A Brief History of God and Atheism

Just watched this for a class I'm in. It's quite an interesting historical examination of the roots and development of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I'm hoping we'll spend a little time outside of the "western" religions, but chances seem slight at this point.


We also watched this film, which is a brief but fairly comprehensive review of the history of atheism and its basic tenets.

Democratized Education and Autodidacticism

I've spent a good deal of my day today, and some of yesterday, enjoying the videos posted on khanacademy's youtube channel. It seems abundantly obvious to me that this is one of the most beneficial ways to utilize the internet (and especially YouTube, which is so well-populated with tripe) for the free edification of people. Of course, one must wonder after watching some of these videos (especially the ones covering mathematical topics) why it is that education is considered such an expensive endeavor. Simply enough, education is just the communication of ideas to an audience initially unfamiliar with them; we engage in educational processes every day when we inform our cohorts of new material (even if that material is no more intellectual than our noticing a change in gas prices at the corner store).
At this point, I am not prepared to deliver a full critique of the bloated public and private education systems, but since one of my first blog posts years ago still seems fairly relevant, I'll throw up a link right here.

I would recommend giving the 15-minute tutorials by the Khan Academy a look. Even if you are familiar with some of the subject matter, there are bound to be areas which will help shore up particular knowledge gaps.