Ask An Atheist

I should note that there are secret messages in our ghost hunting episode.   Or at least that’s true according to the inaugural episode of Backmask an Atheist!

Thanks to friend of the show Taylor Harris!

Sam interviews Becky and Lee in English about our episode “El Ateísmo en el Mundo Hispanohablante” and their outlooks on atheism.   This post highlights this interview for folks who can’t (or possibly won’t) follow the Spanish-language episode nine.

As a reminder, we will be subtitling episode nine at some point in the future.

The data nerds at OK Cupid (a popular, non-Christian dating web site) have harvested data from over half a million of their users and compiled some illuminating statistics. They aggregated data from personal essays written by the users (“Get to Know You” blurbs, I would assume) and matched common keywords to the demographic information volunteered by those users. It’s actually a good read and full of surprising (some stereotypical, some obvious) infoporn mostly about traits common between group of users of the same self-described ethnicity.

The real fun is when they start to correlate reading/writing level by running these essays through the Coleman-Liau Index, a readability test designed to measure the grade level of the author. Near the bottom of the article, they cross-reference the score for this index next to the stated religious preference of the users. Can you guess what it shows?!

Let’s not jump to conclusions here, correlation is not causation, but is it surprising?

Due to some kinks the crew is working out, we won’t likely have the video available for yesterday’s show until tonight.
Until then, I’ll post the video of my lecture “Epistemology: A Critical Approach” (the same topic I tried to do on the show, but we got caught up with answering calls) that I delivered to the Seattle Atheists membership meeting in March: