Chariots of Iron

I want to start by saying a couple things about the blogging here. I started some months ago putting up regular posts, and then inexplicably stopped. This was due to some internal wrangling between Joe, Lamar and myself as to what this website was going to be, how it related to what’s going on at atheiskeptihumanist.com and atheistnews.org. I think these have all been worked out and I’ll be posting here again.

Now, on to the show.

As many of our listeners are aware (and will definitely be aware of after the next show) I spent last weekend at the AAI Convention in Burbank California.  The folks at AAI were nice enough to provide both myself and Joe with press passes for the event, and I’m hoping we make good use of that privilege in the coming weeks. At this point I have heaps of audio to sift through, clean up and edit for use in upcoming shows where we’ll cover who the speakers were, what they talked about and what we think about it. Currently Lamar (who was unable to attend) has all the raw audio so he can get himself up to speed. I also took the time to talk to many of the notable attendees about appearing on upcoming shows and was generally met with a positive response.

The convention was a lot of fun and it was announced that the next years convention would be in Montreal. let me say, if you can go, DO! It was well worth the time, money (I, unlike Joe, covered my own expenses, thanks to the Atheist News listeners for making sure I had some company)  and exhaustion. The people I met there were intelligent, friendly and most possessed great senses of humor. I’m not going to list out a heap of thank-yous and the like as I’m almost sure to overlook someone, but I did want to give a special thanks to three folks:

• to Noelle Dildine, head of the AAI Ambassador Corps and founder of the SECULAR Center charity who acted as a wonderful hostess to myself and Joe during our time at the convention.
• to Viktor Nagornyy, AAI convention director, for putting on such an event and being an overall class-act.
• and of course to Richard Haynes, for making sure Joe and I got to meet with just about every speaker on the list, and being a source of both the fun and the funny throughout the entire convention.

That Said, on to the speakers. I spent most of my time listening to speakers at the convention, and nearly every one of them was both interesting and informative.  My favorites were many and disappointments few, If i had to pick a top three they’d be Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers and Russell Blackford, all of which spent time lampooning the anti-science and anti-intellectual/educational stance of the fundamentalists.  Of course the “big-names” all put on wonderful presentations (Dawkins, Dennett, etc), although I must express a small amount of dissapointmetn with Dawkin’s presenation near the end of the convention which was merely a overview of  the final chapeter of his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth.

Much has been written already of the controversy over the AAI Convention/RDF presenting and Award to Bill Maher, however I think this was handled well, and Maher seems to have stopped retreating form the word “atheist” when, during the streaming presentation f the taping of Real Time, Maher introduced Richard Dawkins as “my fellow atheist”. I wonder if Dawkins had a little chat with Bill before the show?

I’ll be sure to have more thoughts as my brain continues to digest all the information, I’m currently reading one of the many books I picked up at the convention, Donald Prothero’s Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. I’m not too far into it, he spends the first part of the book giving a history of creationism, it’s  a great overview of the origins of the creationist movement, and the writing is concise and entertaining, I’ll have more to say about this book as I delve further into it. My daughter is big on dinosaurs right now as I want to be armed with as many facts to answer her queries as i can be.