Days after the Pope implied that good atheists are welcome in Heaven, the Vatican Secretariat of State allegedly Tweeted, “Intolerance against Christians, especially in the name of ‘tolerance’, should be condemned publicly.”
Tag Christianity
A Christian blog I read recently wrote about an old question asked to public intellectuals in 1908 by G.K. Chesterton. The question was, “What is wrong with the world?” Of course I have a very different take on the question than my Christian counterpart, but I think it is an interesting question to explore.
There are two kinds of people in the world, those who are like me and those who are different from me. Those who are different from me can’t be reasoned with because they are different than me on a fundamental level. I believe in inclusion but those that are different from me categorize people into two groups of people. Because they are different from me, they deserve to be belittled and attacked. We need to drive them out of our community and make them social pariahs.
I recently had a Christian message me to tell me that one of my articles offended him. He was apparently offended by my use of facts. I have known many other Christians who also seem to be offended by facts. They feel that the facts are attacking them and well they should because they are.
We’ve all heard that the internet is where religions go to die and it’s true. Recently, VJack over at Atheist Revolution published a great post about his struggle to find information on atheism before the internet. It got me thinking about my own struggles in the early days of they called “The World Wide Web.”
Strictly speaking, atheism is simply a lack of belief in deities. However, being part of the greater community of reason for several years now, I have noticed something. Most active atheists tend to also be humanists… even if they don’t like that term. In this sense there are atheist values.
Last night, I was a guest lecturer at a community college sociology class. The subject was atheism and secular humanism. I started out talking about the beginnings of religion and at one point outlined how the Old Testament came together. One fundamentalist Christian in the class questioned my account and well she should have because it is pretty damning to her fundamentalist beliefs and because I think it is important to question everything.
Awhile back, a Christian Tweeted an interesting question to atheists. The question was this: “Why would you risk your soul? #atheism” Now, I know the Christian wasn’t actually expecting an answer, but I would like to answer this question anyway.
Many Christians love to tell their stories of how they got saved. I think it is also valuable for atheists to tell our stories of how we became damned to eternal torture… I mean how we de-converted from religion to atheism. The thing is that I think atheists and Christians have very different processes for how we came to our present position on the existence of deities. I don’t really want to know how someone got saved, but I would like to know what convinced them of their beliefs. That is not necessarily the same thing.
On Sunday, Google put up a picture of Hugo Chavez on their main search engine page. Apparently, a lot of Christians were extremely offended by this. They weren’t offended because of the now dead Venezuelan leader’s policies or because they just didn’t like the guy. No, they were offended because it was Easter and Google didn’t give a shout-out to Jesus.