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Meet Lucy the rat.  Mrs. Tesla and I got her from a friend of mine when she was but a few weeks old.  She is about six months old now.
 

This is probably my favorite evidence for common descent, as ERVs are not something species evolve but are carried as "scars" of viral infections, and the pattern they create simply cannot be adequately accounted for outside of common descent.

I am very busy, but I had to take a break to share this with everyone.

CERN has executed their first successful proton collisions within the LHC.  This is great news, as we may be stepping into a new realm of understanding in just a few short years due to this machine.  I guess this Thanksgiving we can all be thankful (to nature, I guess) that the thing did not kill us.  Do not worry though, as CERN has not reached desired collision energy levels.  I am unsure whether or not current energy levels have exceeded past experiments with these collisions, but they intend to scale up quite a bit, so I imagine the paranoia will continue for a while longer.

These developments come just three days after the LHC restart, demonstrating the excellent performance of the beam control system. Since the start-up, the operators have been circulating beams around the ring alternately in one direction and then the other at the injection energy of 450 GeV. The beam lifetime has gradually been increased to 10 hours, and today beams have been circulating simultaneously in both directions, still at the injection energy.

Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments’ calibrations.

Thank you, YogiToad, for your awareness-raising video.

• Is Slavery In Your Chocolate?
• Chocolate and Slavery
• Stop Chocolate Slavery

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. -Bertrand Russell

This claim has proved evidently true according to this article on Damn Interesting from 2006.

Participants scoring in the bottom quartile grossly overestimated their test performance and ability, and analysis confirmed that this miscalibration was due to deficits in metacognitive skill (the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error). Those who were incompetent tended to suspect that their abilities were unequal to the tasks, but the suspicion often failed to anticipate the magnitude of their shortcomings. As predicted, training the participants on the subjects in question increased their metacognitive competence, and allowed them to better recognize the limitations of their abilities.

Also interestingly, the top performers tended to underestimate their own performance compared to their peers. The researchers found that those participants fell prey to the false-consensus effect, a phenomenon where one assumes that one’s peers are performing at least as well as oneself when given no evidence to the contrary.

The funny thing is, I was reading this article thinking about that Bertrand Russell quote, then the author uses it soon after this excerpt.  Delightful.
 

So this guy asked some fairly rudimentary questions regarding atheism and morality, and I thought I would share my thoughts with him.  Following is my response to him.
 

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Hello, LoneStar1776.
 
Let me start by saying that I have intentionally refrained from reading or watching any of the responses to your video, as I want my response to come straight from me minus any outside sources I may have read in formulating it. As a result, I imagine I will repeat many things you have already heard. I may even say nothing you have not previously heard.  FYI, I apologize, but this is going to be very long.

Thank you for defining what mean by "atheist," though your definition is more consistent with naturalism than atheism. I think it undermines "love" to call it "simply a chemical reaction in your brain," because even though naturalists may actually accept that statement, this does not mean we necessarily do not value love as something desirable and admirable. Still, I will not argue semantics too much as your definition mostly applies to me, though I do believe in moral accountability.

I cannot say I have ever heard an atheist say s/he gets his/her morality from "man's law" (which is not to say no one ever has), though I have heard atheists say that morals are derived from society, which is not exactly the same thing. This profession is simply one of practical observation, as we can easily observe a large number of behaviors which are heavily influenced by society.  One's likelihood of adhering to certain moral frameworks and avoiding certain social taboos is heavily indicated by their culture.

All this said, where I ultimately get my personal morality from is me, and I am unsure how I could possibly get it from anywhere else. Even if I were a Christian, and I once was (no true Scotsman argument notwithstanding), I would still be employing my own sense of morality in judging "Christian" morality, as I obviously would not adhere to a religion I find immoral by my own standard. I identify with the philosophies of humanism and, to a lesser degree, utilitarianism, so I tend to frame morality from within those perspectives. I do not believe morality is defined by law, though some laws might be moral. I even believe some laws are intrinsically immoral, and I take no [effort to] defend those laws, though I may obey them due to potential punishment.

That brings me to accountability. I am accountable to the law and society whether I want to be or not, but more importantly, I am accountable to myself. I value the moral judgments I have made, or else I would not have made them, and I imagine you and I could sit down, run through our moral judgments together, and find we would agree far more than disagree.

As a final note on morality, I do not find the potential existence of an afterlife particularly compelling. I do not believe in an afterlife, meaning this is the only shot I get to do something useful and meaningful with myself. If I mess this life up, that is it. This realization provides me a sense of purpose and urgency.

