After you’ve gotten your chuckles and inspiration from Revere’s Freethinker Sunday Sermonette, check out Russell Blackford’s most recent post on moral scepticism. A sample:

The plausible meta-ethical positions seem to be a group of sophisticated moral relativist theories — the sort of position I associate with Gilbert Harman, David Wong, Neil Levy, Max Hocutt, and others — and the error theories (moral scepticism) of people like JL Mackie, Richard Garner, Richard Joyce, and Joshua Greene. There are various other positions in the same ballpark, such as the sophisticated non-cognitivism of Simon Blackburn. I am sometimes irritated when other philosophers assume that the only theory in this sort of ballpark is the popular but vulgar kind of moral relativism that we are all taught to avoid in first-year ethics courses.

Rebecca Watson, Skepchick extraordinaire, has won the Public Radio Talent Quest contest. She joins Al Letson and Glynn Washington in the winners’ circle; each of them will receive ten thousand dollars and the chance to produce pilot episodes for new national public radio programs.

Yes, Rebecca is the one who declined to go out for a milkshake with me because my ESP remote-viewing powers were off by two tentacles. Scandalous, really, but I bear no ill will. Instead, I offer my most heartfelt congratulations! Best of luck to all three, and here’s hoping we’ll get some quality radio.

Just got back from the xkcd meetup. For those who hadn’t heard, Randall Munroe stuck a date, time and pair of coordinates into a comic strip, which turned out to be this afternoon at a park near Davis Square. Naturally, I had to go, at least to see who else would show up.

Imagine a county fair, infested with red spiders, a Wikipedian protester, people wearing T-shirts from several generations of Internet memes, at least one toy velociraptor, a tape measure extension contest and a jungle gym densely packed with people who unanimously declare that science works, bitches.

I forgot my camera.

I did meet Joshua, though, and he might have some pictures uploaded soon.

The New Humanist Blog has announced that it plans to poll its readers on topics of interest and/or importance. First up is — not much surprise here — the question, “Are Dawkins and Hitchens good for humanism?”

Now, I have to say that I’m never entirely sure what people mean by humanism, anymore. Back in the early 1990s, I thought it was the idea that human beings are responsible for the problems which afflict our species, and that human beings are going to have to solve them. (This line comes straight out of Isaac Asimov’s memoir.) Today, it sometimes sounds like a label people apply to themselves to distance their position, at least in their own eyes, from the Uppity Atheists. It can also be an umbrella term to include religious folk who like Asimov’s line about human responsibility (though they might be a little put off by the remarks in the same memoir about the history of religion being “the history of human misery and black times”).

I’m also curious why New Humanist has chosen to focus on Dawkins and Hitchens. Is it a straight-up question of book sales? (PZ, where’s your book? When all the Uppity Atheists meet in the South Pacific at the antipodal point of Nicaea, you’re going to get left out of the Godless Orthodoxy!)

Regrettably, other obligations prevented me from attending Congressman Pete Stark’s speech at Harvard last night. Fortunately, however, Joshua did, and he’s written a report for the rest of us.

Recommended reading.

He also links to the TV Tropes Wiki, which looks like a fantastic time-sink for a Friday afternoon. They’ve got extensive documentation on anime, for starters. The entry for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex was clearly written by fans. “The Major’s clothes are too hot for espionage,” it says, and I agree. I might be indirectly responsible for part of the entry, too, since I recall putting an awful lot of work into the Wikipedia articles on “cyberpunk” and “postcyberpunk” back in 2005.

Apparently, I win the Internet.

Uh-oh — does that mean I’m now responsible for keeping the tubes flowing?