On C-Span I am presently watching a typically moving and insightful Christopher Hitchens interview about his illness. It was recorded January 14 and you can watch it here or below: Your Thoughts?
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Category Archives: Atheism
The (Jesuit) Father Of The Big Bang Theory
December 24, 2010 – 4:27 pmRecently, on Facebook, I boiled down my philosophical and scientific objections to theistic evolution to pithy status update size and received a good deal of discussion as a result. I plan to edit, reprint, and possibly expand upon my remarks on theistic evolution on Camels With Hammers soon. But in the meantime, I wanted to [...]
True Religion?
August 17, 2010 – 8:46 pmMany a religious person defending her own religious beliefs will argue that a given politically, morally, or intellectually unflattering interpretation of her faith is simply not a true representation of her faith. While the question of who has the right or the adequate means to decisively determine with any rational clarity which competing interpretation of any [...]
Sundaily Hilarity: Permission Slip
July 11, 2010 – 12:10 pmI have been hearing numerous appalling stories of late of public school districts incorporating field trips to churches into their activities. On Facebook, in reply to my friend Jessica’s anxiety about what to do about a proposed trip for her own son, another friend, Glynis pointed to an e-mail exchange presenting one approach for dealing [...]
Settled Matters?
July 5, 2010 – 12:00 amNonStampCollector sums up what he takes to be the points which have been thoroughly resolved and should be non-issues in all debates between atheists and Christians going forward: Controversially, you will note, he takes mostly atheist points to have been vindicated beyond the point of reasonable disagreement. Is he right? Does he wave away any [...]
Bursting The Chains Of Monkish Ignorance And Superstition
July 4, 2010 – 2:46 pmI should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them [...]
Prejudice
July 2, 2010 – 10:47 amHere’s a reflexively smarmy, condescending pat on the head to the members of a maligned minority group: I once stayed in a black person’s house when I went to another place for a few days. It was interesting experience to go to an African American’s house because the black person housed us, fed us, treated [...]
Rational Passional Persuasion
June 25, 2010 – 7:29 pmAndrew writes: So atheists don’t have emotions which inform them of the truth of something? And their rhetoric is completely dispassionate to the point where logic and reason are not fully objective? I have addressed the proper ways to consult the emotions in looking for truth in the post, Disambiguating Faith: Heart Over Reason, so for [...]
Hammer
June 25, 2010 – 1:42 pmVorJack writes: If Atheists have a God, the way many believers insist we have, it isn’t science. The God of atheists is Truth (or Reality, or the Universe, depending on how you want to spin it.) Science, reason and logic are only the means of finding the Truth, but they’re also the only means we’ve [...]
What Exactly Are We Supposed To Be Doing?
June 24, 2010 – 8:48 pmYou’re Not Helping responds to my defense of the Freedom From Religion Foundation: Camels with Hammers has posted a bit of commentary on the Do Nothings. First and foremost, they cry foul on us for unjustly misrepresenting the goals of the FFRF Wait, no, first and foremost, I agreed with You’re Not Helping that it is unfair to accuse [...]
The Gulf Disaster: Prayer And Priorities
June 24, 2010 – 5:06 pmSome atheists online have mocked calls for prayer made by Obama and legislators. You’re Not Helping argues that while there is clearly something awful about treating prayer as a substitute for practical action (such as when true believers in “faith healing” forgo actual medical treatment for prayer) not all those who turn to prayer are [...]
"Dawkins Is Not A Priest": A Heated Facebook Exchange
June 23, 2010 – 3:31 pmLast spring a friend asked me to come over to her Facebook wall where she had posted a Sam Harris video (on his views on science’s ability to answer moral questions, which I will get around to analyzing here some day). Though not an outspoken atheist herself, she had received a lot of anti-atheist fervor from [...]
A Quick, Belated Post For Yesterday's "Atheist Solidarity Day"
June 22, 2010 – 3:16 pmYesterday was the first annual “Atheist Solidarity Day” but since I was too busy to blog I never got around to doing anything special for it here. So, now I hereby affirm, in honor of “Atheist Solidarity Day”, that I’ve got your back, fellow atheists. Your Solidarity?
Disambiguating Faith: Why Faith Is Unethical (Or "In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence")
June 21, 2010 – 5:18 amA couple of weeks ago, I argued that there was a real distinction between “lacking a belief in any God or gods” on the one hand and “believing there is no God (or gods)” on the other hand. Primarily I saw the heart of the distinction as resting with the difference between on the one [...]
Christopher Hitchens Vs. Laura Ingraham & Doug Wilson
June 20, 2010 – 9:08 pmThey start talking after an opening minute of some Gospel Bob Dylan: Your Thoughts?
The Thing That Made The Things For Which There Is No Known Maker
June 20, 2010 – 5:55 pmStrictly deriving belief in the Christian God logically from the problem of where everything comes from: It’s amazing how the problem of how something comes from nothing leads to so many obvious and unavoidable truths, isn’t it? Your Thoughts?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali At The Ottowa International Writer’s Festival
June 19, 2010 – 12:54 pmAn interview from June 10 with the author of Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations: Click through the video to see all 5 parts. Your Thoughts?
Jennifer Michael Hecht On The History Of Doubt And Atheism
June 18, 2010 – 12:44 pmHere is Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson at Hampshire College in 2007 discussing the the wrote the complicated history of doubt and atheism: Your Thoughts?
Say The Pledge Of Allegiance With Porky Pig
June 14, 2010 – 8:07 pmWithout any reference to God. In honor of Flag Day in America, here is a clip from “Old Glory”, a 1939 Porky Pig cartoon which features a godless pledge in both print and recitation: Of course, Porky was not an atheist activist trying to prove a point, he just lived in that pre-1954 America that [...]
The Christian Logic Of Power, Pride, Humility, Free Will, Original Sin, And All-Consuming Divine Narcissism
June 14, 2010 – 6:43 pmPride has traditionally been disparaged by Christianity as not only a vice but as the chief vice and gone so far as to recommend humility as one of the highest virtues for a human being. The theological reasons for this begin with the way that traditional Christianity understands human beings primarily relationally, as in an [...]
How And Why To Defect From The Catholic Church
June 13, 2010 – 6:00 amIf the Catholic Church baptized you and you have neither personally defected nor been formally excommunicated, they still count you in their numbers when they quantify the scope of their influence by citing how many Catholics there are. If you do not want them considering you Catholic, here’s what you should do: Your Thoughts?
How Genesis Is Not Only Literally False, But Metaphorically False
June 12, 2010 – 1:40 pmMary Midgley argues that only the views of fundamentalist literalists are refuted by the fact of evolution: Appeals to evolution are only damaging to biblical literalism. Certainly the events described inGenesis 1 are not literally compatible with what science (from long before Darwin’s day) tells us about the antiquity of the Earth. But this is not [...]
"Skipping Sunday School": A Documentary On Parenting Without Religion And Growing Up Godless
June 11, 2010 – 11:06 am(via Atheist Nexus) Learn more about the topic and the film here. Your Thoughts?
Conservapedia: Pat Tillman "Could Not Have Been An Atheist"
June 11, 2010 – 10:58 amIn this interesting piece on the eye opening extent to which American atheists on Atheist Nexus report fearing social consequences if they were to come out as atheists, Lauri Lebo points us to this Conservapedia article takes stupefyingly ignorant prejudice against atheists down to a level I’ve never seen before: As a teen, Pat kept [...]
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