It is interesting that you bring up Europe, as that continent may be the most detrimental example to your premise that atheism is destructive to society. You speculate that atheists may be more likely to commit crimes because you think we lack a valid moral compass, but in order to test this claim, we need to look at population statistics. Many studies have found an inverse correlation between a country's religiosity and crime rates. This correlation should not be interpreted to mean that irreligiosity reduces crime rates, as determining a causal relationship can be tricky, but it does offer evidence against your premise since the more atheistic states do not show more signs of societal unhealth than more religious states.  In fact, Europe is far more secular than the United States, and enjoys (in the post-industrialized countries, anyway) lower rates of divorce, STDs, and teen pregnancy and equal or better life expectancies and infant mortality rates.

As a personal anecdote, on our way out of a restaurant one day, my wife and I found several hundred dollars in twenties scattered about in the parking lot. We gathered the money up, went back inside the busy restaurant, and found the couple to whom the money belonged, asking for no reward. We easily could have taken the money as no one saw us gather it up, but we took time out of our day to help someone we never met. We did so with no expectation that we were being smiled upon by a deity, though the charitable act was personally rewarding, much like when I give blood. Again, I am accountable to myself, and I take that accountability very seriously.

I do not think your question regarding atheist hospitals is fair. We live in the United States where Christianity is the norm. Christians congregate in large, organized groups, and as a result can be financial powerhouses. Self-identified atheists in the US account for only about 1 to 6 percent (the number is probably about 4 percent) of the total population, and we do not congregate in groups the same way Christians do. I am one student on a college campus of over twenty thousand. I am a member of the only atheist group on that campus, which typically includes about a dozen or fewer attendees per meeting out of approximately thirty total members. I counted 21 explicitly Christian groups, 22 if you count the Latter Day Saints group, and I am sure some of the fraternities and sororities I did not consider are also Christian based. Each of these groups I am aware of is larger and better financed than our small atheist group, and the focus of my institution is not even liberal arts but engineering and science.

Besides, many of these Christian hospitals were small operations until they were absorbed by or merged with public hospitals thus becoming secular. I cannot actually point to a hospital and say "that was built by an atheist" though I would assume they exist, especially in the overseas countries where atheism is more widespread.

Now, of course, atheist and secular charitable foundations do exist, but it is important to remember that very few charitable foundations are going to identify themselves as "atheist" foundations. Firstly, such a thing is highly exclusionary. Were I to start a foundation aimed at feeding the homeless, I would not call it the "Atheistic Food for the Needy Foundation" because atheism is not informing my desire to help people. Were I to start such a foundation, I would leave it as open as possible, as I would not care who contributed or volunteered to the cause. Besides, slapping the word "atheist" on any foundation in the U.S. is a quick way to get yourself ostracized by most people who would much rather support openly Christian groups performing the same task.

You do not want to leave your child with an atheist? Does this not strike you as a tad xenophobic? If you have every reason to believe the person is trustworthy, how are they any more reliable than the average person who professes Christianity, especially in light of the crime statistics I mentioned earlier?

Most atheists certainly will not do "anything they can to get ahead in life." At my workplace, I am one of two self-identified atheists, and we both have reputations as straight-shooters, which is more than I can say for a number of the professed Christians with whom I work.

I realize that you are speaking in generalities, and I appreciate that you clarify this point, but I have to ask, does your admitted failure to understand us justify an inherent distrust of us in general? Do you likewise distrust people who are not aligned with you politically? If so, why and how do you justify it? If not, what is the difference considering you may think the oppositely aligned have a different moral framework than you?

I apologize for failing to list sources, as YouTube commenting is not friendly to that, but all the information I provided can be easily acquired with a few Google searches.

As a final note, I would like to invoke a modernized version of Euthyphro's dilemma.  Does God command good because it is good, or is it good because God commands it?

Thanks.

According to this quiz, I am a center-left social liberatarian.  That is a mouthful.

My Political Views
I am a center-left social libertarian
Left: 2.93, Libertarian: 6.65

Political Spectrum Quiz

Check it out if you haven't already.  Post your results.

Another quiz gave me a similar result, saying I would likely fit in with Democrats.  What an odd personal paradigm shift this is in the course of a few years.

Conservative/Progressive score: 11
Capitalist Purist/Social Capitalist score: 6
Libertarian/Authoritarian score: 2
Pacifist/Militarist score: 4

Disclaimer:  These are just quizzes.  Have fun.