If you could be any superhero, you should always choose Batman. It is a basic law of comic book geekery. In a fight between Batman and pretty anyone, Batman always wins. Batman is a detective who researches his adversary, finds their weakness, and figures out how to exploit it. While he cannot fly, doesn’t have heat vision, can’t command the fish with telepathy, or have any other supernatural abilities, he does have the super power of logic.
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!
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:
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.”
Picture this, you are walking on a beach and all you see for miles is sand. Then, out of nowhere you find a perfectly formed rock. How do you suppose it got there? How could a rock have formed naturally?
When we think about religious believers, we tend to think that they all actually believe in the belief system that they identify with, however that might not always be the case. Many religious believers are brought up in the traditions of religion but might not really believe in the actual beliefs – and really, who can blame them. Many of those beliefs are pretty ridiculous.
Often religious believers will claim that science can’t apply to religion. What they really mean to say is that they would rather not apply science to religion because if science were to apply to religion, it would be extremely obvious that religious claims are not actually true. So of course they will assert that science can’t apply to religion because if you are a religious person, you have to believe that or sacrifice your religion to the alter of science.
This is why I love it that the number one online news program are filled with rational people who self-identify as “agnostics.” The on-air personalities of The Young Turks aren’t those mean atheists like me; they are open-minded progressives like me. They are also not “preaching” to the “choir” in that their audience isn’t just atheists. I don’t know if I can call them mainstream, but they are certainly more mainstream than the average atheist broadcaster.
Many times in my conversations with religious believers, they attempt to define me as dogmatic. They claim that “atheists” must hold to the position that there is no God and that we can’t accept the possibility that we could be wrong. They maintain that the agnostic position is the only valid position one can hold and yet they themselves are religious believers.
I’m an atheist activist and I’m pretty open about it. All my relatives, people from High School, College, former co-workers, theistic friends, etc. all know that I am an atheist who writes about atheism. Many of these people are also atheists, but many are not. Sometimes I get asked, “Why do you always bash religion?”