Back from American Atheist convention and other things.

I apologize for not posting much this month, but I have been doing things.

I Spent this week in at the American Atheist Convention in Austin, TX. I met a lot of people in the movement I haven't had the chance to meet before and I learned some great things from the speakers.

Most of the talks haven't been posted on YouTube but I did find the one from Matt Dillahunty on skepticism, so I'll post that for those who are interested.

AACON 2013 Matt Dillahunty speaks on Skepticism and Atheism

Here is a few pictures I got at the convention:

With Darrel Ray, author of Sex and God

With Dan Fincke from Camels with Hammers

With a new friend Ben Conner at the pub crawl on Saturday

Some random guy at the bar who jumped into the photo
I don't know who he is.

A photo I took of my leg and a table by accident.

I also did a debate on  March 25th about gay marriage with Vocab Malone, you might remember him as the guy I debated abortion with a few months ago. We touched a a number of topics in the debate some of which we didn't have a change to delve into deeply, and both of us brought up a lot of statistics. I was planning a post to go up when the episode is posted, but it was ending up crazy long so I'm probably going to break it into four of five posts dealing with topics separately. I'm still putting some time into researching a couple of the statistical claims my opponent brought up, since many of the claims he brought up can be found on hundreds of websites most of sites by fundamentalist Christians with clear anti-gay biases,  it makes finding the legitimate published studies or even an abstract difficult. Even then one has to read the study to see if the conclusions reached by Vocab and other fundamentalists are legitimate conclusions to reach from said study.

This is often the way it is with debates, particularly ones that involve statistics. It is incredibly easy to make a claim, but as a skeptic I don't want to dismiss a claim without giving a proper reason so it can often take much longer to debunk a claim than to make it. I'll wait until the actual debate is online in a week or two to post anything though.