Welcome to the new Unequally Yoked!

Welcome to the official launch of Unequally Yoked here on Patheos!  Technical note first: if you run into any problems, please post a comment in the bug-spotting thread.  Now, let me introduce myself properly:

I grew up with atheist patents in a pretty secular neighborhood (when we learned about the Reformation in AP Euro, one student asked if Lutherans still existed today). I didn’t know any particularly religious Christians until college, when I joined a debating group that had knockdown, drag-out fights that often pitted Libertarians against Catholics. Not falling into either of these categories, I tended to pick fights with everyone and came in for my share of questioning in return.

And then I started dating a nice Catholic boy. (I traded my Mass attendance for his presence at ballroom dance lessons, and it’s worked out pretty well so far). So between one thing and another, I was spending a lot of time arguing with smart Christians and I needed to step up my game.

Most of the prominent New Atheists have gone after the fundamentalist evangelicals. You know the type: creationists, young earthers, homophobes – just plain anti-empiricists. That’s not the fight I’ve chosen. The arguments get boring fast, and it feels like bashing your head against a wall.

That’s not to say that those arguments aren’t worth having or that I’m not grateful that other people are manning the front lines of a battle I’m not very good at. I get to have more fun arguing about the ethics of drone strikes and the cultural history of sin-eaters, but the stakes are a lot lower than the fight over the Texas state science curriculum.

Although the political dimensions of atheism are urgent, I want this blog to continue to be a space focused mainly on personal ethics and philosophy (not that either of those are without their political implications!). I’m excited to be here at Patheos with the opportunity to reach out to people at the various portals and spark crosstalk.

Picking fights with dumb people is a recipe for lazy thinking, so I hope this blog can be an opportunity for people on any side of the religion question to burn off the dross and refine their ideas.

Let me put it this way, I promise to try to live up to the Litany of Gendlin if you will.

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.

Now, may the correct side win.