What's New Archive ● 2008 ● January
What's New on the Secular Web?
See also: Events & The News Wire
January 25, 2008
Added The Top 10 Myths about Evolution (2006) by Charles Sullivan and Cameron Smith to the Secular Web Bookstore.
Though the United States is the world leader in science and technology, many of its citizens display a shocking ignorance regarding basic scientific facts. In this concise, accessible, "myth-buster's handbook," educators Cameron M. Smith and Charles Sullivan clearly dispel the ten most common myths about evolution, which continue to mislead average Americans.
January 21, 2008
Changed Was Christianity Highly Vulnerable to Inspection and Disproof?, chapter 7 of Was Christianity Too Improbable to be False? (2006), by Richard Carrier.
Corrected mathematical calculations in footnote 31 on life expectancies, using a fixed baseline age of 15 instead of switching confusingly between starting ages of zero, ten, and twenty; simplified arithmetic by using a base year of 35 instead of 36; and corrected mistaken estimates of probability accordingly.
January 19, 2008
Added A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent Is Vital to Islam and America (2007) by Anouar Majid to the Secular Web Bookstore.
Confronting the fundamentalism that afflicts both Islam and the United States through traditions of dissent, A Call to Heresy discovers unexpected common ground in one of the most inflammatory issues of the twenty-first century: the deepening conflict between the Islamic world and the United States. The solution, Majid concludes, is a long-overdue revival of dissent.
January 12, 2008
Added The Ten Commandments (Really!) (2008) by Rich LaPuma to the Secular Web Kiosk.
"The Ten Commandments (Really!)" is a casual, sometimes sarcastically humorous, but honest, review of the story of the Ten Commandments in the book of Exodus. Do you think that you know the Ten Commandments? The author doubts that you do.
January 5, 2008
Added Losing My Religion (2008) by J. McLane to the Secular Web Kiosk.
The author explains to a younger friend from her old church how and why she went from fundamentalism to disbelief. It is the story of her deconversion.
January 1, 2008
Featured Article: Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe (2001) by Matt Young
Can you apply a skeptical empiricism to religious beliefs? The author answers, "yes"--and religion comes up short. In place of theism, Young offers what Einstein called "a cosmic religious feeling," in this excerpt adapted from his book No Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe.
Book-of-the-Month: Science and Nonbelief (2007) Taner Edis
What place does evolution hold in the arguments of nonbelievers? What does modern physics tell us about the place of humanity in the natural world? How do modern neurosciences challenge traditional beliefs about mind and matter? What can scientific research about religion tell us about the nature of belief? How do skeptics react to claims at the fringes of science, such as UFOs and psychics? Science and Nonbelief provides a nontechnical introduction to the leading questions that concern science and religion today.