The A-Unicornist

Sometimes I think that believers fail to realize that atheists don't actually believe in God. Any kind of god. And that we don't actually believe the Bible is true.

Yesterday, my brother's former pastor from a church in Boston commented on a humorous atheism-themed picture I have on my Facebook page. This is what he wrote:
Did you wake up this morning? Are you still breathing? Be grateful, it's a gift from God.
Do you know what this is? It is a statement of personal faith. It's not an inquiry into my beliefs. It's not an attempt to rebut anything I've said, ever. It's not remotely an attempt to discuss theological issues in any way at all. You know why? Because I don't believe that God exists! You might as well tell me that each breath is a gift from Voltron.

I responded with some sarcastic remark about how I was glad God didn't change his mind like he does with all those millions of miscarriages every year. I mean, really. Christians love to tal…

Conversations about religion don't come up often in my day to day life (shocker!), but on the occasion that they do, I am often asked why I do not believe in God. That's not a difficult question for me to answer, but it's a really difficult question for me to answer concisely. It seems that the most common answer is something like, "Because there's no evidence that God exists." But that just opens up a whole can of worms, because some nincompoop is going to say something like, "Oh yeah, well then how did the universe get here?" or "Just the fact that something exists instead of nothing is evidence," and then you get dragged into a conversation that you really didn't want to have while you were out drinking with your friends.

So, I've been trying to come up with a concise answer to the question – one that leaves the believer more humbly inquisitive, rather than provoking them to ask pompous follow-up questions so obvious that you…

Today, Obama met with representatives from the Secular Coalition of America to discuss problems fueled by religion. From USA Today:
The main discussion points were, according to Margaret Talev's McClatchy article:
"child medical neglect" -- Many religious child care centers are exempted from the health and safety regulations under which secular health centers are run."military proselytizing" -- The coalition asserts that the increasing number of evangelical Christians in the military is causing religious discrimination and that these Christians believe they must promote Christianity as part of their military duty."faith-based initiatives" -- The coalition says the Bush administration created programs like the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to unconstitutionally funnel money to religious institutions.I'm a little mixed on the idea of atheism as a social movement, mainly because of the fact that there are innumerable stupi…

Well, this article just gave me a tickle. I'm a liberal, an atheist, and I'm writing this at 3:44 in the morning. And apparently, all of these things are strongly correlated with a high level of intelligence.

I've never thought it was a coincidence that people who identify as atheist or agnostic, in my experience anyway, tend to be more politically liberal. I live in Oklahoma – the buckle of the Bible belt – and I've rarely met non-religious conservatives or religious liberals. And and I don't find it coincidence either that among the religious, those who do espouse more liberal theological views also tend to swing left at the ballot box. Now there is some good science backing this up: highly intelligent people are indeed much more likely to be atheists and liberals.

Is this really all that surprising though? I remember a survey of the National Academy of Sciences showing basically a mirror opposite of the general population of the U.S., with a paltry 7% of scientis…

Generally speaking, when people attain credentials marking high levels of specialized knowledge, I feel obliged to show some measure of respect for their achievement. I would not be so presumptuous, for example, as to lecture someone with a PhD in physics on the implications of quantum mechanics. This isn't a hard and fast rule, of course; people with doctoral degrees can still say and do stupid things, often by stepping outside their field of expertise. And not all education is created equal – I'm not about to be impressed by someone who has a degree from Regent University. But, generally speaking, I think most of us realize that the high level of specialized knowledge marked by such degrees indicates that at least on their particular subject, they speak from some position of authority.

This is not the case with clergy. Whether they call themselves reverend, pastor, minister, father, or dear leader, being an expert in theology is like being an expert in astrology or homeopath…

Pope John Paul II seemed to take a more liberal view of hell, describing it as "the ultimate consequence of sin itself . . . Rather than a place, Hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy." But leave it to the newer (yet still old), more conservative Bearer of Pointlessly Large Hats to proclaim that hell is not merely "separation from God" – it's a real place where you literally get burned forever in a lake of fire.


From Times Online:
Addressing a parish gathering in a northern suburb of Rome, Benedict XVI said that in the modern world many people, including some believers, had forgotten that if they failed to “admit blame and promise to sin no more”, they risked “eternal damnation — the Inferno”. Hell “really exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any more”, he saidI also found this little gem pretty entertaining:
In October the Pope indicated that limbo, s…

If you haven't subscribed to this guy's Youtube channel, get on that shit asap.

Context!!!!!!

When I was a young, enthusiastic evangelical Christian, I undertook an inquiry into philosophy and apologetics that would eventually be the undoing of all my faith. When I began the journey, however, I did so with the most noble intentions. I had a lot of unresolved questions about my faith, and I believed that if my faith were truly the rock I believed it to be, it would stand up under the most rigorous critical scrutiny. Unlike many of my peers, who seemed fearful of reading materials critical of or counter to our Christian beliefs, I thought that a dispassionate understanding of opposing views was vital to growing stronger in my Christian faith.

I read a lot of books in those years, and among them was The Case For Christianity by C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis is to this day held up as a beacon of Christian reason, as someone who made Christian theology the domain of academics and learned philosophers – someone who made less inquisitive believers feel comforted that such a learned and inte…

I've always been interested in philosophy, and obviously with this blog and my previous blog The Apostasy, I often spend time discussing philosophical arguments regarding the existence and nature of God. And I think that there is a lot of value in pondering those things. However, it seems to me that a much more relevant question than "Does God exist?" is "Does it matter whether God exists?" The only thing worse than a god that is unlikely to exist is one whose existence is trivial.

In the last couple of posts, for example, I talked about the cosmological argument, and my objections to natural theology in general. But even if the cosmological argument were correct, it would only be capable of proving, at best, a deistic god. And really, if people imagine God as a hands-off, abstract intelligence that merely set the universe in motion, what difference does it make whether they believe in God at all?

I had the same thought when I first listened to my favorite apol…

Some might say that I was a little harsh on Bill Craig to call him a "retard" in my previous post. Of course, I don't actually think that he's mentally retarded, or even a half-wit. I dare say that he is quite possibly smarter than Brick Tamland. But see, what grinds my gears about people like him is that he's floating in a cloud of his own intellectual hubris, to the point that he derides the "new atheist" movement as being intellectually unsophisticated. And yet, his arguments fail at such a basic level of logical scrutiny that it truly boggles the mind that someone of reasonable intelligence, which I'm sure he is, actually believes them.

I wanted to elaborate, relatively briefly, on a question in the prior post that Craig posed at his website:
I must confess that I'm baffled why atheists would think that causation presupposes time and space or at least time. Janey and John, you need to ask them what they mean by "causality" and what …