In the past, I have defended the idea that rather than classifying people simply as atheists, agnostics, and theists that we should separate the questions of the contents of beliefs (whether they are atheistic or theistic) from whether one’s atheism or theism is held as a matter of knowledge or not. If one’s theism is [...]
Juan Sanchez, inspired by a little Robert Nozick, explores some problems for the concept of an omnipotent, omniscient God: Suppose you’re God: How can you be sure you’re omnipotent? Perhaps you can accomplish anything you can imagine in your own corner of reality—a lucid dreamer can say that much—but there’s some greater reality you’re not even [...]
Via Dan Savage, A Christian decodes for his brethren: When you tell a gay person to “resist” being gay, what you are really telling them—what you really mean—is for them to be celibate. What you are truly and actually saying is that you want them to condemn themselves to a life devoid of love. Be [...]
The claim that all value, whether moral or otherwise, requires a God is a familiar one. But what this claim either means or how it is supposed to be apparent to us is far from self-evident. The claim could mean something along the lines of a divine command theory interpretation of value according to which [...]
Below is Louie CK’s NSFW full episode of his show “Louie” devoted to religion, focusing for the most part on the dubious means by which children in particular are emotionally manipulated through the Roman Catholic Church’s emphasis on the violent death of Jesus which they are told is their fault. Your Thoughts?
It’s about as good as all other arguments for a personal god: Thanks to Linus for the link. Your Thoughts?
An Onion classic from 1998: SAN FRANCISCO–For as long as he can remember, 7-year-old Timmy Yu has had one precious dream: From the bottom of his heart, he has hoped against hope that God would someday hear his prayer to walk again. Though many thought Timmy’s heavenly plea would never be answered, his dream finally [...]
In response to the attention I brought to the great comic strip about “The Four Horsemen” earlier tonight, The Vicar recommends this great comic strip, Head Doctor Productions, from Daniel B. Willingham: Your Thoughts?
In reply to this video on various immoral things outright commanded in what is supposed to be God’s law in the Old Testament, Loyal writes: Militaristic non-Christians often seize upon the many difficult passages where God is condoning morally repugnant acts. I am glad you admit that they are morally repugnant acts and neither morally [...]
Introduction This post is a long one but an important one for understanding what sophisticated Roman Catholic philosophers have traditionally meant when they have said that “God is good” and that the existence of evil is not to be taken as counter-evidence to their belief in God’s goodness. Very often we atheists are dismissed as [...]
Peter Rodger went around the world asking people from numerous viewpoints, “What Is God?” for his documentary, Oh My God. Watch it here. Your Thoughts?
John W. Loftus, the former minister turned atheist, author of Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity, and the primary blogger at Debunking Christianity (whose updates you can follow daily in our blogroll feed) has a terrific summation of 30 extraordinarily unlikely ideas, at least most of which most Christians would have to [...]
Why is there something rather than nothing? This question includes God in its scope: if there is a God, then God is something, so we can always ask: why is there God rather than no God? This implies that the question cannot be answered by appealing to God. It can’t be answered by saying: because [...]
I used this video to help illustrate a point over a year ago. Back then we did not have the capabilities to actually embed the video. Oh, and we had almost no readers either. But now that we are at a new host that lets us embed whatever we want, it’s been finally added to [...]
While I agree with, and vigorously defend, the notion that there is an important difference between lacking a belief in gods (as an agnostic atheist) and believing there are no gods (as a gnostic atheist), I also think that atheists should not, based on the best available scientific evidence and philosophical arguments, merely lack belief [...]
Yesterday Ron Rosenbaum aggressively attacked atheism and defended agnosticism in Slate. He starts out with the familiar charge that atheists have “faith”. But faith in what? Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the [...]
Last fall, Wired reported on a study published last fall (“Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity.” By Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron K. Barbey, Michael Su, Frank Krueger, Jordan Grafman. Public Library of Science ONE, Vol. 4 No. 9, September 28, 2009) which finds religious people have extra activity in the neurological brain regions indispensable for social intelligence: Brain scans [...]
Strictly 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?
Pride 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 [...]
Yesterday I replied to Mary Midgley’s article out this weekend, which claimed that evolutionary theory does not refute Genesis since Genesis was not meant to be a literal description of how God made the world. In reply I revisted remarks and videos that I posted last fall which overviewed the ways that even if we [...]
Mary 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 [...]
Johnson Brown explains: This scene is from the 2008 TV remake of the 1961 film, A Raisin in the Sun (an adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s play). “In my mother’s house, there is still god!” In this version, they left out the best line: “All the tyranny in the world will never put a god up [...]
Yesterday on Friendly Atheist there was a vigorous debate in the comments section about whether there is a real and important difference between claiming one lacks belief in God (or gods) and outright claiming that there is no God (or gods). Here is a nice formulation of the argument that the distinction is an irrelevant [...]