Meet Jesy Littlejohn, Founder of “Rainbow Bridge”, Grove City College’s Unrecognized LGBTQ Awareness Group

Grove City College, my alma mater from which I graduated with a BA in Philosophy and a minor in Religion in 2000, is an Evangelical Christian college which ranks among America’s most religiously and politically conservative colleges.  Princeton Review ranks Grove City among the “Best Northeastern Colleges” and among the 373 best colleges in the [...]

Why Atheists Should Not Give Up Challenging Theism And Theists

GreenGeekGirl advises the atheist community (and she has a nice defense of the existence of an atheist community against those who do not believe one exists) that we should no longer bother arguing with theists, since this is supposedly futile, but should rather accept we have it pretty good in America and focus on protecting [...]

Defending The Apparent Truth Of Evolution’s Mindlessness

Last Christmas Eve, I argued that the belief that God “guided evolution” was not a rationally respectable way to reconcile science with faith but rather it was essentially an effective denial of the theory of natural selection, in its scientifically explanatory sense. Part of the revolutionary character of the discovery of evolution by natural selection [...]

“If You Believe In God, You Have To Believe In The Devil”

Last summer there was a cheesy ad for the latest Exorcist film, and the tagline epitomized and exploited a key twist of twisted religious logic.  The film’s tagline was “If you believe in God, you have to believe in the devil.”  What’s the idea behind this?  

Apostasy As A Religious Act (Or “Why A Camel Hammers The Idols Of Faith”)

In “The Three Transformations of the Spirit” in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra describes the human spirit as successively taking three different forms: the camel, the lion, and the child. The transformations begin with the spirit of the camel, which Nietzsche characterizes as consisting of obedient, self-sacrificing, reverential, [...]

What Can An Atheist Love In People’s Religiosity?

Earlier today, I argued that atheists can vigorously and outspokenly oppose bad faith-based ideas, values, and behaviors, but still love other aspects of the religiosity of their religious friends (and of religious people in general). I argued that religion can be as central to personal identity formation as sexuality is and that to indiscriminately hate [...]

Islamic Apologist, Shabir Ally, Argues Quran And Evolution Are Consistent

Of course I disagree, but I’m sure glad he thinks so and hope more Muslims do too. Your Thoughts?

On Defending True Spirituality And Taking The Word Back From Spiritually Bankrupt Fundamentalism

So Chris Mooney’s article in Playboy about the spirituality of scientists has sparked some interesting debate in the atheist blogosphere. His new post on the subject explicitly interprets his aims and themes in the piece as essentially saying what I interpreted them to be—to defend the idea that you can have completely sufficient spirituality without [...]

Scientists’ Spiritualities As Alternative Models Of Religiosity

In my last post, I made clear that I am by no means an “accommodationist” who wants to let religious claims to hegemony over ethics, metaphysics, or epistemology go unchallenged as part of a deal whereby it agrees to either cooperate with or, minimally, not interfere with science education and science-based public policy.  In a [...]

How Belief In “Theistic Evolution” Is Nearly As Much A Denial Of Science As Creationism

One often hears the refrain that it’s possible to believe in both God and evolution.  And it is in fact true, both psychologically and, more importantly, logically, that one may both believe in God and in evolution. Psychologically we have ample evidence that plenty of people believe in both and logically it is clear that [...]