Want to donate to Haiti, but worried about your money passing through the hands of (ugh) believers? The Richard Dawkins Foundation will care for your needs. A whole bunch of impeccably atheist organisations has agreed to collect money, then pass it on either to Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières) or to International Red Cross.

But why not donate direct to one of those two organisations? In the words of the website

When donating via Non-Believers Giving Aid, you are helping to counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans.

You are also helping to promote aggressive bigotry. Assisting hypocritical opportunists. Oh and because neither Doctors without Borders or International Red Cross is a development agency you are making a default choice about effective help – Haiti’s needs will not go away any time soon.

But it’s your money.

Sceptics can take this comfort: they now make up the biggest denomination, followed by Catholics and then Anglicans. But this puts Australia only about midway in a list of the top 50 non-believing nations.

All the same, we’re getting there. Agnostics and atheists together = 30%, a figure that in my youth would have astonished my parents’ generation – and delighted my father.

Easy to get down about religious dogmatists, especially the 7th century lot. (How exactly perverse to use fertiliser to make bombs.) So it’s consoling to come across an item like this in The Huffington Report.

“The central government should understand the need for green turtles as part of traditional ceremonies because it relates to our faith,” Sudiana said. “Prohibiting it will hurt Balinese people.”

Up to five turtles are needed for sacrifice at each of the 100 to 150 large ceremonies a year in Hindu temples around Bali, he said.

Turtles were traditionally decapitated. But since they became protected in 1999, ceremonies in many temples have changed with turtles being symbolically sacrificed through their release to the sea alive.

Go turtles.

As I write, It’s about 4.30 US Central Standard time on 9th November. It’s the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Google’s tricksy logo is still about the 40th anniversary of Sesame St. Cute, huh?

In the Higher Education section of the Australian this week, Luke Slattery gets a mite carried away.

? university leaders are focussing their attention on post-crash curriculum reform.

What leadership role might higher education play in the ethical retooling of the professions and the broader society?

Let’s hope they remember the plumbers.

People talk of ‘monetising’ (or if American, of ‘monetizing’); their blogs or websites. Why this verb? Let’s consider the options. ‘Making money out of’ hints at exploitation, ‘making money from’ suggests that money will actually be made (with blogs, about a 1/1,000,000 chance) To ‘monetise’ cleans up the process; it’s technical and neutral; neither ethics nor the possibility of success need enter into it.

Nothing wrong with making money. I just wish people would be more straightforward about it.

Consider the case of Nathan Rice, a prominent WordPress guru and theme designer.