Atheist website wins religion Bloggie

March 1, 2011 • 8:49 am

I hate to use the ugly word “blog,” but since it’s in the name of the award, let me congratulate Hemant Mehta and his crew over at The Friendly Atheist for nabbing the 2011 Bloggie Award for Religion (or, in this case, the lack thereof).  The site hasn’t been on my radar, but I’ll be paying more attention from now on.

22 thoughts on “Atheist website wins religion Bloggie”

  2. “let me congratulation Hermant Metha and his crew”

    I’m having one of those mornings too. Perhaps you meant to congratulate Hemant Mehta?

    Let me add my congratulavations.

    Reply

    1. Definitely. He has his finger on the pulse of atheist activism and its constantly updated.

      I kind of find his prose a little cliched, but I did just use the term “has his finger on the pulse of…” so I shouldn’t talk.

      Reply

  4. Friendly Atheist is one of the first atheist websites I stumbled across while I was leaving religion, and one of the few I still regularly read today. I’m glad it won the award, and I hope more religious people may visit it and go beyond the stereotypes to see what atheists are really like.

    Reply

  6. You might want to condemn the list instead. Look at “Best Science Blog”.

    It’s Watts Up With That, one of the worst climate change denialist sites out there. Watts wouldn’t know science if it set his moustache on fire. He’s featured arguments that claim straight lines are curved, measurement scales don’t exist, and that global warming causes sunspots. One graph was simply rescaled and flipped upside down to argue for cooling. Watts also promised to publish his analysis of surface station microclimate, but has never delivered – in part because Menne 2010 showed the exact opposite (ie Watts is delaying because he doesn’t like his results).

    How is that science?

    Reply

      1. There’s quite a bit of overlap. Watts is explicitly “not engaging in political activism“. And his followers are rather rabid about this.

        He won similar awards in the past for this reason.

        If you’d like, there’s some pretty solid Watts takedowns at Tamino’s “Open Mind” blog (it’s statistics-heavy but he’s a good writer; Watts’ chief rebuttal to Tamino is either “OMG PSEUDONYM” or “OMG UNCIVIL!”), along with WottsUpWithThat (note spelling) and, of course, Skeptical Science (which is rapidly becoming the best climate science blog I’ve ever seen, possibly surpassing RealClimate. Seriously, draw parallels between Skeptical Science and similar anti-creationist resources like Talk.Origins and Panda’s Thumb. You’ll be impressed).

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    2. Yes, I caught “Watts up with that” in a major feat of dishonesty back in January.

      “Friendly Atheist” has only recently made it onto my radar screen as well. Good for it, regardless of the validity of polls…

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    3. Well, it’s more popular than any other science blog beyond, perhaps, Pharyngula. That’s the trouble with polling, especially online polling: it’s not a question of merit but of who’s got the biggest, thickest er – readers base.

      There’s a reason PZ Myers wins everything he links to.

      Reply

    1. Congratulations Hemant.
      I was very impressed with your performance on the Point of Inquiry debate about atheist, alongside Dave Silverman and Chris Mooney.
      That debate seemed to have been arranged in such a way as to contrast two moderate atheists against one extremist. In fact that is exactly how it sounded like in the end – however the extremist turned out to be Mooney himself! You and Dave Silverman came across as very reasonable and genuine characters while Chris, errr, I won’t comment more than say you need to listen to the podcast to understand how things went.

      Reply

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