e. not in the USA) like myself, and they show a great diversity of atheism across the world.

The Amiable Atheist tells of growing up a US baptist before discovering atheism, Db0 from Division by Zero tells of growing up in the highly religious country of Greece (99% Christian according to him) before moving to Germany to start a career in the tech industry, and Ramon Garcia from the Philippines who is married to a Christian wife and says that he “respect[s] Adrian Hayter the most” for having the balls the question an entire organisation (Atheist Nexus) despite not having many allies (I’m now blushing…).

All the interviews are very well thought out and great reads, and I would advise subscribing to the Atheist Spot Blog to read the rest (I’m sure there will be plenty more).

If you are an atheist blogger and want an interview, contact The Atheist Spot with your details!

The last 4 hours have seen me go through several emotions, excitement, shock, despair, frustration, to name but a few. After submitting one of my most popular articles (101 Atheist Quotes) to the atheism subreddit, it managed to climb its way to the top link. It also made it onto the reddit homepage if “atheism” was a category selected. This was exciting.

In the short space of an hour, 7000 people managed to connect to the site. Due to a badly configured file in the apache config, the entire server overloaded and crashed. After fixing the file, the server continued to run very slowly. A look at the logs showed a large amount of incoming traffic from Digg. With hesitation, I loaded up the Digg homepage, and saw the 101 Atheist Quotes article, with 487 votes. This was a combination of shock, excitement, terror, and despair.

The server was undergoing what is commonly referred to as “The Digg Effect”. Essentially a massive influx of visitors caused by an article being featured on Digg. The server promptly crashed again under the pressure, with PHP and Apache complaining about everything. This was frustrating, but we managed to get rid of the plugins that were causing the problem. At the same time we hastily installed the WP-Super-Cache plugin to help with the load.

Some hours later, the article had reached 850 votes, and it finally got pushed off the home page of Digg. This slowed down the traffic by a lot, but the votes were still going up, and only time will tell where it goes from here. Currently it has 976 votes, and is on the second page of the top last 24 hours section.

Of course, the kicker about this is that I didn’t even submit this to Digg (at least not this time). My original submission, made back in Febrary, managed to get around 36 diggs. This new submission was made by brown3218, who also put it in the category of “Science” which might explain why it got all the attention. I don’t disagree with the people who responded saying “this is in the wrong category”, but there is not much I can do about it. Science is a popular category on Digg, and this only proves that a load of atheists frequent it.

Hopefully I got some new subscribers out of it, but I’m at least proud to say that other than a few errors, I survived the Digg effect in one piece!

Db0 from A Division by Zero is intrigued by all the atheist blogs that are hosted on free services like blogspot, wordpress.org, livejournal, etc. He has set up a poll over at his website to find out why so many people use these free websites instead of having complete control with a hosted account. Of course, this isn’t just a poll to find out statistics.

Now rest assured that there is a method to the madness . I am not just doing it for my own amusement but I will actually utilise the results I get for your benefit.  I will reveal the how and why in one week, once I have (hopefully) enough answers.

If you fall into the group of bloggers who are using free services, go and vote now!