Thanks for your suggestions, the survey is now LIVE. There are fifteen Ideological Turing Test contestants in all, and, starting tomorrow, you’ll get the chance to vote on which of the answers to questions for atheists were truly written by atheists. I’ll be posting all the remaining entries by noon on Friday, and then I’ll open up a link to a Google form for voting. I’m finishing up the survey instrument tonight, and I wanted to open up suggestions... Read more
This post is part of the Ideological Turing Test Challenge. Go to the tab above for an overview and remind yourself of the voting and commenting guidelines here. What’s your best reason for being an atheist? Evidence, plain and simple. There is no historical evidence compelling enough that can be accepted based on actual facts. Previous reasons for believing in gods were based on events, such as the creation of the world, weather patterns, etc, people and cultures could not... Read more
This post is part of the Ideological Turing Test Challenge. Go to the tab above for an overview and remind yourself of the voting and commenting guidelines here. What’s your best reason for being an atheist? My best reason for being an atheist is simply that it is the default position. I have not encountered any sufficiently strong reason to cause me to believe that there is a supernatural power, and so I go back to the default position that... Read more
This post is part of the Ideological Turing Test Challenge. Go to the tab above for an overview and remind yourself of the voting and commenting guidelines here. What’s your best reason for being an atheist? I’m an atheist for several reasons, but there are two reasons that are primary. One is that the reality I’ve experienced so far is consistent with there being no God. It seems to me that reality is furthermore not consistent with the existence of... Read more
First things first, I want to give credit to Hemant Mehta who originally posted on the Rebecca Watson/sexual harassment/privilege dispute in a way that ticked a lot of feminists off. Yesterday he clarified and reflected, and I appreciate his patience and willingness to listen when people tried to argue respectfully. Here’s part of what he wrote that I think is especially good: Some people (mostly men) have said the elevator incident wasn’t a big deal. Here’s what you may not... Read more
This post is part of the Ideological Turing Test Challenge. Go to the tab above for an overview and remind yourself of the voting and commenting guidelines here. What’s your best reason for being an atheist? I’d say that the best reason is the simplest: the lack of sufficient evidence that a god or god exists. Although, I have to say that this is tempered by the problem of definition. An omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being is logically impossible, but once... Read more
This post is part of the Ideological Turing Test Challenge. Go to the tab above for an overview and remind yourself of the voting and commenting guidelines here. What’s your best reason for being an atheist? This is like asking: “What’s your best reason for not believing in a wide variety of mutually contradictory stories about magical invisible playground swings?” If I really need reasons, here are a few: Without even considering the space of all possible deities (which is... Read more
This post is part of the Ideological Turing Test Challenge. Go to the tab above for an overview and remind yourself of the voting and commenting guidelines here. What’s your best reason for being an atheist? Anything which is true is known by the senses and also at the same time explained by reason. Experientially or experimentally, there is no test for God. Rationally or logically, all definitions of God fail. The first scientific experiments by Empedocles 2500 years ago... Read more
The Turing Test is ongoing (two more entries going up today, and more through the week), but I want to interrupt that for a second to try to talk about privilege and sexism one more time. In the two posts about Rebecca Watson’s experience at an atheist conference, some discussions about whether women are being ‘oversensitive’ when we talk about privilege got tangled up in disputes over the way Rebecca had called out the people she disagreed with. Let me... Read more
This post is part of the Ideological Turing Test Challenge. Go to the tab above for an overview and remind yourself of the voting and commenting guidelines here. What’s your best reason for being an atheist? There is no evidence that gods exists, and a lot of evidence to the contrary that humans are psychologically predisposed to invent gods. Both the lack of evidence for deities and the presence of evidence for bias are products of scientific inquiry. So science... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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