In connection with the New Humanism conference, I attended the Secular Student Alliance training on promoting your blog or podcast. Duncan Crary, now with a beard, and Jes Constantine were there.
Duncan, having been a reporter, is very savy about reporter’s tricks, including feigning sympathy, and playing dumb to get a source to talk more.
Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, was there too. He was friendly indeed when I spoke to him afterward, and recommended Planet Atheism as an aggregator of the latest posts at atheist websites. I also chatted with Becky Robinson, who has found in moving from Pittsburgh to Texas she has moved from a place where people are private about their religion to a place where people are all too pushy about it.
I consider myself agnostic rather than atheist, but I’m certainly in favor of atheist rights.
My agnosticism is because contemporary science has solved some key problems, like the nature of consciousness, and why the universe and the physical laws that govern it exist in the first place. But I’m clear that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic scriptures contain vast amounts of falsehoods, and do not provide a reliable guide to life.
I see not-knowing as open-minded and modest, in the spirit of the Don’t Know Mind of Zen Master Seung Sahn.