Fleeing Blogspot?

I received some advise about moving my blog to WordPress, and so far I am liking it. Will play around with it and post both there and here, but let me direct any readers to the new place:

gilgamesh42.wordpress.com

I exported all the posts from here to there, so nothing should be missed. I'm also running a poll to see what people prefer. Make your vote count. And your vote this November counts too!

More Aliens at Skeptic Blogs

I'm happy that I was featured in another blog post by Jonathan Pearce at Skeptic Blogs (his blog there is The Tippling Philosopher). I made some intro and summary to the videos I recently made about ancient aliens and more recent abductions.

In case you are curious, the content not only examines the claims of Ufologists and ancient astronaut folks but there is some religious criticism in there as well (namely the contents of the Bible). Plenty of things to chew on.

Make sure to check it out!

Help Doctors Without Borders in a BlogTV Marathon

You want to help save the world, right? Well, perhaps you can't be Superman, but you can help with the many good charitable and recovery groups. And one of the great ones is Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders. It's a great emergency relief group that is efficient, goes where they are needed including the worst places in the world, and is completely secular. The people involved put their lives at risk to provide medical care to those that have had their lives turned upside down by natural disaster or ongoing civil war.

And you can help them raise money this weekend. For what I think is the third time in a row, many of the big names in YouTube and atheism/humanism will be running a BlogTV marathon for 24 hours trying to raise money for MSF. They have direct donations which is tallied up, and there is an e-Bay auction of various items, from books to signed photographs to a stay at a southwestern ranch. Here is one item up for auction:



The MSF charity marathon is being run, once again, by the excellent DPR Jones of Great Britain, who also tends to run the Magic Sandwich Show. Over the years, his work has earned over $100,000 for MSF, and he has gotten excellent guests, both big names on YouTube such as AronRa and Potholer54, but also Eugene Scott, Lawrence Krauss, A.C. Grayling, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The events begin on Saturday, Sept 8th at 4 PM Greenwich Mean Time (11 AM Eastern Standard). And it will all be here.


dprjones- Broadcast your self LIVE

So donate. Do it! You can do it here or here or here. And again, there is the auction with over 100 items up for bidding.



Donations will stop being taken through the marathon later on the 9th, but some of the auction items will go on longer. And you better bid on those things, because I have; try bidding and you force me to give more.

And while I mention giving for a good cause, also consider the Light the Night walks starting this September. This is another secular charity cause, trying to raise $1 million for research on cancer. If you hate cancer, and if you are secular (or not), get to know these walkers and help them or donate. Help work with another great organization, Foundation Beyond Belief. There is also a matching program; every dollar donated up to $500,000 will be matched; that means $500,000 donated will equal $1,000,000. And it fights cancer. You don't like cancer, do ya?

So much good to do. So little time. But if you have the money to spare, please help out these awesome organizations that really do git er done.

A New Skeptic Blog Site

I was very happy to be invited to post at Debunking Christianity a bit ago about my research on the Star of Bethlehem, and the comments there were interesting. It's also a high-traffic site, so that certainly helped get what I have done noticed.

But now it looks like DC is moving in with a bunch of new roommates at Skeptic Blogs. 

I imagine this was inspired by when DC was at Freethought blogs, but because of some internal disagreements (of which there have been a number of public ones recently) that partnership ended. Nonetheless, there is a lot to be said for having a network of blogs working together for a similar goal. And their goals are something I can get behind.

We seek to collectively provide a positive set of voices on behalf of science, reason, and skepticism. We take aim at critically examining the basis of religious faiths, their holy books, claims of miracles, and of the paranormal, without neglecting the adverse cultural impact they have on us. We will do so from a diverse set of perspectives and disciplines of learning.

I think I can get behind that. And I'll have to spend some time reading A Tippling Philosopher there, not least because the author was the one that invited my post at DC.

I'd check out.

Blog Out

Because of a recent discovery, thanks to some of the other blogs I read, I have now added this blog to an Atheist Blogroll. That is, it is a list of a large number of active blogs by atheists, mostly talking about that subject, but hopefully more as well. There can only be so many ways to debunk a certain religious belief. A good examples, and a very popular one, is Pharyngula, written by a developmental biologist PZ Myers. But, I am an astronomer so I have to like Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy, plus he does some work for SETI's podcast Are We Alone. So, you should see a list of the blogs currently on the roll call, along with a link to the complete list. At this point it has well over 400 blogs. Don't expect to read them all.