Republicans are freaking out and fundamentalist Christians are declaring that the Ebola “outbreak” in America is the start of the End Times. The media is in full court press mode. The only thing that can knock Ebola out of the news now is a missing plane or a political sex scandal and even they might not be able to take down this scary sounding virus that almost no one in America actually has.
Category featured
Last night, I went to the Church to give my presentation. To start with, I asked the Pastor if I could tape a letter to the Church door as part of my presentation. He allowed it. My letter was a list of 10 things that all atheists agree about. Each numbered item was a particular deity that atheists lack a belief in. I tried to pick a mix of deities what were mostly pretty well known. Of course the last deity on the list was Yahweh.
Recently, my 5-year-old son was running around the house and knocked over my glass. It broke and while no one was hurt, it was a glass I really liked. My son immediately apologized, but I told him that I could not forgive him until he went out and mercilessly slaughtered an innocent lamb. I explained to him that I love him and that I want to forgive him, but until he sacrifices the innocent blood of a lamb, I just could not forgive him. Those are the rules. I didn’t make them up; God did.
In a recent interview on CNN, Muslim apologist Reza Aslan made it clear that barbaric practices like female genital mutilation and the treatment of women in a few Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran has no place in the 21st century. However, he doesn’t think this has anything to do with Islam. The fact that so many countries ruled by Muslim theocracies also just so happen to treat women as horribly must be a coincidence.
About a year ago, I read a news story about a proposal to give every citizen in Switzerland $2800 as a basic income. I remember talking about this with my progressive friends and to my surprise I was the only one who really thought this was a great idea. Sure, critics could easily point out that idea would obviously sound great to me because I am a stay-at-home dad who works a part-time retail job making slightly above minimum wage, but that isn’t why I actually liked the idea.
I’m not really a fan of Michael Bay because most of his films are basically disaster porn. But that’s okay because this blog post has nothing really to do with him. It has to do with a comment someone left on my Facebook page in relation the video of Leonardo DiCaprio’s speech to the United Nations about Climate Change.
Religious believers often claim that atheists choose to not believe in God for various reasons. Some will even say that our choice not to believe is just a phase. Obviously I disagree with that point of view, but more than that I disagree with the premise that atheism or even belief is a choice at all.
I haven’t created a YouTube video in a while, so I figured now might be a good time to get back into that. In my latest video, I ask religious believers and former religious believers about the line of religious crazy. Basically, I am curious about what aspects of religion are too crazy even for the religious. Check it out:
When I think of what kinds of things atheists should be doing to change the way the general public perceives us, I will now be thinking of people like Jaclyn Glenn. In a recent YouTube video she and her friends went out on the streets of LA for two days to raise money for Children’s Hospital. The catch is that on the first day they had a sign saying they were doing it on behalf of the United Methodists and on the second day, they had a sign saying they were doing it on behalf of the United Atheists. Check it out:
The other day, I was picking up some fast food. When I returned to my car, I noticed that the car next to mine had the window open and there was a woman sitting inside. I smiled politely at her and might have even said hello as I unlocked my car door. It was at that moment when she extended her hand to give me a pamphlet.