In my last (and first) post to the new Skeptic Mag Hotline group I thanked Randy Cassingham who helped me set this up, but I forgot to thank and acknowledge the person and company running the Hotline online, and that is John Buckman of the Shelby Group Ltd., creators of the Lyris mailing list software (www.lyris.com). Cassingham calls Lyris "the most amazing list processing software in the known universe." I wonder if this includes other bubble universes in inflationary cosmology? In any case, our universe will due and I thank John for his voluntary efforts to help the skeptics cause in this way.

Tonight (November 3), I'll be speaking at the Griffith Observatory at 7:00pm on UFOs, alien abductions, astrology, and cosmological attempts to prove God's existence. Astronomer John Mosley will be running the Zeiss planetarium projector (that projects the stars onto the dome) so we can run the solar system backwards a couple of thousand years to show the precession of the earth's axis which has been enough to shift the zodiacal signs off by one. So any astrologer who does not take into account this factor will be wrong in their prophecies (of course, they are wrong anyway, but that's another lecture).

In the works for December is a debate on creationism with an anatomy professor at Washington University in St. Louis (he can't believe the eye could have evolved, ergo...divine creation), and a debate with a theologian at Claremont McKenna College, on the existence of God and morality (he can't believe people can be moral without God, ergo...divine creation).

On Friday, November 21, on NBC's Leeza show, I'll be the token skeptic on a program about UFOs and alien abductions. The program features representatives from X-Files, Millennium, Fox (re: the alien autopsy film), and Stanton Friedman was holding up his books and government documents filled with blacked-out paragraphs, proof positive of the alien cover-up.

In preparation for my own weekly skeptics radio show starting in January (KPCC, 89.3 FM, the NPR affiliate for Southern California), I'll be on Monday, November 10, from 6-7pm with my guests Dr. Tana Dineen, author of "Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is doing to People" and in the second half hour with Dr. Christopher Toumey, author of "God's Own Scientists: Creationists in a Secular World."

On Monday, November 24, from 6-7PM my guest will be Dr. Lawrence Krauss, author of THE PHYSICS OF STAR TREK, and his just-released book, BEYOND STAR TREK. We are going to solve the age-old philosophical conundrum: is Data alive?

Penn Jillette and I have been having a lively e-mail exchange on atheism and agnosticism. He's an atheist and I'm an agnostic. He's an atheist because he believes there is no God. I'm an agnostic because I believe God is an unknowable concept. But maybe we are talking at cross purposes and just playing a language game. Neither one of us believes in God. I would be interested in your feedback on the following definitions I use:

Strong Atheist: There is no God. Weak Atheist: No belief in God. Agnostic: God is unknowable. Theist: There is a God.

Penn, like Randi and many other skeptics, humanists, and free thinkers I know, feel that it is a black and white issue. Either there is a God or there isn't. If you believe there is a God there are a theist. If you believe there is no God you are an atheist. So only the theist and atheist positions are necessary. I feel the agnostic position has three benefits: (1) we cannot prove God's nonexistence (strong atheism); (2) weak atheism is fully tenable, but so is Huxley's originally meaning of agnostism: unknowable; believing God is unknowable is compatable with having no believe in God; (3) "agnosticism" is far more socially acceptable than "atheism," which most people associate (do they?) with militant atheists like Murray-Ohare and it becomes something of a conversation stopper; by analogy, my partner Pat Linse says she's a femin ist but would never call herself that because the feminists have changed the meaning of the word and now it has a lot of unwanted baggage.

Am I merely whimping out taking the agnostic position, or is there philosophical and social justification here?

Your thoughts?