I really respect and like what Dillahunty said in his closing speech here (the video is linked to the correct…
Tag atheism
The term fundamentalism is bandied about with wild abandon, but what does it really mean? We have an intuitive sense of what it means, perhaps. When I use the term, I have in my mind ideas of hardliner, fanatical beliefs, adhered to by uncompromising believers in a dogmatic insistence that a particular (holy) text and/or ideology is correct.
Metaphysical thought processes are more deeply wired than hitherto suspected
WHILE MILITANT ATHEISTS like Richard Dawkins may be convinced God doesn’t exist, God, if he is around, may be amused to find that atheists might not exist.
Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged.
I, as you may well know, contribute to the Skepticule podcast by recording a counter-apologetics segment for them, Pearced Off.…
I was involved in a little discussion over at Advocatus Atheist the some time ago with regard to whether a secular and skeptical approach can spell the end of religion. I found this to be interesting. Even if the evidence (does it not already) overwhelmingly ruled in favour of the disbelief in a personal god, would religion still tenuously hang on to the threads of desperate hope or ritualistic comforts that humanity seems to endure?
OK, so if you have been following the debacle of the schools in Birmingham, UK, which have involved the schools…
I have posted this some time back. If you don’t mind Aussie swearing, then watch this diamond piece of comedy:…
Brilliant:
The new book that I have co-edited with Tristan Vick called Beyond an Absence of Faith: Stories About the Loss of Faith and the Discovery of Self has been really favourably reviewed by those who have read it, and hopefully some of those reviews will filter trough the internet.
My book, The Little Book of Unholy Questions, is a cumulative case against God (the Judeo-Christian version predominantly, but not exclusively) and it includes a number of chapters on different topics. I will include the last questions in the book before I sum up there. These questions are by an large irreverent. But actually, many do pack a punch, if you tease out what they can lead to.
I was invited to speak on the last night of Reason Week at Southampton University, organised by the Atheist Society. I have spoken there a number of ties and know the people who run it and really enjoy speaking there. There are some philosophy students who are involved which means that the chat in the pub afterwards is always engaging and often properly geeky. Nice.
For Hitchens and co, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Never mind that tyrants devoid of religion such as Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot perpetrated the worst atrocities in history. As H. Allen Orr, professor of biology at the University of Rochester, observed, the 20th century was an experiment in secularism that produced secular evil, responsible for the unprecedented murder of more than 100 million. (Abramovich, 2009)
Just thought this list of atheists in film and television, from wikipedia, was interesting: Douglas Adams (1952–2001): British radio and television…
Some time back I posted an argument on mentalizing deficits with regard to God being unfair. This broadly stated that certain autistic type people who have an inability to empathise are less likely to believe in God, presumably because the intersubjectivity of empathy allows an agent to see the,selves from somebody else’s point of view. This means that they are less able to suppose what God would think about them whilst doing any given moral action, and such like. The abstract, to the paper looked at in the post, reads:
Christian:
Why is it more probable that your god exists than man made him up?
We have an exceptionally high prior probability that your god is false given that we both believe that every other god claimed to be true (before and after) is false. Thus, on prior probability, the JC God is HIGHLY unlikely to exist. How does the Christian overcome this? They have to provide high CONSEQUENT probability. ie Evidence. But this is poor. Let’s take the four Gospels, written by unknown people at unknown dates in unknown places with ex post facto agendas to evangelise, at least 40 years after the person they are writing about and whom they have never met, has died.
Here is another account in my series of real-life deconversion stories. They are often painful, psychological affairs, as you can see from the various accounts. Phil Stilwell, someone whom I came across on facebook (The Unbelievable page). It is a few years old now, but well worth the read. Happy reading. The previous accounts can be found here:
This is a fascinating account of someone I met on facebook who has interesting things to say with regard to religion and society in a part of the world which is easy to misunderstand for someone like me. I found mention of sleep paralysis interesting as I have suffered a few times with this and my sister had it badly for years. It is prevalent in African folklore and I can see how it must contribute to ideas of the supernatural.
Anyway, here is an insight into being nonreligious in a very religious and superstitious context:
As part of the continuing efforts to get the message out about the Star of Bethlehem and the failure to explain it with astronomy, I was interviewed on the Exposing Pseudoastronomy podcast, run by Stuart Robbins, an young planetary scientist and skeptic. In the past, the podcast has tackled lots of material from Coast to Coast AM and some of their top guests, such asRichard Hoagland, in great but comfortable detail. That should be enough reason to subscribe to this skeptical outlet.
It’s no secret that I am a big fan of John Loftus’ books. He has written some corkers. In fact, his class Why I Became an Atheist (or WIBA) is exactly that, a classic. It remains one of the best counter-apologetics books out there and was hugely significant in contributing to my movement toward being so interested in the philosophy of religion.
Let me go through them one by one.
I, as you may well know, contribute to the Skepticule podcast by recording a counter-apologetics segment for them, Pearced Off.…