Festivus, deconversion, and a new blog

An Un-merry Christmas:With inspiration from Festivus in Seinfeld, John Cole is airing his grievances. My favorite:

5.) The Democrats- A full accounting of the gross incompetence of this party would require more bandwidth than I am willing to purchase, but what can be said about a bunch of partisan nitwits so inept that the GOP self-destructs in front of them, and all they can do is triumph the loony views of Cindy Sheehan and advocate for immediate withdrawal from Iraq?

Meanwhile, Michael Reynolds airs grievences at a diferent target:

Ten reasons why I don't like Christmas:

1. I can't stand having schedules imposed on me. I should be merry now? Not later? Not next week? Has to be right now? How about now?...

Read the whole thing; I like his suggestion at the end.

I feel somewhat bad linking to all this negativity, so now go read a list of what we get from the material world. A Christmas sermon I can say, "Amen!" to.

Deconversion, parts II and III:Jenna has posted a part II and a part three to her deconversion story. There's great thoughts in there about science and the destruction of the individual.

Without Gods: That's the title of a new blog by a New York University professor writing a book on the subject. This is particularly fascinating as a scholarly subject because denunciations of atheism ("the fool hath said in his heart, there is no god") pre-date open declarations of atheism, and it would be good to understand what exactly such denunciations were responding to.