Dating is a daunting process, especially for those of us who do not have the luxury of being in a setting designed to facilitate it (e.g., high school, college, etc.). The appeal of short cuts is understandable. Wouldn't it be great to have an efficient way of sifting through eligible partners to maximize one's chances of finding a good match? This is why online dating sites are constantly promoting their personality questionnaires, compatibility algorithms, and the like. This is also why some online dating services have decided to specialize by catering only to a particular niche market. In fact, this practice is becoming so common that it no longer seems controversial. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Can you think of a time when you were right about something and all your friends were wrong? I suspect you can. After all, we tend to remember things like that. It could have been something quite trivial. Perhaps you knew which band recorded a particular song, and all your friends thought it was someone else. The point is, you were right and everyone else was wrong.

Imagine what it must have been like to be the one person (or perhaps one of a very small number) who first realized that the Earth was not flat! Think of how much flack the earliest proponents of heliocentrism faced. And yet, they were right while the overwhelming majority was wrong.

I know that several of you know far more about Mormonism than I do. Some of you are ex-Mormons, and you probably have much that you could teach the rest of us about this religion. I will defer to you to make sense out of this for those of us with less information about Mormonism, but I found it interesting to read that the Mormon church recently reminded its leaders not to endorse political candidates.

I wrote a post last July in which I speculated about the possible merits of atheists launching our own "take back America" movement.

What if atheists started our own "take back America" movement, focusing on restoring America to the secular democracy envisioned by our founders and reflected in our Constitution? Obviously, many of us are already working toward such a goal. Look at the efforts of organizations like Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom From Religion Foundation. I suppose what I'm talking about here is more of a marketing approach than anything else.

I was not advocating such an approach as much as I was thinking aloud about it. Reader reactions were mixed, as they should have been.

Now here we are one year later, and it appears that American Atheists had a similar idea, one which they decided to put into practice today. In the 26 states that agreed to allow it, the group is hiring planes to display trailing banners with messages like "God-LESS America" and "Atheism is Patriotic."

If you spend any time in the atheist blogosphere, you have undoubtedly heard that a man asked Rebecca Watson (Skepchick) back to his hotel room for coffee at 4:00am at an atheist conference. She felt uncomfortable and expressed these feelings on her blog. And for reasons I still can't quite understand, all hell broke loose in the atheist community. It seems that every atheist who has a blog has already weighed in, and I do so with great reluctance because I think something is missing amidst all the intensely emotional reactions.

What is a real Christian? Who deserves to be called a real Christian, and who does not? These can be difficult questions, and sometimes I don't envy the plight of Christians at all. It seems like almost no matter what you do, someone is going to come along and claim that you are not a real Christian. And yet, if you are doing what your god tells you to do (like many of the protagonists in your bible did), how can you not be a real Christian?

I support marriage equality. Two consenting adults should have the right to marry if they so choose. Nothing about this has ever struck me as being particularly controversial, even though I have known quite a few people during the course of my life who seemed to have a problem with it. When asked if I support same-sex marriage, my response is usually something like, "Of course! Why wouldn't I?" I thought it might be interesting to see if I can articulate why.

I watched Bill Maher's Religulous again recently, and think I enjoyed it even more the second time. I thought it might be fun to go back and re-read the post I wrote after I saw it the first time and see how my initial impressions compared to the second viewing.

One difference was that I found Maher far less annoying this time. Yes, I noticed once again that he does not seem to understand the difference between atheism and agnosticism. But while I continue to find this unfortunate, it did not detract from my enjoyment of his film nearly as much as it did previously.