TreesNightly

Half way into high school I went to camp for the first time in my life. It was a Christian Science camp which would be a very odd choice if not for the fact that I was a Christian Scientist. The camp�s selling point to my parents was the promise to re-up my faith and to provide leadership opportunities as a Counselor-in-Training. The camp�s selling point to me was a canoeing trip in Canada and a three-day capture-the-flag tournament. That, and I just wanted to get out of the house. I feel like a little background in Christian Science is needed here. CS is a religion that teaches the works of Jesus did could also be done by us providing that we have enough faith and live free from sin. In the Bible, the disciples healed and performed other miracles after JC�s death, the same premise applies to here. The implication is that, as Christian Scientists, material medicine should be avoided because using it diminishes our faith to heal thyself through God. If you need to see someone, CS has th...

The moral argument for God requires the existence of a moral realism that can only be sustained by a deity. To argue that moral facts exist, the apologist finds commonality between himself and the nonbeliever by highlighting mutual condemnation of certain actions. Common agreement does not prove a moral fact�s existence, it only shows a shared judgement, but thats the tactic that is most commonly used nevertheless. Commonality is usually reached with the condemnation of the act of murder. What makes an act a murder? The act itself is killing. We could break it down further to the type of act be it stabbing or shooting or poisoning, but the method is not usually factored in. What makes a killing a murder are, at the minimum, four conditions. 1. The victim must be born human. 2. The victim has not expressed a specific desire to be killed. 3. The victim must not be posing a significant and direct threat to the acting party. 4. The acting party must have the intension to kill. One could ar...

It used to be that wearing a shirt with the headline �Atheist� was considered to be the gold standard in testing public reception of the label. Most of us never wore such shirts and assumed that non-atheists would be confrontational or, at the least, expect the shirt-wearer to be confrontational. Living in the bible belt, I get it. Don�t expect to see me wearing such a shirt to a job interview. Still, Americans came close to having our first non-Christian candidate for President this year with Bernie Sanders. This suggests that at least half the population of the US is more receptive than ever. So I made shirts. They aren�t as explicit as a shirt with the big block letters A-T-H-E-I-S-T. Think of them as part of a campaign. Each shirt displays a passage of the bible, not unlike a Christian wearing John 3:16 across their chest. The primary difference is that the passages available here are the parts of the bible Christians don�t advertise. They are about God commanding the murder of kid...

Atheism isn�t a worldview. It isn�t a belief system. It�s a single belief, or as many of us phrase it, a �lack of� a single belief. It�s not a religion, it has no dogma or doctrine, and it only unites us under the same wide umbrella as the label �theism� unites the rest. Theism, as many of you know, includes categories such as polytheism, monotheism, pantheism, and dystheism as well as specific faiths like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Christianity�some of which are further broken down into even more specific faiths. A diverse spectrum of belief systems falls under the �theist� label. Atheists don�t have this plethora of sub-genres because each of us are ideological free-agents. For the most part, we don�t bundle opinions, opting to make a belief system unique to the individual. There have been attempts to deviate from our ironically shared nonconformity, such as the formation of the Brights, Atheism+, and �New Atheism��but I don�t know many proud members, and I�ve come to know a lot of...

Words are ultimately invented, with definitions that were chosen arbitrarily. They are meaningful today, because most of us have a common understanding of the context of each set of letters. They are meaningful because those definitions are relevant to most of us in that they correspond to something in our consensus reality or experience. Not, I find, when talking to religious apologists. They use theological jargon under the guise of common vernacular. Morality is defined, in part, as "that which can only exist with God." I've seen reason defined as "that which can only be accessed through God." I've often thought of making a master list of words apologists frame in terms of their deity, but it would always be incomplete. Words are invented, with definitions that were chosen arbitrarily. The apologists break no cosmic rule by creating their own language, but when they try to communicate in secular society with these identically constructed variants, they ho...

Religious apologists often overlook secular reasons to be decent to our fellow man in order to make their arguments that morality can only be grounded in God. For them, I present these ten secular incentives to ground one's morality in reason. Points one and two can be seen as a catch all and that all following points can be seen as subsets of one and two. The truth is, by making one and two so broad was the only way to cover all the ways people can come to what we consider good behavior. The rest are just some specifics that are probably obvious to all but the most religious of apologists. 1. To avoid negative consequences. Try to kill, rape, or steal from someone and that someone will be pissed. If the person is able to hurt you, he or she is much more likely to hurt you as a punishment of your previous action. The motivation for the retaliation could be revenge or just to put you on notice that if you try that shit again then you�ll be hurt again. If that person is unabl...