Serious Skepticism

A few years back, I wrote about becoming a parent and the ramifications of religious expectations for "moral parenting":

Defining myself as an atheist also actually ends up giving more power to religious social institutions. For example, when my wife and I learned that we were going to become parents, we had many tense discussions about the moral education of our child-to-be. My wife is a Unitarian and believes in certain supernatural forces and in a relatively abstract version of God. Her initial position was that our son should be raised as a Unitarian. When I explained to her that I wanted our son to be allowed to make his own decisions, she seemed concerned. "He has to have something to start with," she argued. "I don't want our children raised with nothing!" It disturbed me that my wife equated my atheism as a simple absence of religion and religious principles. I believed that, in spite of my rejection of religion, I had a great deal to teach our son about how to live.
It took me a few weeks to realize that by defining myself solely according to what I was not, I had created the impression that I was merely lacking in religious beliefs. My wife had innocently assumed that because I was an atheist, I had no system of ideas about the proper way to live to pass on to our son. Once I explained to her that my atheism did not prevent me from having ideas about philosophy and ethics, she understood and agreed that we could be equal partners in the ethical (or as she puts it, "spiritual") upbringing of our son.

In response to these ideas, a "concerned mom" wrote in with the following comment:

"If there is a hell you will be comdeming this child like smoking in a car with a baby. I do like the way you write."

What do you think about this response? Write you own thoughts in a comment here.

Gordon Holmes took this short video of what he claims to be the Loch Ness monster... after six years of taking videos trying to get one that looks like it might be Nessie.

Six years, and this is the best he can do? Look at it and judge for yourself, but to my eye, this looks like a log.