This isn’t the worst blog on the Internet, but that says more about the Internet than it does about this blog.
I’m a loaner. I think microfinance is freaking brillilant! It’s one of those things that you just don’t appreciate on face value. It turns out loaning poor people money is vastly superior to giving it to them. Who knew?! Another hidden virtue is that it can scale very well. At least, that’s my prediction.
I’m a skeptic. That’s a wholly unsatisfactory label to me, but people like short identifiers, so that’s the one I choose. I could just as easily have called myself a “secular humanist” or “rationalist” or “atheist” or “freethinker” or “science-loving non-scientist” or “evidence-based reasoner.” There are problems with all these words. They either don’t say enough, or have a negative connotation that I don’t mean, or are simply misnomers. Whatever…
Basically, I recognize and eschew (as much as I am able) the human propensity for magical thinking. I understand why we do it, and I have sympathy for us and our need to engage in it. But, I’m also a fan of responsibility. The cat’s out of the bag. It’s time to grow up.
On Kiva.org, I belong to a wildly successful secular lending group, whose name I co-opted for a group on FriendFeed as a place to share and discuss content about issues of science, atheism/agnosticism, and secular humanism from a truly skeptical and non-religious point of view. Feel free to join us there!
