The 54th Carnival of the Godless is up on Hellbound Alleee. This fortnight’s edition’s theme is, believe it or not, Christmas shopping. The carnival’s highlight is vjack’s What’s a Little Atheist-Bashing Among Friends?, which explains,
How would I respond if I was in a group of co-workers who started making racist comments? Even though I am every bit as white as they are, I am quite certain that I would respond with outrage, attempt to correct the misconceptions, and ask them not to make such comments in my presence. Why the difference? Why am I more tolerant of the anti-atheist comments, especially considering that I am an atheist? I suspect my inaction here (I really don’t consider it tolerance) is due to the far greater frequency and social acceptability of such comments. But does this really make sense?
Timothy Shortell writes about illusions created by the entire self-help industry. He calls what he critiques “authenticity,” but the term is somewhat misleading; I think it’s a lot more instructive to see his post as a general critique of campaigns aimed at convincing people that they can only achieve true self actualization by consuming product X, where X can be a Ford Explorer, the Atkins diet, Christianity, Scientology, or speaking Esperanto.
Gordo comments about the hipness article and blog posts,
The New York Times got a lot of people buzzing with this story, about the the exodus of young, educated hipsters from New York to places like Stumptown (if you were hip, you’d know where that is). A lot of New York bloggers started saying some nonsense about New York being hip. Well, numbers don’t lie, guys.
Now that I think about it, Steve, Jen, Jill, and I all live in New York. On the other hand, the person who got bashed the most for being a snob is Amanda, a thoroughly un-snobby Austinite.
Shelley brings the news that cancer is apparently caused by faulty stem cells.
[Link] Current therapies treat all cancer cells the same. They’re aimed at shrinking tumours on the basis that the various cells within them all have similar powers to spawn new cancers and spread destruction.
But mounting evidence suggests that cancer’s real culprits — the roots of perhaps every tumour — are actually a small subset of bad seeds known best to the world as stem cells.
Abstract Nonsense 
Christianity isn’t a product?
What do you mean?
Learn more about esperanto: http://www.esperanto.net
No thanks.
Alon–
The link to the anti-esperanto site is funny, but I think you ought to break your spammer’s links. They don’t stick those links on your blog to build traffic, they stick them here to build their google rankings. They’re quite happy to have you rebut them and discourage your readers from buying their products, as long as you leave their links intact.
If it becomes a regular problem, I’ll do that. So far I don’t mind that spammers are using my blog to boost their Google ranking, considering that my blog’s pagerank is 0 out of 10.
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