Flattered (not to mention amused at having become one composite blog being) by getting included on the Exterminator’s ten favourite blogs, we thought we’d turn it into a meme. Without all the meme stuff of having to tag x people and name your favourite band or say who’s your most admired atheist celeb.

Our favourites are mainly atheist blogs, although we aren’t very devout atheist bloggers. I mean there’s only so much you can say about not believing in something that doesn’t exist. So, we’ve picked sites that are all-round enjoyable & wise and say more than “I’m an atheist.” Mainly, they are just really funny.

Being human, we’ve tended to pick sites that we usually agree with. Or can at least have enjoyable rational disagreement with and can learn from.

We tried to stick to ten. They are partly randomly selected, on the basis that these are the blogs that we’ve recently remembered to visit regularly. Old favourites that haven’t been brought to mind, because their little names haven’t popped up on the atheist blogroll or planet atheism or planet humanism have just got ignored. By accident. So apologies in advance if we’ve missed off some brilliant blog we just didn’t think of today. When we have come up with ten more favourites there’ll be another post. It was going to be in alphabetic order, but that seemed boring…

No More Hornets did this first, so the Exterminator is getting mentioned first. Great blog. Among his many charms, he has been consistently dryly funny on atheist silliness. Long objecting to the search for an atheist logo, he has still managed to come up with one of his own, which at least has the merit of saying Atheist.

I’M an Atheist. YOU can be one, too!
Send for your free badge NOW.

He recently ran a “student” post in an avowed attempt to match Pharyngula’s prodigious output. A fair percentage of the commenters assumed these were real kids. Some comments managed to sound so much like the atheist blogs he’d parodied a couple of weeks before that it was hard to believe these weren’t parodies too.

It is annoying to read something that is crying out for a blog and then to find that it’s been done so much better by the Exterminator.

The next one here (though the order isn’t going to imply anything) is my This-Week’s-Favourite blog, Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes. Some of Bing’s writing is so good it would make you want to amputate your own hands to stop you trying to communicate with words. I am going to resist the temptation to quote things, as it’s all in the context. All the same, I’m going to quote a use of graphics instead. Railing against Rush Limbaugh, he says:

Let me express myself in stick figure form:

A bit further on, he says

But you haven’t established the facts yet…I mean you just said so! I now need to express myself in mountain goat form:

Bah. This post is seemingly going on for ever. I’ll try to be more concise.

Black Sun Journal is intimidatingly authoritative on subjects like climate change. Magisterial, even. It feels like every word has been chosen with a magnifying glass and scalpel. Even his diagrams are brilliant. If Black Sun has written a post on some topic, there’s probably nothing left for unascended mortals to say.

Clioaudio is the same, He posts on “Ancient History, Archaeology and Archaeoastronomy through a Skeptic’s Eyes.” You can find endless surprising and fascinating things here. His writing style is very light. The words just ooze subtly over you, so sometimes you have to think again about what he’s just said.

Archaeology Magazine are running an interesting poll at the moment:
“The tombs of so many of history’s great leaders are lost.
Which other ruler would you most like to see discovered?”
That’s an easy one to answer I know which unseen tomb I’d like to find. It’s more difficult if you specify that the leader should already be dead, but I think I have an answer for that too.

I’m doing really poorly with this whole “being concise” thing. And I’m running out of ways to say “great blog, love it.” The next few are long-term favourites. I think I need a Flickr style trophy logo from now on, so I don’t need to use as many words. Here it is:

Look at the sites and you’ll see how good they are.

Hell’s Handmaiden’s blog has lots of brief enraged and completely-to-the-point rants, like this one on torture.

Spanish Inquisition doesn’t just have a great top logo – although it does – but it also has some excellent posts, like this one on Things I’m getting tired of hearing.

I’m still not making these fit in. I am going to have to start running them together and put some more detail in future blogs. Picking “ten” favourites was a demented choice. I am so much regretting it.

Skepticum , Evolutionary Middleman, Deep Thoughts are also great.

Having a quick scan for a post to feature here, I just realised that Evo-mid, like many of the blogs on this list, seems to have decided to adopt the No More Hornets Atheist logo. I hope the Exterminator doesn’t start selling atheist breakfast cereal, because that shape just wont translate well to a corn and wheat format.

Sorry, I squashed the last three up to make room for a last word for our atheist (no)godparent Nullifidian. Sadly, he’s not posting as often as he used to, he even disappeared altogether for a good while. But, when he blogs, you can bet that it’s going to be really funny, with either a unique subject or a unique personal take on something.