What Exactly Are We Supposed To Be Doing?

You’re Not Helping responds to my defense of the Freedom From Religion Foundation: Camels with Hammers has posted a bit of commentary on the Do Nothings. First and foremost, they cry foul on us for unjustly misrepresenting the goals of the FFRF Wait, no, first and foremost, I agreed with You’re Not Helping that it is unfair to accuse […]

Rate this:

Rightful Pride: Identification With One’s Own Admirable Powers And Effects

Pride is essentially the personal identification with something admirable.  When I am rightly proud of my traits, I rightly take the traits themselves each to be admirable in one way or another and rightly take myself to be admirable insofar as they are part of me and expressions of me.  When I am rightly proud […]

Rate this:

Disambiguating Faith: Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”)

A couple of weeks ago, I argued that there was a real distinction between “lacking a belief in any God or gods” on the one hand and “believing there is no God (or gods)” on the other hand.  Primarily I saw the heart of the distinction as resting with the difference between on the one […]

Rate this:

“Skipping Sunday School”: A Documentary On Parenting Without Religion And Growing Up Godless

(via Atheist Nexus) Learn more about the topic and the film here. Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not A Christian”

Russell reads his classic, Why I Am Not A Christian.  I find his reading and his rhetoric riveting. Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

Disambiguating Faith: How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Yesterday on Friendly Atheist there was a vigorous debate in the comments section about whether there is a real and important difference between claiming one lacks belief in God (or gods) and outright claiming that there is no God (or gods).  Here is a nice formulation of the argument that the distinction is an irrelevant […]

Rate this:

Angry Atheist Debate About A Mosque Near Ground Zerosts

Saturday I put together a large post highlighting a spectrum of thoughtful and/or provocative opinions on the recently approved plan to build a mosque a couple of blocks away from the former site of the World Trade Center in New York.  That day, for the sake of balance, I wanted to find someone who could […]

Rate this:

Differently Abled Or Simply More Virtuous In One Respect

Earlier today, I made a post comparing the different routes which atheists and those with Asperger’s syndrome take to their naturalistic explanations of causes of events that more religiously inclined people tend to chalk up to supernatural agency.  Whereas religious people would attribute an illness or finding their true love to the purposeful forces, like God’s […]

Rate this:

“I Prefer John Locke To Jesus Christ, I Prefer John Stuart Mill To Jesus Christ…I Prefer Jon Stewart To Jesus Christ”

If you missed Ayaan Hirsi Ali on The Colbert Report last night, make time to see the interview here. And in either case I also recommend her first interview with Colbert, from March 15, 2007, in which he hardly knows what do with her. Ayaan’s books are Infidel, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women […]

Rate this:

On Secular Uses Of Hallowing Halls

A federal judge has ruled that a public school cannot hold its ceremony in a church building: [Bridgeport-based federal judge Janet] Hall ruled that use of the church for graduation violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, even though some of the symbols were to be covered. Earlier this year, members of the Enfield Board of Education […]

Rate this:

Atheists In Foxholes

While on this day we Americans honor all those service people who have lost their lives fighting for causes of freedom, here’s a special tribute to those who were, or are, willing to risk their lives without even any belief they could get them back if they lost them: Thanks to ChuckyJesus666. Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

God Would Understand

What if, against all odds, there really is this omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient, and all-loving God the Christians claim and I were to meet it on a Judgment Day?  The YouTuber “Theoretical Bullshit” expresses, and even advances a bit, own thoughts on the matter: Thanks to Mary and Shay for the find. Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

Teachers Accused Of Bullying Atheist Colleague

South Florida News reports: The district is looking into whether the women at Ely High School tried to bully the counterpart into becoming a believer. “The students whom I interviewed said that’s absolutely untrue,” said Fort Lauderdale attorney Johnny McCray, who represents both teachers, Leslie Rainer and Djuna Robinson. He says the two didn’t have […]

Rate this:

Daily Hilarity: Incredibly Easy Moral Dilemmas

Do theists even believe themselves when they say that atheists would not be able to know right from wrong without religion?  Do they really think we’d reply like the guy in green in that cartoon? (Cartoon courtesy of Chaos Pet, of course.) Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

More On Pascal’s Wager From Qualia Soup and Theramin Trees

Recently I posted a terrific video challenging the value of Pascal’s Wager  from numerous perspectives.  Qualia Soup and Theramin Trees, the creators of that video, have a new video replying to criticisms they received after posting the first video.  Below is first the original video again for those who missed it (or who saw it […]

Rate this:

Thorough Refutation of Pascal’s Wager in 6 Minutes

From Qualia Soup and Theramin Trees. Just turn off the volume because there is none of Qualia Soup’s normal soothing narration but instead some truly horrendous music. Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

Daily Hilarity: Mr. Deity and the Quitter

It might be just me, but this is one of my favorite episodes in a while: Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

Last summer I wrote a number of posts through which I sought to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith and in the process distinguish the various virtuous ethical and epistemic practices for which faith is typically confused by means of ambiguous equivocations.  I attempted to distinguish the virtues of hope, loyalty, trust, intuitional […]

Rate this:

Answering Accusations Against Atheists: The Charge We Naively Blame All War On Religion

In this post I want to address Chris’s problems with the tactics and arguments of internet atheists. In two previous posts I have rejected his assumption that not liking the tactics or particular arguments that particular atheists use is somehow a reason to reject the essential atheist position that there are no gods, and then I have […]

Rate this:

A Challenge To Christians To Unqualifiedly Condemn Genocide

Christians who defend the Old Testament genocides are guilty of either relativistic authoritarianism (anything can be okay as long as God wills it and His will has simply changed from the Old Testament days to the New Testament one) or, possibly worse, theoretical agreement with all the normal justifications of genocide as long as God […]

Rate this:

The Belief In God Doesn’t Cause Violence, Only Particular Beliefs About God Do

In discussing the response to Nidal Malik Hasan, Alonzo Fyfe draws the distinctions just right when he accuses atheists who leap from the act of one kind of theist to associate theism in general with violence as an instance of “The Bigot’s Fallacy”: Many of the people who embrace the Bigot’s Fallacy in this case […]

Rate this:

A Brief Overview Of My Dissertation

Nietzsche’s writings on morality are famously provocative and controversial.  His criticisms of morality in both theory and practice are so extensive and rhetorically scathing that many philosophers assume that he can offer little or nothing constructive to moral philosophy.  Additionally, his glorification of the will to power sounds prima facie like a celebration of excessively […]

Rate this:

Happy National Coming Out Day 2009!

Let me just take the opportunity to let all my LGBTQ friends know how much I admire your resilience in the midst of so much cultural hostility.  Individuality, self-definition, self-creation, self-overcoming, and values-innovation are all extremely high ideals to me (in no small part due to my Nietzscheanism).  And the increasingly successful struggle of gays […]

Rate this:

The Nightmare Possibilities If Atheists Ruled The World

Three female atheist vloggers (xxxThePeachxxx, Healthy Addict, and the ever popular ZOMGitsCriss), A most enjoyable riff on the video I highlighted earlier today that quoted hilarious fundamentalist Christians from around the internet: Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

Smug Atheists?

Andrew Sullivan, whose blogging I usually admire and emulate a great deal as he’s really my blogging hero, had an astoundingly nasty post about the fact that atheists dared to meet up together to listen to Daniel Dennett mock the emptiness of apophatic theological gobbledygook last weekend. They’re really charming, aren’t they? It is as […]

Rate this: