Welcome to the Simple Atheist Blog

I'm Ray Higgins, and I go by Big Atheist on youTube. This is my attempt to rant on my thoughts and interest in a semi periodic way and see if I can build some dialog.   As my Blog Description says, this blog will be a collection of "Music, Movies, Memes, and Mayhem from another Gnu Atheist". Mind you the Movies part is really just my own animation which I do very infrequently and the Mayhem piece ...well someday I'll get around to it. I suspect this blog mostly will center around Music and Memes. The Music will mostly focus around my quest for great covers, mash-ups, or odd new music I find on youTube and elsewhere, and maybe some thoughts on why we like the music we like. The main intent for this blog is to talk about the Memes!!! which include my atheism, the atheist/skeptical community, society at large, science, the meaning of life, the future, and speculate a little on how I think it works. And all this from the point of view of just anther militant Gnu Atheist. I'm hoping I will spur some interesting conversations and maybe occasionally give you a new perspective on our reality.

About What I do:

I'm an Aerospace Engineer working on intelligent systems for the Government. I probably won't talk about it much. Its not that I dislike my Job, on the contrary, its the perfect job as far as I can tell. It's just that I spend at least 40 hours a week thinking about it and when I exit my building at the end of the day I leave my work behind. My work does give me an interesting perspective on the Singularity and hopefully I'll get around to putting down a few thoughts.

About My Atheism:

1) I am a strong, very strong atheist. I do not consider the notion of a God-like-being to have any significant probability of existing and that if you don't make the assumption that a god is possible, there is nothing in our universe to suggest it. What this means is that I see little validity in agnosticism and even weak atheism, even though I generally consider them part of the greater skeptical and atheist communities I associate my self with.

2) I hate calling myself an Atheist. Atheism, like theism, is really just a category of beliefs and says only that they share one single belief about god. I share most of the naturalism, skepticism, science, and interests of a significant portion of those people that we generally call the atheist community. The problem with calling my self an atheist is that there is nothing to differentiate me from those purveyors of woo that also happen to not believe in god.

3) Why do I go by Simple Atheist? Basically its an attempt to try to streamline and clarify the what and why behind what I believe.  I'm trying to remove as much of the clutter and hype tradition, society, and our own human tendencies & pitfalls confuses and dilutes what we believe. This is definitely a work in progress and I will try to put it into word someday.

About My Music:

I love my music and probably spend more time listening to and searching for music than any other recreational activity. I have no musical ability and make no claims to the quality of my own likes other than to say this is what I like and I don't care how you judge or categorize it. I share my music in a hopes to find kindred spirits.

About my Plans:

In order to try to get this started and put me me on some schedule, I will try to do a few weekly feature, namely:

1) Cover of the Week where I pick a song from my "Covers all around me ()" youTube playlists, There are five playlist so far. Links to (A-C), (D-H), (I-M), (N-S). and (T-Z) for a total of more than 600 covers. The playlists are my collection of the best covers I have found on youTube and I have spent a lot of effort finding new ones, sorting them, and keeping them current so I hope you enjoy. From my playlist descriptions:

I pick my covers by 3 features: technical performance, innovation, and fun. I admit my choices are biased by how much I like the song, my preference for female singers, and my folk roots from my childhood in the 60s. Hope you like the mix, i love just playing one of the list randomly as I go thru my day.

2) My Random Meme of the Week -  short random thought about the world and my slant on atheism

3) Favorite Science Story of the Week - really sure if this will be a single science story or highlights form the week

Beyond these Weekly features and assorted new stuff that peeks my interest, I hope to put up some of my old writings (or more honestly I will try to finish my old writings)and put up some of my youTube videos.


Thanks for Checking me out
Ray Higgins