The Holiday Season is here and Christmas is right around the corner. This is the season of gift giving and religious believers often love to give atheists the gift of some apologist’s book that would totally convince us that God is real and Jesus was his only begotten son… if we would just read it and forget everything we know about reality.
Category Religion
A 2012 study published in the journal Science is making the rounds on the interwebs again. In one part of the study, the researchers suggest that they can predict if someone is religious or an atheist based on how the person answers three mathematical word problems. That sounds fun!
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.
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:
I’m an atheist and I write a lot about atheism. People come to my blog or read my articles usually knowing that I am an atheist and yet I get accused of “throwing atheism in everyone’s face.”
A few years ago, I got into a religious conversation with my ultra-Jewish cousin. This was a long awaiting exchange of ideas. My cousin is very smart and so I was expecting a pretty interesting debate-style conversation. What I got was the same typical arguments I have gotten from newly minted born-again Christians.
The Supreme Court just ruled that corporations can have religious exemptions from laws. This is ridiculously insane for so many reasons.
Rabbi David Wolpe was named the most influential Rabbi in the country by Newsweek Magazine in 2012. He is also no stranger to high profile debates with atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Recently he posted an interesting meme on his Facebook page which inspired me to make a comment. Wolpe responded and I want to share our brief exchange and my thoughts about it in more detail. Here is the meme: