Check out Dawkins Web Site for video clips from personal appearances and other goodies.

An easy, but interesting book I recently read is Is God good, bad, or irrelevant? by Preston Jones (Intervarsity Press). It’s an e-mail exchange between a Christian college professor and Greg Graffin the lead singer of the punk bad Bad Religion who just so happens to have a PhD in evolution from Cornell.

Consider putting a list together of your favorite books and send them to info@freethoughtassociation.org to get them posted as recommended reading in our Book Store.

Betsy

I am not sure who to contact about this, could anybody point me the right direction?

I would also be interested in anybody commenting on this idea. We were thinking that we might try to do a fund raiser for Make A Wish or something similar.

http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2008/04/on_historical_jesus_video_oust.html#more

My background is I was raised Catholic and really started doubting religion when I started college in philosophy courses.  I started reading Free Inquiry online a couple of years ago and most of it is logical to me.

Personally, I’m getting married in July to a wonderful woman who is a nurse.  I’m back in school (again) working on my nursing degree.  I have a BS in History from CMU and a BS in Healthcare Administration from Southern Illinois University.  I was in the Navy for five years as a corpsman (medic) and was stationed in Italy and Memphis, TN during my service.  I moved to west MI almost six years ago after getting discharged (thankfully), before all this Iraq business started.

I often let copyediting slide in forum posts even though I do quite a bit of it in my day job.
Other than that, here’s the cut and paste from my profile here…

Seven years as a newspaper technology consultant - over 90 newsrooms in 47 states.
Five years running and writing for the science fiction news site http://www.MarsDust.com
On-and-off stints as a graphic designer and illustrator
Currently a Pagination Crew Chief at the Ann Arbor News, running the Future Michigan Blog and writing a science fiction / bioethics thriller about Detroit called Combustion City Folklore. I also fancy myself an amateur futurist. I sometimes speak on science fiction convention panels about science fiction fantasies emerging in real-world headlines. Below is a link to a panel I was on with Canadian novelist and futurist Karl Schroeder, game designer Ron Hale-Evans and the Foresight Institute’s Christine Peterson. We talk a lot about nanotechnology, human biological modification and the ethics of it all.

http://www.archive.org/details/PosthumanALousyMarketingConcept

I supposed I’ve been a skeptical freethinker my whole life. Strangely enough, I found skepticism and freethought through Oprah.

I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Oprah and I came to a link through the James Randi Educational Foundation, where I found The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast.  I suppose this was the affirmation I needed. I found my label!

Having spent the last couple years living in Denver and Seattle, I’m finally back in West Michigan. I’ll be returning to school soon for biology. I’d like to take that and study some field of paleobiology.

I’m excited to see what the CFI has to offer. This is the first group I’ll be taking part in with real people. Until now it’s been mostly cyberworld stuff.

Peace, Love & Reason,

Derick

I grew up in a weak general Christian household, we’d go to church sometimes, and it was always understood that the Bible and the spin of each religion was just what groups of people today think could have happened in the past, mostly used as allegory, to teach you right from wrong and more general life lessons.

As I passed through middle school, I was always pushing “god” back - as I learned more biology, astrophysics, and history, I realized that any god would have to be only a Creator with little action in shaping the fates of today. 

I actively engaged the Evolution/creation debate, with my best friend and father being strict Creationists.  While my friend, who was taking the same biology classes I was, had “faith” that God made the environment that produced the Grand Canyon, layering up and carving down, in 3000 years, I decided that if there were a god as creator, then ‘he’ could use natural processes to achieve today from setting up whatever initial energy/mass distribution there was “at the beginning.”

Now, while I accept that I don’t know the answer, I have faith that there are no gods except the ones we create.

Anyway, I’m a de facto atheist, and I like TOTALLY dig technology, philosophy, science, and.....oh hell the list is too long!

Hope things pick up around here. I’ll be dragging in as many friends as I can.