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.
I've finished chapter 9 of my book, which is titled "Stardust" and concerns how we should handle death from an atheist viewpoint. As in the past, I'm making this chapter available to regular commenters on this site for editorial review and critique. If you fit that description and would like to review it, please let me know.
We're moving into the home stretch now! I have one more chapter tentatively planned, then an afterword. I'm soon going to begin work on pulling together a draft of the whole book, cleaning up and editing the text and ironing out the footnotes. I'll post updates on my progress as it happens.
This month's Poetry Sunday features two poems by Robinson Jeffers, an American poet of the early twentieth century. Born 1887 in Pennsylvania, Jeffers was the son of a Presbyterian minister who taught his son Latin and Greek. Nevertheless, Jeffers did not follow in his father's footsteps. Rather than theology, he became enthralled at a young age with the natural world, and became an avid outdoorsman and follower of scientific discoveries in biology, astronomy, and other areas.
Jeffers found his voice as a poet in the first decade of the twentieth century when he moved to Carmel, on the California coast. He would live there for the rest of his life with his wife, Una, in a granite home called Tor House which he built himself. Jeffers found in the wildness and isolation of the coast, combined with his scientific background, a potent inspiration for poetry. Most of his poems are about the stark and awe-inspiring glories of nature - the "astonishing beauty of things", as he called it. Jeffers also wrote much about human civilization, which he viewed, Thoreau-like, as decadent and corrupted, inferior compared to the clean, fierce freshness of the wilderness. (The fact that he lived through two world wars seems to have given him a certain cynicism about the destructive tendencies of civilization.) His poetry is well-known in the modern environmental movement. His published works include Californians (1916), The Women at Point Sur (1927), Be Angry at the Sun (1941) and The Beginning and the End and Other Poems (1963).
Jeffers' religious views were pantheistic. Rather than the anthropomorphic, miracle-working god of Christianity, he believed in a god that exists as the sum total of all natural forces - "the wild God of the world", he wrote in his poem Hurt Hawks. In Roan Stallion, he mused, "Not in a man's shape / He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the Pacific, that laces the suns with planets, / The heart of the atom with electrons". Jeffers' deity was "no God of love", "no anthropoid God making commandments", but rather "the God who does not care and will never cease". Like nature itself, he shows no mercy and grants no afterlife, and is often violent and savage, but nevertheless spins out astonishing and luminous beauty to fill the world. (Read more here and here about Jeffers' pantheist views.)
Their Beauty Has More Meaning
Yesterday morning enormous the moon hung low on the ocean,
Round and yellow-rose in the glow of dawn;
The night-herons flapping home wore dawn on their wings. Today
Black is the ocean, black and sulphur the sky,
And white seas leap. I honestly do not know which day is more beautiful.
I know that tomorrow or next year or in twenty years
I shall not see these things—and it does not matter, it does not hurt;
They will be here. And when the whole human race
Has been like me rubbed out, they will still be here: storms, moon and ocean,
Dawn and the birds. And I say this: their beauty has more meaning
Than the whole human race and the race of birds.
Continent's End
At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite:
I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and doubled stretch of water.
I said: You yoke the Aleutian seal-rocks with the lava and coral sowings that flower the south,
Over your flood the life that sought the sunrise faces ours that has followed the evening star.
The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you, you have forgotten us, mother.
You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun's eye on the tideline.
It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and you have grown bitter; life retains
Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness, the insolent quietness of stone.
The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.
That watched you fill your beds out of the condensation of thin vapor and watched you change them,
That saw you soft and violent wear your boundaries down, eat rock, shift places with the continents.
Mother, though my song's measure is like your surf-beat's ancient rhythm I never learned it of you.
Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.
Other posts in this series:
I've written a new post on Dangerous Intersection, "John McCain bribes the media; the media accepts". Here's an excerpt:
In some of my previous posts both here on Dangerous Intersection and on Daylight Atheism, I’ve done my best to call attention to the corrupt, degraded state of most of today’s major news-gathering organizations. But a story I read today is truly the most astonishing example yet - both in the way the mainstream media has totally abandoned basic principles of journalistic ethics and integrity, and in the way they brazenly flaunt that behavior.
Last weekend, U.S. presidential candidate John McCain invited reporters to his vacation home in Arizona for a barbecue. McCain’s aides and staffers explained that the weekend was intended as a “social event” - i.e., no questions about McCain’s campaign strategy, voting record, or political positions - and was therefore off the record. When some reporters objected, McCain’s staff agreed that the weekend would be on the record after all, but only on the condition that reporters brought no audio or video recording equipment. The reporters meekly acceded to this, and that was the extent of our brave press corps’ journalistic heroism.
To see more, click through and read the rest.
This is an open thread to hold the discussion split off from the "On Amateur Atheism" thread. Comments and replies welcome.
I've put up a new post on Dangerous Intersection, "Barack Obama gets it right".
