Two new round ups came to our attention earlier this week. First, is the Carnival of the Godless, created by Unscrewing the Inscrutable. Entries are closed for the first issue (which will be out tomorrow). Brief details are as follows:

Carnival Of The Godless Guidelines

1. The post you send in must be from a godless perspective and address something such as atheism, church/state separation, the evolution/creation debate, theodicy, philosophy of religion, etc. There is a huge amount of wiggle room in the post subject and we will consider every submission carefully for inclusion.

2. You may only submit one post per carnival. If you submit a post that you really think ought to be included from another blog, and the author of that blog also submits a post, we'll use their post. This should be considered a great way to get one of your excellent, but (for whatever reason) unknown or underrated posts in front of a potentially huge audience. Grab the bull by the horns!

Time frame

The Carnival Of The Godless will be posted on Sunday. The cutoff date for submissions will be the preceding Friday. If we get the submissions chosen and sorted out before Sunday, it will be posted earlier. (So, this week's COTG will have a cutoff date of Friday, January 28, 2005 and the actual post date of the Carnival will be Sunday, January 30, 2005.)

Submissions

Send your submissions to cotg-submission@brentrasmussen.com. In addition to writing "COTG Submission" in the subject of the email, please include the following information:

• The name of the blog where the post is from
• The post title.
• The post author's name or handle.
• The post's permanent link.
• A short description of the post.

Also, the Skeptics' Circle, created by St. Nate is accepting entries until February 2nd for their premiere issue. This one promises to be something like the Mythbusters, Penn & Teller's Bullshit, and the James Randi Educational Foundation all rolled into one. The framework for this round up is as follows:

My vision is to create a carnival for bloggers who'd rather think critically than criticize thinkers. More specifically, some of the things I'm looking for are posts about:

* Urban legends and hoaxes. If you spotted an oft-reported story that doesn't hold up to critical thought, this is the perfect opportunity to let people what you found. I hate plugging myself, but check out this post about Bill Gates' pictures - and if that doesn't work for you, try one of the examples I cite therein.

* Pseudoscience. Those who know their facts can take this opportunity to correct those who don't. Sean at Preposterous Universes shows how a good report can get misinterpreted by the mainstream media.

*Pseudohistory. Don't like the lessons we all should learn being denied or rewritten? Check out how Orac is continuing his long-running battle against Holocaust denial.

*Hysteria. We've all head countless stories about what is the greatest threats in the world today are, so now it's time to hear why we can still count on the sun rising tomorrow. RealClimate does this well by examining a popular argument against global warming.

*Quackery. Any stories either about potentially harmful alternative medicines or misleading reports from medical news stories. Dr. Charles has a good example of how he works a little magic on his prescription pad to save a witch.

So if you have a story you'd like to contribute to the premiere edition of the Skeptics' Circle, send it to me at saint_nate at hotmail dot com by 11:59 p.m. EST on February 2. Also, please let me know if you're interested in hosting a future Circle so I can set up a schedule.

Both round ups look to be right in our wheelhouse, and we look forward to reading them for what we hope is a long time to come. Thanks to Pharyngula, and Unscrewing the Inscutable for clueing us in on these.