I have a confession to make. As the atheist movement grew explosively, flourishing in a World Wide Web of disbelief, I slept through it. I awoke from my coma into this unexplored universe of unbelievers. I had been an atheist since I was 14, and my first published work appeared in American Atheist Magazine. I even published a satire of God. Yet I didn’t truly dip my toe into the secular stream until I started pouring my own writing into... Read more
I wrote this on my own personal blog last Saturday. It seems to have resonated with many. I felt I would share it here as well. This is what I mean by stories without isms. The other day I had a man say in the same breath to me that he did not have any bias against GLBT people and then told me that my child did not have a right to use the men’s rooms and then likened my kid... Read more
I wanted to be a Bride of Christ. I thought everything about the Church was beautiful. Now I find most of it disgusting. Read more
I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a guy who learned more about people driving a taxi than I did from more than a decade in a pulpit. By Pat Green. Read more
Mary, an electrician, and Bob, an administrative assistant, are happily married, and have been for 5 years. They met in their high school ninth-grade math class, where they sat at the same desk. Bob began courting Mary two weeks after they met. By tenth grade, they had been going steady for 6 months. They got engaged at the end of eleventh grade, and married right after their high school graduation. They are widely known as a great couple, and... Read more
I used to joke that the chicken or the egg riddle was actually an evolution vs. creationism debate (though I’m not the first to come up with this idea). For evolutionists, the egg came first, since any genetic change which made the fetal fowl more like a chicken than its parents occurred when the egg was fertilized. For creationists, God said, “Let there be chickens.” And there was. But another chicken or egg question also lies at the heart of... Read more
Isn't the National Day of Reason just pitting reason against faith once again? When does this script get tired? Read more
Passover will pass over on Saturday…and I couldn’t care less. So what, you may say, neither could I. But Judaism is the religion I don’t practice. And since I was raised by an agnostic mother who felt no desire to keep up traditions she felt no connection to, I grew up with little sense of what it meant to be Jewish. When I was a kid, I learned to answer the question of what my religion was with a rote,... Read more
Caption: Donald Trump pointing (image credit) Despite desperate opposition from the Republican establishment, Trump has dominated the primary process, most recently with his decisive victory in New York. Mainstream politicians and commentators who use traditional frameworks to analyze the situation struggle to explain Trump’s success with voters. Turning to neuroscience helps provide a more accurate explanation, by revealing that Trump’s popularity stems from his masterful ability to resonate with the emotions of many Americans. For example, consider his... Read more
Today is the third birthday I wasn’t expected to celebrate. That makes it a very happy birthday indeed. As atheists, we travel through life with a sense of agency over it, but also with a realization of our lack of complete control. While we believe that there’s no God watching over us, at least he’s not waiting for the moment to give us the divine screw-over. Life sometime does that all on its own. Everything happens for a reason? As my... Read more
The Secular Spectrum
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