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.
Tag God
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.
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.
Obviously, it is my strongly help opinion based on the complete lack of evidence and compelling counter-evidence that the entire Christian mythology is fiction. While I am fond of spreading the real “Good News,” that Hell is imaginary too, I think just talking about the concept of Hell is a win for atheism.
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.
Over the weekend, I had an experience that I just can’t explain rationally. A few weeks ago, I went on Ray Comfort’s Facebook page and he challenged atheists to read his book. I told him that I was game and sure enough, he sent me a copy. I was in the middle of debunking the crap out of it when I decided to take a break. My financial situation hasn’t been great lately and I have been thinking a great deal about that. Before I started reading Ray Comfort’s book again, I decided to pray to God for money. I mean, if God can help basketball teams, he should be able to help out too, right? Here is what happened; I picked up Comfort’s book and a ten dollar bill fell out of it. God has answered my prayers!
Equality for gays to marry is in the news again as the Supreme Court heard two cases this week on the subject. Surprisingly, even many Christians are starting to come around on this topic. However, some (not all) of the Christians who support marriage equality still have this problem of believing that homosexuality is a sin.
Many religious believers seem to think that they have the monopoly on awe and wonder in the universe. Some actually cite awe and wonder as evidence for their deity of choice. This I think is an insult to the human experience.
I used to tell some of my Christian friends that I don’t have faith in deities, but that I do have faith in people. This was and still is often my opening line in many conversations with religious believers.