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:

• Poetry Sunday

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".

Today's Poetry Sunday features Anna Akhmatova, one of the most famous and critically praised Russian poets of the twentieth century. Anna Ahkmatova was born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko in 1889; she started writing early in life, and took the surname of her grandmother after her father forbade her to sully his respectable name by publishing "decadent" poetry under it.

Akhmatova was a prominent poet of the Russian Acmeist movement, which rejected symbolism in favor of clarity and immediate, vivid imagery. Tragically, she had the misfortune to spend much of her life under Stalinism; she was married three times in her life and saw two of her husbands executed by that tyrannical regime for anti-Soviet activities. Akhmatova herself was banned from publication from 1925 to 1940 for suspected subversive imagery in her writing and for her relationships with official enemies of the state. Nevertheless, despite government repression, she remained a much-loved and unofficial symbol of Russian heritage. Her poetry continued to circulate underground, and later in her life she was grudgingly allowed by the Soviet government to resume publishing. However, her gripping and deeply poignant account of Stalinist terror, Requiem, was not published in her homeland until 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I haven't found much information about her religious affiliation, except for a few references which say she was a member of the Russian Orthodox church. Nevertheless, an unmistakable note of freethought sentiment is evident in today's poem, which retells a famous story of the Old Testament from a viewpoint more sympathetic to the woman - an allegory, perhaps, of Akhmatova's own turbulent life and her suffering in the face of what was taken from her. The translation given is by Richard Wilbur.

Lot's Wife

The just man followed then his angel guide
Where he strode on the black highway, hulking and bright;
But a wild grief in his wife's bosom cried,
Look back, it is not too late for a last sight!

Of the red towers of your native Sodom, the square
Where once you sang, the gardens you shall mourn,
And the tall house with empty windows where
You loved your husband and your babes were born.

She turned, and looking on the bitter view
Her eyes were welded shut by mortal pain;
Into transparent salt her body grew,
And her quick feet were rooted in the plain.

Who would waste tears upon her? Is she not
The least of our losses, this unhappy wife?
Yet in my heart she will not be forgot
Who, for a single glance, gave up her life.

Other posts in this series:

• Poetry Sunday

You know what time it is. :)

Today marks the second anniversary of Daylight Atheism's first post, which was on February 10, 2006. After two years, we're still going strong! My list of topics for future posts remains as long as ever. In fact, I've found in the past several months that the number of posts I plan for a given month outnumbers the number of opportunities for posting. As a result, I've built up something of a backlog of posts, which I'll try to work through over the next several months.

In honor of this milestone, I've gone to the database and crunched some numbers. At the time this was written, Daylight Atheism had 529 posts and 12,318 comments. Below is a chart of the total and unique hits by month, which I'm proud to say displays the strong upward trend that's been apparent since this site's inception. So far, February 2008 is on a course to continue that trend.

I don't know if there's an upper limit to Daylight Atheism's traffic, but I haven't seen one yet. I firmly believe that there's still a huge audience for the message of freethought which we've only begun to tap. Even in America, most god-besotted of the First World nations, there are tens of millions of atheists, secularists, and religious "nones". Among the conventionally religious, there must be millions more who are reachable - frustrated freethinkers afraid to identify themselves as such, or people who simply didn't know that atheism was a live option. If we can reach out to even a small percentage of these people, if we could persuade them to speak out and organize, we could make nonbelievers a political and social force to be reckoned with. In the last year, the religious right has fallen into disarray, and their stranglehold on American society has weakened. If we want to make that a permanent state, we need to create an active and motivated secular movement that could step into the power vacuum they've left. To whatever extent I can further that goal, I'll gladly play my part.

The writing of my book continues more or less on schedule; I'm aiming to finish writing by this summer. After that, I'm planning for another month or so of editing and cleanup, and then I'll start looking into options for publication.

As Daylight Atheism enters its third year, I'm always in search of new and interesting ways to improve this site and its community. One thing I've been thinking about is a live chat session, probably on IRC, where I could answer questions or where readers could communicate with each other. Is there any interest in this? If so, let me know; we can negotiate a time and date that would be best for the largest number of people. If this is a success, I may make it a monthly or bimonthly event.

In closing, I offer my warmest gratitude to you, the readers, who've made this site what it is. Overall, I'm very happy with the quality of discussion here, and I think there's a vibrancy and yet a sense of intimacy and community that one doesn't often find together on popular weblogs. This, to me, is an encouraging microcosm of the larger freethought community that I perceive is taking shape in society. I'm thankful to everyone who's taken the time to participate and to leave their thoughts in comments or e-mail. As always, I'm humbled by the number of friendly, intelligent people who've chosen to take part here. I strive every day to improve my writing to be worthy of your time and energy.

Our challenges are not yet past, my friends, but the future looks bright. There's religious lunacy to skewer, humanism to defend, and a world that still needs to hear what we have to say. Onward!