Before I Deconverted: I Dabbled With Calvinism In College (Everyone Was Doing It)

February 27, 2012 By 112 Comments

I’m writing a series of posts about my Christian upbringing and the philosophical and personal road to my deconversion. Often it is easy for atheists, especially for those who never were serious religious believers, to not understand how religious thinking works from the inside. What counts as evidence for or against theological propositions when you [...]

Filed Under: Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, God, God, Personal, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion, Religion Tagged With: , , , , 112 Comments

Is It Just A Mystery Whether God Exists?

February 16, 2012 By 71 Comments

Robin: Jaime, what bothers me about your atheism is that it’s so dogmatic. You claim to know there is no God. That’s so arrogant. Jaime: Yes, I claim to know there are no gods. But I don’t claim it dogmatically or arrogantly. I claim it based upon the fact that the evidence is overwhelmingly against [...]

Filed Under: Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Atheism, God, God, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 71 Comments

God and Goodness

January 30, 2012 By 32 Comments

Robin: Look, I get it, Jaime. As an atheist, you think that God’s wisdom is foolishness, that God’s righteousness is wickedness, and that the bloody death of Jesus on the cross is hateful and ugly rather than the epitome of love and beauty that Christians like I think it is. The Bible makes it very [...]

Filed Under: Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Authority, Authority, Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, Ethics, Examining Conceptions of God's Attributes, Goodness, Knowability, and Existence, God, God, Metaethics, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Morality, Morality, My Theory of Morality's Rational Foundations and Nature, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy Of Religion, Problem of Evil, Rationalism, Religion, Religion Tagged With: , , , 32 Comments

Hell As The Absence of God

January 29, 2012 By 86 Comments

Robin: I know you don’t want to hear it, but Jesus loves you, Jaime. Jaime: Yes, yes, a man who either never existed or who is long dead and rotted by now loves me—and will torture me in hell forever if I don’t worship him, of course. Robin: He just wants you to love him but [...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, God, God, Jesus, Jesus, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism Tagged With: , , 86 Comments

Atheism and the Sacred: Being-Itself

December 22, 2011 By 9 Comments

Paul Tillich defined God as being-itself.  He argued that being-itself is not any being; it is not a thing, and it does not even exist.  For Tillich, being-itself transcends existence.  It cannot be identified with any being (neither with any particular nor with any universal).  It cannot be located within the categories of any ontology [...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Featured, God, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Rationalism 9 Comments

A Few Christian Replies to Hitchens's Death Worth Noting

December 17, 2011 By 6 Comments

Shortly before Christopher Hitchens’s death, Andrew Sullivan movingly reminisced about him and gave a sense of how their friendship was so strong despite such differing views on faith:

Filed Under: Atheism, Christianity, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, God, God, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Religion, Religion 6 Comments

Thoughts and Questions About Obama

December 11, 2011 By 8 Comments

Before Obama, America had not elected as president a legislator, either a congressperson or a senator, for decades. We have consistently preferred governors, vice presidents, and generals. Now in electing Obama we have a legislator, law professor, and grass roots organizer. We have someone whose skills are building consensus, managing intricate relationships with allies and enemies, [...]

Filed Under: 2008 Presidential Race, 2008 Presidential Race, Barack Obama, Barack Obama, Disambiguating Faith, Disambiguating Faith, Examining Conceptions of God's Attributes, Goodness, Knowability, and Existence, Faith, Faith, God, God, Philosophy Of Religion, Politics, Politics, Problem of Evil 8 Comments

Dan Barker Makes Sense of the Gospel Message

December 3, 2011 By 3 Comments

I know Dan Barker claims to be only a former Christian minister but he still has a gift for bringing the Gospel message alive in a fresh, new way that makes powerful sense of it. It’s weird it would take an atheist’s description to make me see angles in the story of salvation which I [...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Atheist Videos, Atheist Videos, Christianity, Christianity, God, God, Hilarious, Jesus, Jesus, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Religulous, Religulous, Satire, Satire 3 Comments

Learning About Love From The Bible

November 24, 2011 By 3 Comments

Using the “New Comprehensive Self-Referencing, Taking The Words on the Page To Mean What They Actually Say Version” of the Bible (that’s the NCSRTTWOTPTMWTASV), NonStampCollector shows us how the biblical God of love (the God who is love) models and illuminates for us all the virtues of love described in 1 Corinthians 13: Your Thoughts?

Filed Under: Atheism, Atheist Videos, Atheist Videos, Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, God, God, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Religious Satire, Religious Satire 3 Comments

Internecine War At Freethought Blogs: Philosopher vs. "Redneck" Edition: Free Will And The Real World Smackdown

September 10, 2011 By 19 Comments

As far as I have noticed, there has not been a blog war between any of the Freethought Blogs (or, er, since we all moved here anyway) so I was a little trepidatious of going and picking apart the every word of a quick comment on one of my posts by my new favorite blogger, Hank [...]

Filed Under: Applied Ethics, Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheism, Autonomy, Autonomy, Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Ethics, Ethics, Faith, Faith, God, God, Hypocrisy, Hypocrisy, Metaethics, Metaphysics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, My Theory of Morality's Rational Foundations and Nature, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Mind, Psychology, Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Psychology Tagged With: 19 Comments