"Maybe" this is an irony. Sanctimonious and expensive "organic" (aren't the others made of carbon?) products getting caught red handed using the devil's chemical products for its holy products, putting it in the same language that a lot of people uses to describe modern chemistry (which has allowed us to reach never seen before life expectancy).

James Ashenhurst's comment should be displayed on the front page, anyway.

Sure, atheism is no vaccine for dogma. But to go from there and claim that atheism is a religion or that atheists are wrong for criticizing factual claims of religious people is plain dumb. People can believe what they want, but that does not mean they are entitled to their favorite facts. Reality is the way it is, not the way we want it to be.

Well, to me, regarding people as the center of my ethical universe, those horrors are indeed evil and must be stopped. To me evil does not needs to be sentient. But I agree that that is arguable.

It became a religion?
Sure it has not become anything even near a religion.It is simply the belief that God does not exist. Inverting the question, how can anybody be CERTAIN that Odin, Bhaal, Osiris, Ganesh and Quetzalcoatl do NOT exist? Should we do Pascal wages about each of those? Shut them down to 365 gods, so we worship one every day? We assume that they do not exist, all of us in the case of gods of dead religions. Are all of us with intellectual deficients because we claim to know that Ishtar does not exists?

Of course, some kind of creator might be possible, but that thing or person or force would not certainly be the Judeo-Christian YWHW.

Please stop making straw man arguments. Could you really prove that we the non believers in gods are anthropomorphizing the universe just for assuming that no god created by men exists?

A part of the key definition of religion is the belief in a god. Atheism might (even if I strongly would disagree with that) a dogma, a philosophy, an ideology. But, religion? Is like claiming a vegetarian meal has meat because the plant suffered and you are actually eating fruits of suffering, metaphorical meat. WTF?

OK, soryy about that. My point is that religion is not the root of evil, but certainly the trunk of that tree has some religion on it.

I do not buy that, Takuan. Ebola is caused by a virus, not by religion. Religion could/can help to its spread but is not the source of it. Most of us atheists do not believe such thing as religion being the source of ALL evil.

Being atheist means you have no dogma, you can change your mind if evidence is on the part of your contrary. Claiming one thousand times that atheism is a religion won't make it one. Same for secular humanism.

I am atheist and a lot of people using straw man arguments here.

Some fact checking: Could you point an exact quote of the atheists claiming that religion is the root of all evil? Because as far as I know no one would say that Ebola or polio are caused by Christianity or Islam.

I am Venezuelan.
I am an Anarchist (Anarchotranshumanist, in fact).
I despise the Bush administration and find it incredibly stupid, incompetent, liar and yes, evil. I cannot understand American policies of killing people with taxpayer's money but refusing to cure taxpayers and sentence poor people to die if they ever get a nasty disease.
I have been in the US , I try to keep informed, so my opinions are not based on prejudice.

And I agree with the fact that Chavez is a mad tyrant.

"Chavez is a hero to stand up to the tyranny of the US. Chavez won't be bullied into becoming a US puppet state like Colombia. Why can't the US get out of everybody's business and clean up its own back yard?"

Could we stop talking about puppets? When talking about Colombia, Chavez supporters always claim that it is a puppet state, willfully ignoring that Colombia's president has even higher popularity degree than Chavez. According to the Wikipedia: "Uribe obtained 62.20% of the votes, thus surpassing the 50% needed to avoid a runoff against the second place candidate."
And Chávez, again, according to the Wikipedia, got 62.87%. Both presidents were elected with very high rates, but one is a puppet and the other is a liberator? LOL. Uribe is not the nicest guy in town and his party has been involved in ugly issues. But probably very few people will be clean in COlombian politics and those who were involved in the nasty issues ARE IN JAIL or at least attended to a trial. Could you, Chavez supporters, tell me ONE, JUST ONE, person from Chavez parties currently in jail due to corruption or crime? Here, you walk around the streets in Caracas and you see guys and girls, many of them very young, driving fucking humvees, with gold in every single finger, gold necklages and red shirts with the face of Che Guevara. Now, that is not what I would call socialism.

We need better education, but during Chavez government the standards came down in an awful way. I attended to a public elementary school and I became literate enough to go to (free) college (something we have had since ever, not a thing Chavez brought, despite some claims). Several years later, I looked at the tests that my brother was taking in 8th grade, and it had the level of my 4th grade tests. We need to invest more in education, not in adoctrination, we need to change the college system, with everybody becoming a lawyer and nobody specializing in technical issues. But all we do is buying more and more weapons while claiming we want peace. It almost makes me cry, when I think about all the opportunities we are losing these amazing days. India is showing the way in may aspects, improving itself, educating its people, making innovation. We are here looking at our navel, blaming other people for our problems and scared of a real threat made a thousand times more by our fear mongers.

Chavez is Castro's puppet.
And I cannot accept some bastard who hugs and smile with thugs like Mugabe, Ahmahdineyad, Saddam Hussein, Yahya Jammeh or Fidel and who express mourn for a bastard from such a nasty organization as the FARC.

There must be some kind of licensing, otherwise somebody will try to take it, patent it and sue your ass.

There is a PLOS-like journal about neglected diseases caused by trypanosomatids, this is, Sleeping disease, Chagas disease and Leishmaniasis:
http://www.kinetoplastids.com/

To me, the elevators in the Getty Museum seem like something designed by Apple.

