TreesNightly

A catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they�re not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances. ~Urban Dictionary The popular MTV show and film of the same name, Catfish , has popularized the reality that people use the anonymity of the Internet to pose as someone they aren�t in order to become more appealing. A high school drop out poses to a potential mate as a Harvard grad. A homosexual boy poses to a heterosexual crush as a cute girl. An atheist poses to a Christian apologist as a curious theist. ...wait, what? Hear me out. The second I engage a believer I�m immediately (and correctly) seen as an atheist by my publicly recorded post history. The problem with this is that their preconceptions of an atheist color everything I say. To them I�m just mad at God, close-minded, hindered by secular culture, parroting the words of the �horsemen,� or even influenced by demons. Although some of their preconception...

The following is a post by Google+ user Rick Rab in which he goes over what it might take if the biblical flood was be found in the nonfiction section. I didn't check the math, nor did I proofread. I barely practice journalism in any sense of the word. Was it really possible to put the animals in the biblical ark? Let�s start with a horse, say 1000lbs weight. It requires 17.5lb of hay and 10lb of grain per day per 1000lb of its weight. So for 40 days it requires 700lb of hay and 400lb of grain. Baled hay occupies about 10lb per cu ft. Oats (whole) occupy iro 26lb per cu ft. So its food alone required 85 cu ft. Modern rules require 350 cu ft space per horse, let�s say Noah gave it � that, 175 cu ft, so per horse he needed 260 cu ft. Let�s add a token 10 cu ft for its water. Total 270 cu ft per horse. Now the big sums... Ok, not all animals are horse sized so let�s half that just to be nice�13.5 cu ft per animal, Oh sod it, let's be really nice, let�s half it again�. 7 cu ft per...

"Your life has no meaning without God." Apologists often appeal to meaning when arguing for their deity. Let�s quickly look at what they mean by this claim. Possible meaning #1 To have meaning you must have been created. Okay, then God has no meaning according to their own doctrine--which begs the question, how much meaning can we really have as the product of a meaningless being? Possible meaning #2 To have meaning you must either have been created or create. This option gives meaning to God as well as us--but it also allows for our meaning without God. We create under our own power everything from art to life. Possible meaning #3 To have meaning you must have a purpose ascribed by an authority higher than yourself. Again, this makes God meaningless which makes him a pretty weak authority and therefore us essentially meaningless by proxy. It also gives anyone meaning once they enter the workforce or are born into a family with defined expectations. Possible meaning #4 To ...

The following is a syndicated post by the wise Ugo Cei . "If you had been born in Saudi Arabia, you would have a 98% chance of being a Muslim." You've heard that argument already, right? You have also probably heard the rebuttal that it's an example of the Genetic Fallacy: The fact that what you believe depends on where you were born does not mean that what you believe is false. In a sense, those who object to the argument on those terms are right. When interpreted as an argument against god, it just doesn't hold. However, the true power of the argument is not as a tool to prove there is no god and I am not sure whether it is mostly the believers who like to interpret it as such, so they can have an easy job tearing it down, or the non believers, who didn't really think it through. The fact that, exceedingly, religious affiliation depends on geography or family history, is only useful together with the fact that, for almost every believer, geography is the mai...

Not to mention that "hell" is the absence of the omnipresent God.

I recently joined a Google+ community meant to educate people on counter apologetics. This was my first post. Here is a way to dismantle the moral argument for God without getting into the subjective vs. objective morality debate. A more traditional take on the Euthyphro dilemma, a classic problem of the moral argument for God: If God chooses what is good, does God have a reason for the actions to which he assigns a good value? If so, why can humans not come to the same reason? If not, then someone (God, in this case) arbitrarily assigned good and bad values, which is exactly what theists think is the problem with subjective morality.  Modern apologists rarely say God decided anything, rather they claim what is morally good is simply part of God's nature. They expect this negates the dilemma. It doesn't. For this reason I recommend presenting a formation more like below to stay with the times. If God's nature is good and it could be no other way...who made God's nature...

The following is a post from Tim O'Neill who is much more knowledgeable than I on matters of history, but I'm still pretty sure I have him beat in James Bond trivia. "History sucks." In April last year Grundy, the usual writer of this blog, posted History Isn't My Area, commenting on the release of Bart Ehrman's critique of the Jesus Myth hypothesis, Did Jesus Exist?: A Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth . Unlike the majority of actual historians, many prominent atheists find Jesus Mythicism convincing and many of them are unhappy with the generally sceptical and highly renowned Ehrman for criticizing this idea. Grundy, for his part, stated frankly "I honestly have little knowledge as to whether or not Jesus existed", though added "I tend to think he did". That said, he made it clear why the overwhelming consensus of historians and other relevant scholars that the Jesus Myth idea is junk was underwhelming for him: "History suck...