A Sickening Act of Violence Has Struck Us Today

An act of sickening violence has occurred. Let’s keep our hearts with the victims and our minds vigilantly on the look out for ways we can proactively help them. And let’s especially remember not to be hasty about posting unsubstantiated rumors and accusations and speculations about who is behind this or about the full nature of what has happened today, whether ideologically or factually. Fear mongering, hate mongering, warmongering, and conspiracy-mongering all begin with rumormongering. So, let’s hold our bars for evidence and for justice as high as they should always be and focus on our compassion for all innocent people, including those who others might treat with guilt by association.

Why Was The Reason Rally An Atheist Rally, Instead of Just a Secularist One?

Many of us movement atheists fear Christian supremacism and theocratic intentions when right wing Christians mix their political rallies with professions of their religious beliefs and affirmdations of their religious identities. So, to make sure we are not hypocrites, in this post I explore the question of whether it was a good idea for us to have The Reason Rally be so much an atheism rally, rather than a broadly secularist rally. Should we have focused on our identities as atheists and our non-beliefs as much as we did on our politics? I explore the challenge that we should have just kept our political agitation separate from our private cultural and philosophical beliefs if we didn’t want to imply we wanted to impose our private philosophical views about religion on everyone through political means. I also talk about why it was important to have an atheists only rally and not just an “interfaith/no-faith” secularist rally.

Why I Write About My Deconversion

“I aim to make clear to Christians that I was one of them, that all my life was willingly committed to their God and that all my emotions were on the side of their God when my intellect was dissuaded against my will. I was not, as much as they want to assume, looking to leave Christianity, biased against Christianity, unable or unwilling to dutifully follow the rules of Christianity, disposed against the God of Christianity, unfamiliar with the most sophisticated philosophical or theological versions of Christianity, or unfamiliar with how wonderful Christians or Christian community could be. I had been there, done that, and despite wanting nothing more than to believe, I had found that I could no longer believe–either rationally or ethically. The best arguments for the faith had failed. The best arguments against it were overwhelming. And as a matter of intellectual and moral conscience, I could no longer believe fantastic claims that had the preponderance of rational evidence stacked overwhelmingly against them. I deconverted against my will.”

10 Reasons To Scrutinize A Candidate’s Faith (or not)

Religiously explicit political candidates cannot have it both ways. They cannot promise an elevated influence of religious faith on public life and not have the nature and meaning of their religious beliefs go unexamined. They cannot say that the most important source of values and beliefs they have is their faith and then dismiss inquiries into the contents of their faith as irrelevant personal trivialities.

“It’s amazing what some people will justify through their religion, isn’t it?”

Why should it be amazing that people who adhere to their religions sincerely actually adopt the regressive or militaristic values often explicitly attributed to their god or gods in their sacred writings themselves? Isn’t that what you would expect? That they would believe in and adopt the values of their sacred texts? Let’s stop equating religion with goodness just because religions say they are the arbiters of morality and its best promoters.

“Atheism+” =/= “Humanism”. Sign Me Up For “Atheism+”.

Why identify with “Atheism+” rather than just with Humanism? I was skeptical and confused about this at first but I have been wholly impressed and convinced by Ashley and Heina on this topic

Is Religious Circumcision of Male Infants Morally Defensible?

Last month a court in Cologne, Germany ruled against allowing the circumcision of children too young to give consent. CBS News summarized the facts: a German court ruled that circumcision infringes on a child’s right to be protected from bodily harm. The regional court in Cologne said that circumcision went against the “fundamental right of [...]

No Obligation to Protect Those Deviant Atheist High School Students?

Today on WWJTD, JT relates the details of a letter the Secular Student Alliance received from a high school teacher bragging about how he and his fellow Christian teachers thwarted some of their students who were attempting to start an SSA group. From the teacher’s letter: When beliefs are far from what is considered the norm you [...]

In Which I Answer Leah Libresco's Moral Philosophy Concerns So You Don't Become A Catholic Too

Leah Libresco was an irreligious person with little interest in religious issues until as a Yale undergraduate she began dating a Catholic, reading Catholic theology and apologetics, and going to church with him. She wrote a blog about her process of weighing Catholicism against atheism. Recently, she converted to Catholicism. I have previously analyzed some of [...]

Jesse Galef and the Obnoxious CNN Interview Questions

So Jesse Galef of the Secular Student Alliance (on whose behalf I am awake in the wee hours of the morning blogging as part of a 24 hour blogathon) appeared on CNN today and the questions he got (nor the tone of voice he got them in) could not have been any more smarmy, indignantly [...]