I've put up a new post on Dangerous Intersection, "The traditional media is dying".

This is an open thread. Comments and discussion are welcome.

For your consideration:

• The 91st Carnival of the Godless at State of Protest

• The 64th Carnival of the Liberals at Sir Robin Rides Away

• The 69th Philosophers' Carnival at Possibly Philosophy

• The 86th Skeptics' Circle at The Skepbitch

• And, last but certainly not least, the 19th Humanist Symposium at Letters from a Broad!

I've posted a new essay over on Dangerous Intersection, a review of Glenn Greenwald's latest book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.

This is an open thread. Comments and discussion are welcome.

This is an open thread to address the comment below left by a Christian visitor. Replies are welcome; as always, let's have a civil discussion.

Today's Poetry Sunday features a few selections from the American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Wilcox was born in 1850 in Wisconsin and soon acquired renown as a poet, becoming well-known for her writing by the time she graduated high school. Her poems were resolutely plain and optimistic, and though her simple, sometimes singsong verse was often scorned by critics, during her lifetime she was immensely popular among the public. Among the best-known quotes from her poetry are "Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes" and the well-known line, "Laugh and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone" (from "Solitude"). Some of her many published works include Drops of Water (1872 - written in support of the temperance movement), Poems of Passion (1883), Poems of Pleasure (1888), and Poems of Sentiment (1906).

Though no friend of religious orthodoxy, Wilcox was not an atheist - she flirted with spiritualism, Theosophy, New Thought, and other New Age-like beliefs throughout her life, and grew distressingly attached to them after the death of her husband Robert, whom she repeatedly tried to contact from beyond the grave. Nevertheless, I think she deserves to be considered an honorary freethinker on the strength of poems such as "The World's Need", reprinted below.

The World's Need

So many gods, so many creeds;
So many paths that wind and wind,
While just the art of being kind
Is all the sad world needs.

Protest

To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised
Against injustice, ignorance, and lust,
The inquisition yet would serve the law,
And guillotines decide our least disputes.
The few who dare, must speak and speak again
To right the wrongs of many. Speech, thank God,
No vested power in this great day and land
Can gag or throttle. Press and voice may cry
Loud disapproval of existing ills;
May criticise oppression and condemn
The lawlessness of wealth-protecting laws
That let the children and childbearers toil
To purchase ease for idle millionaires.

Therefore I do protest against the boast
Of independence in this mighty land.
Call no chain strong, which holds one rusted link.
Call no land free, that holds one fettered slave.
Until the manacled slim wrists of babes
Are loosed to toss in childish sport and glee,
Until the mother bears no burden, save
The precious one beneath her heart, until
God's soil is rescued from the clutch of greed
And given back to labor, let no man
Call this the land of freedom.

From "Here and Now"

Stand not aloof nor apart,
Plunge in the thick of the fight.
There in the street and the mart,
That is the place to do right.
Not in some cloister or cave,
Not in some kingdom above,
Here, on this side of the grave,
Here, should we labor and love.

From "Settle the Question Right"

However the battle is ended,
Though proudly the victor comes,
With flaunting flags and neighing nags
And echoing roll of drums;
Still truth proclaims this motto
In letters of living light,
No question is ever settled
Until it is settled right.

...Let those who have failed take courage,
Though the enemy seem to have won;
If he be in the wrong, though his ranks are strong,
The battle is not yet done.
For sure as the morning follows
The darkest hour of night,
No question is ever settled
Until it is settled right.

Other posts in this series:

• Poetry Sunday

If you're seeing this post, then you've made it back! This is Daylight Atheism at its new, and hopefully much faster, host. Thanks for your patience. Regular updates will resume shortly.

I do have a request to make of my readers. Until the move, I hadn't upgraded WordPress since I first set up Daylight Atheism in 2006. I figured, since the move was happening anyway, it was about time I got around to doing that long-overdue software update.

As it turns out, the designers had introduced just enough interesting database incompatibilities in the intervening two years to make that job interesting. Nevertheless, after much grumbling and occasional cursing, I think I've gotten it all sorted out. (No thanks to God, but many thanks to the designers of Perl.) Posts, comments, and all the other data should be here, and commenting and other site functions should be working properly. But to be sure, I'd like to ask you, readers, to be my beta testers. If you have the inclination, please explore the site and kick the tires - check out some old posts, the archives, the search function, and make sure everything is present and working as you expect. If you find anything that's missing, broken, or odd, please drop me an e-mail and let me know. Thanks!

Given the patently unsatisfactory response of my hosting company to the recent slowness issue, I've begun preparations for moving Daylight Atheism to a new host. The DNS transfer will begin soon, and while it's in progress, my domain name may not function for a day or two. If this happens, don't fret. The site will be back up (and hopefully much faster), probably by the end of the week. I'll post updates in this thread for as long as the domain name still works.

Survey time: Has the slowness problem of the past two weeks gone away or are you still experiencing it?

After some back-and-forth, my hosting company claims to have fixed the problem, and it does seem substantially better on my end. Have you all noticed the same?

Has anyone else noticed that this site seems to have gotten dramatically slower in the past week or two?

Lately, it's been taking me minutes to load even the simplest administration pages. When I load the front page or other public parts of the site, it seems somewhat better, but still slower than it used to be. This has happened to me logging in from multiple locations, and I haven't noticed a comparable slowdown in any other website I visit.

If you've experienced this also, please leave a comment and let me know. I'm going to open a support ticket with my host.

I was asked to pass along the following announcement:

On April 4, 2008 at 7:00 pm CT (GMT - April 5, 2008 at 12:00 am), Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University will give a talk entitled God, Darwin, and Design: Lessons from the Dover Monkey Trial. Miller was a lead witness in the Pennsylvania "intelligent design" case that began in September 2005, and which has been front-page news since it started.

We would like to invite members of your organization and/or visitors of your website to view our Live Webcast of the lecture, April 4, 2008 at 7:00 pm CT (GMT - April 5, 2008 at 12:00 am). If possible, posting a link to this event on your website or forwarding the information to your members who may be interested in this lecture is greatly appreciated. Our webcasts are very high quality, and viewers can submit questions to the speaker through our website and the speaker answers the online questions in real time. The webcasting software we use requires viewers to download a small plugin, but it is very simple and quick to install.

A link to the details of the lecture and the webcast could be found at:
http://www.esi.utexas.edu/outreach/ols/lectures/Miller

Could be worth checking into.