A primer:

A fun little game. Try and stabilize the U.S. debt by 2018. The goal isn't to eliminate the debt, just to get it down to 60% of GDP in 8 years. I was able to get it down to 56% of GDP. Play, if you dare.

I really love this lady.

I removed my last post, because I couldn't figure out a way to get the link working, and was too lazy to figure it out. I'll work on it soon.

Along the same lines, though, was this post by Damon Linker of The New Republic. In it, he criticizes a certain batch of atheists for making the implicit claim that atheism necessarily equals the best possible life:

The statements “godlessness is true” and “godlessness is good” are distinct propositions. And yet the new atheists invariably conflate them. But a different kind of atheism is possible, legitimate, and (some would say) more admirable. Let’s call it catastrophic atheism, in tribute to its first and greatest champion, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in a head-spinning passage of the Genealogy of Morals that “unconditional, honest atheism is ... the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two-thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.” For the catastrophic atheist, godlessness is both true and terrible.

...

Take the example of physicist Steven Weinberg. In his 1977 book about the earliest origins of the universe (The First Three Minutes), Weinberg stated in passing that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” When some of his fellow cosmologists objected to the choice of words, accusing him of expressing, if only implicitly, some form of theological nostalgia for a non-scientific view of the world, Weinberg admitted that he is indeed nostalgic—“nostalgic for a world in which the heavens declared the glory of God.” Associating himself with the nineteenth-century poet Matthew Arnold, who likened the retreat of religious faith in the face of scientific progress to the ebbing ocean tide and claimed to detect a “note of sadness” in its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” Weinberg confessed to his own sorrow in doubting that scientists will find “in the laws of nature a plan prepared by a concerned creator in which human beings played some special role.” When it comes to God, what Weinberg believes to be true and what he wishes to be true simply do not coincide.

Nietzsche and Weinberg are hardly the only catastrophic atheists. Poet Philip Larkin thoroughly rejected belief in God while also recognizing that a life lived in the glaring light of “the sure extinction that we travel to” could be nearly unbearable at times. Playwright Eugene O’Neill seems to have thought that a life stripped of all illusions, including theological illusions, would be intolerable, plunging us into despair and madness. And then there is the rather extreme case of Woody Allen.

The point is not that atheism must invariably terminate in a tragic view of the world; another atheistic hero, David Hume, seems to have thought that it was perfectly possible to live a happy and decent life as a non-believer. Yet the new atheists seem steadfastly opposed even to entertaining the possibility that there might be any trade-offs involved in breaking from a theistic view of the world. Rather than explore the complex and daunting existential challenges involved in attempting to live a life without God, the new atheists rudely insist, usually without argument, that atheism is a glorious, unambiguous benefit to mankind both individually and collectively. There are no disappointments recorded in the pages of their books, no struggles or sense of loss. Are they absent because the authors inhabit an altogether different spiritual world than the catastrophic atheists? Or have they made a strategic choice to downplay the difficulties of godlessness on the perhaps reasonable assumption that in a country hungry for spiritual uplift the only atheism likely to make inroads is one that promises to provide just as much fulfillment as religion? Either way, the studied insouciance of the new atheists can come to seem almost comically superficial and unserious.