I really do not like the article. It is too simplistic, full with fear mongering and its science is just not right. We are not that separated from other beings, there is horizontal gene transfer (a rare event, but it does happen) between species, it is very well documented. Besides there are relations between animals and bacteria not as shocking as the caterpillar-fungus relationship. We have more bacterial cells inside us than mammalian cells (being bacteria so tiny, there many of them in very little space).

Concerning the comment about "Soylent rice", do insulin-dependent diabetics get shots of "soylentsulin"? Are they cannibals or just junkies of human proteins? Should they feel revolted because they need human proteins from non human sources to live?

As a citizen from an underdeveloped country I think that the problem is that it is very difficult to change the state of things concerning agricultural subsidies, tariffs and other stuff. However, given that we have the tools for growing our own food, improving our yields and adapting the crops to our particular environmental conditions, we could improve our situations, as has happened before, in Mexico with new and better maize crops and in India and Pakistan with better wheat. Population has increased a lot since the 60's yet the world wide famines feared by many didn't happen.

The big problem here is not just the lack of innovation from the first world, but the kind of attitude that bases policy making on shock factor, that sends the message that innovation is dangerous and science not necessary for developing and better life standards. This is dangerous for us. You in the developed world can afford to say "this is enough", we just cannot.

I agree that both sides of the debate should be listened, so I would like to see here in Boing Boing the case of the farmers from Gujarat, who, took cotton seeds Monsanto, made hybrid crops that outperformed them and ignored bans from the government and lawsuits from Monsanto and now have much better yields than with their old seeds:
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/02/08/gujarat/index.html

After all, this story has all the elements that are typical of Boing Boing: Copyfighting, DIY, funny aesthetic (look this seed bag, as they can not advertise directly that they have the BT gene, they do a great working depicting indirectly the fact that it is a hybrid (F1 in Mendelian genetics) http://www.indiatogether.org/opinions/psainath/images/2005/psa-seeds.jpg)

I really think that this is a case where people is empowered by technology and a taste of the times to come.

If natural medicine is so good and medicine does not cure and yadda yadda, why the life expectancy is so high in countries with advanced technology and good healthcare?

Concerning 5 years old, then everybody is a possible terrorist, then nobody should fly. Reductio ad absurdum works both ways.

Violet... Beauregard?

Violet... Beauregard?

I am very happy for this, I wish I could buy one and contribute to this effort.
This is an invaluable opportunity for children all around the world. When I think about what the Internet and computers have done for me, I just have can be grateful for the price drop of the machines and regretful for losing so much time until I was able to afford one.

This will improve the quality of life of many people around the world in the medium term and will give a voice to many that were silent. I bet that in five years the Blogosphere will be very different and much more diverse and fun. Sometimes the American-centrism is overwhelming.

If I help a person in the street needing help and I help that person I am behaving according to Christian morality, but I am not a Christian. Same thing about North Korea. And it would be tough to support the relation of the US for Saudi Arabia using the same old rhetoric about freedom and democracy instead of cynicism if you are not a patriot.

As I said, my attitude to patriotism has been with me since long time ago, so your comment about brainwashing besides being rude, turns to be wrong.

Your claim about problems that only something called country can solve is very shallow and unproved. There a lot of things we have not done in politics. And being non patriotism does not means that one thinks that countries shall not exist. That is a straw man logical fallacy. For some being non patriots is just acknowledging that there are times where "the interest of the nation" should be overcome by the interest of Mankind. The fact that you are a patriot does not means you are against the government of your state or that you do not think that some problems should be solved at state level instead of a federal level.

It is not very clever to think that people from a border region should feel more identified with some strangers thousands of kilometers away than with their neighbors of the town across the border.

Why do I want a country and a culture that I do not share and feel comfortable with? Why should not I be free to choose my country and culture? And talking about bad guys is plain nonsense. The fact that I am not a patriot does not change the fact I am strongly opposed to those who try to take the values of Enlightenment from us, including christian fundamentalists.

And please, keep you army at home, at least most of the time. WWII was great, Bosnia was wonderful,but Vietnam, Iraq and protecting Pol Pot in Thailand because he was the resistance against the Vietnamese puppet government was outrageous.

And of course, there are problems that you can`t solve when the interest of your nation becomes the priority. A lot of problems, Squashy has written some serious arguments about those.

Brainwashed by the media?
Very unlikely, since I do not own a TV set, I never listen to radio and I am not even American neither live in the US. It is pretty near sighted to assume that everybody writing here is American, in fact, we are living in a global age. And that is what I do not like about being a patriot. You say "recognizing a greater good than yourself or your community. It's about recognizing that we have an entire nation of people and trying to think of what's best for us today and 20 years from now.". And I ask: Why should I stop at the level of "nation", why should not I think what is best for Mankind as a whole?

I have been anti patriot/anti nationalist since the last 16 years or so, that makes around two thirds of my life. We have big troubles right now, troubles that are not easy to solve and that need to be addressed from a broad point of view and with joint efforts. Often nations are selfish and attending only their interestings, neglecting other nations.

I pledge no allegiance to no country. Not even the one where I was born. If that makes me a bad cowboy, so be it. I neither like guns.