These are some of the last Sunday School editions of the year! We're going to get to the links in a second but first I wanted to ask for everyone's help if I could. This week we put up a page asking for some small donations with the aim of being able to pay for some improvements to the Think Atheist Radio Show. We've already had some very generous friends offer their support and we greatly appreciate their gift, but we need just a little bit more. Besides donating directly you can also support us by making sure that everything you buy from Amazon, now during the holidays and whenever, on into the future, you purchase via this link. When you use that link you'll pay no more and your packages will ship just as fast, but the Think Atheist Radio Show picks up a tiny fraction of Amazon's profits on each purchase as support. Remember, even though we've certainly carefully selected some reading suggestions for you to consider from the store, you can buy anything using this link, no matter if it's books or not.

Okay, getting closer to the links now! Are you guys on Google+? What about Twitter? I'm always giving show updates and news about upcoming book giveaways on Twitter and I trickle Sunday School links out during the week on Google+. If you're out there, you should follow me/add me to your circles! Connect with me there and you won't have to wait until Sunday for interesting links and you'll hear about updates to new show guests and book giveaways as soon as they're available! C'mon! Join me!

If you haven't had the chance to catch our interview with physicist Dr. Lisa Randall you need to! Dr. Randall is a leading expert in physics and cosmology and one of the most cited physicists alive today. A professor at the Harvard University Department of Physics, she is the author of Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions and her new book Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. She joined us to talk about her book, recent experimental results from physics dealing with faster than light neutrinos and the Higgs boson, and about the scientific worldview generally.

This week on the Think Atheist Radio Show we're featuring our interview with Dr. Terrence Deacon. Dr. Deacon is the Anthropology Department Chair at the University of California, Berkley. His interests center on brain-development and evolution, the origins of language, and emergence. His research combines evolution and neuroscience to shed light on the evolution of human cognition. He is the author of the recently published Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter about the evolution and emergence of consciousness. It is this subject that Dr. Deacon joins us to discuss.

Alright, LINKS!

The New York Times this week had a piece on African American atheists and their unique struggle.

The more you read of William Lane Craig the more you have to respect the sheer deviousness of his approach.

New announcements coming with regard to the search for the Higgs. Alright. But why does the Higgs matter?

What's the difference between rationality and rational self-interest?

Scientology held woman on a ship at sea against her will for 12 years! 

Infants as young as 8 months are capable of social judgments.

Recently a handful of bloggers in the skeptical community, including a 17 year old, received legal threats from a Texas clinic that claims to be able to treat cancer with unevidenced pseudoscience. They got a lesson in the Streisand Effect this week when the entire skeptical blogosphere rose up en masse to spread the word about this particular brand of nonsense and the shady tactics the clinic was using to try to stamp out legitimate criticism. The clinic released a statement defending itself to which the skeptics responded by closely examining the clinics claims to legitimacy. They found that donations to the clinic don't go to the clinic proper, but to the shady quack-a-medicine snake oil peddler that runs the place. (Turns out he may not even be an MD) The moral of the story for the clinic is: shoulda kept your mouth shut... The letter writing campaignis on.

Our ancestors speak out after 3 million years. Hear what they sound like...

Religion imprisons women.

On William Lane Craig's notion of free-will.

The Misanthropic Principle: If our flourishing is the central concern of existence, we should be surprised to find obstacles to our flourishing. And we do find obstacles to our flourishing. So what does that tell us about the theistic hypothesis?

Daniel Kahneman's new book Thinking, Fast and Slow continues to get rave reviews. Certainly the best of all of the books I've read this year! Check out Sam Harris's interview of Kahneman too!

Could Titan's seas harbor life?

The certainty of memory has its day in court. Scientists have long cautioned that the brain is not a filing cabinet. The police and courts are gradually coming to understand that eye witness testimony should be treated as no better than trace evidence.

Evangelical churches in Britain are telling people to pray their AIDS away, to stop taking their medication. The result: 6 people dead.

20 years after its start, Intelligent Design is dead.Jerry Coyne agrees. PZ Myers too.

How fairy wasps cope with being smaller than amoebas.

Japanese astronaut plays baseball aboard the ISS.............. alone; pitching, hitting, and catching his hit in the space of 37 seconds. This will put a smile on your face!

How rationality can make your life more awesome.

Creationists like to trot out "Nebraska Man" and "Java Man" as examples of evolution's failure. Are we surprised when it turns out to be lies?

A boiling superEarth joins the exoplanet roster.

Is our universe one big Schrodinger's cat? Where it's alive is where we live?

Why do the religious give to charity?

Philosophy of Mind: An Overview

The Bible and homosexuality. Is homosexuality condemned in the Bible?What does it actually say?

It's a good week when I can post a link that says that poo flinging chimps provide clues to human origins.

Check out Richard Carrier's great talk from Skepticon 4 on Bayes Theorem, how to think more clearly and rigorously.