TreesNightly

If I believed the Force was real as completely as theists say they believe their religion is real. I'd be out staring at rocks all fricking day thinking "Go up! Fly! Levitate dammit!" I'd be reading the grocery lists of Jedis--anything to get a handle on this power. Hell, if it didn't work out after a couple years of daily training, I'd even give the Sith a shot. Christians claim to have complete faith in the word of God, but generally don't even spend the time to learn the original languages in which the Bible was written. They read translations of translations, sure (or more commonly listen to someone else's interpretation once a week), but I don't find that convincing. Maybe they aren't so convinced. Maybe we aren't so different. I was a Christian Scientist, a denomination that taught God's power and influence was more attainable then the average flavor of Christianity. If I lived by the values of Jesus I could, with complete faith, ...

Search �morality� in Merriam-Webster and the first definition you�ll see is �beliefs about what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior.� That�s beliefs, plural. This implies that what I believe is right and wrong isn�t the only belief out there, which should be obvious. Add the word �objective� in front of a word with a definition like this and the result is an oxymoron. Morality, by definition, is subjective. Case closed. Well, of course the case isn�t closed. I can�t cite Merriam-Webster and expect millennia of philosophy to buckle.  Honestly, it isn�t even justified. Merriam-Webster has four definitions for the word �morality,� and MW is hardly the only dictionary in circulation. Should I go with the terminology of Google? Wikipedia? Who is the linguistic authority here? Few theists will deny the reality that different beliefs of right and wrong behavior exist, they just believe one in particular belief is true in an absolute and objective way, conveniently, it�s their own...

SFT #1: On Mental Illness & Climate Change. I find a less recognized way in which religion harms society is in how it encourages many theists to deny the negative effects of mental illness and climate change. Because the existence of these things imply that, if there is an agency behind everything, that agency doesn't have our best interests in mind, they refuse to consider that they are real. This denial delays or thwarts the prospect of working on and potentially fixing issues that inhibit individuals' well-being and threaten our lives. SFT #2: Disbelief in Magic Theists often misunderstand why I disbelieve the bible. Let me be clear--it's because of the talking animals, duplicating seafood, parting seas, magic plagues, transforming matter, and resurrections. There are other valid reasons to be skeptical, but reasons 1 thru 100 are all the violations of common experience and observation that are not naturally possible. The same reasons that theists, hopefully, would d...

It's possible that religious apologists could be wrong about their arguments even if a handful of supernatural beings exist. Here are a few examples (that are obviously just me having a bit of fun, I'm not actually arguing any are real.) Lacsap is a hipster God who ironically only grants those who don�t believe eternal life. Inversely, Lacsapians and all other religious types are met with an afterlife of everlasting The Nanny reruns, thus reversing Pascal�s Wager. Why would you risk believing if there was any chance an eternal Fran Dreser could be your fate? The Great Nothing gives new meaning to the theist straw man that atheists must accept that everything came from Nothing. Indeed, Nothing created the heavens and the earth in not six, but three days...and he was drunk on the third...which explains a lot. Bob the programmer coded our universe to test different structures of space/time. Bob�s universe is likewise coded by a programmer named Ted, who was programmed by Kim. This...

Some theists claim that when atheists judge the character of God in the Bible as immoral, they show that they have a sense of objective morality which could only be present if God is a foundation for morality. By claiming this they are implying that the atheist's judgement is objectively correct. These theists either must agree that God is objectively immoral or admit that the atheist's judgement isn't objectively true thereby discounting their claim that the atheist's judgement shows that we have a sense of objective morality.?

Comedian Adam Carolla once said �I know everything because I know nothing.� By this he meant that his lack of parental involvement and disinterest in school led to a kind of philosophical blank slate which allows him to assess reality on reality�s terms. He claims the opposite of indoctrination in which every opinion is fully his own, made from scratch. I�m sure this is hyperbole, but I believe that he is more like he describes than the average Joe. In the same way, I came into blogging about atheism with little to no knowledge about theology, philosophy or, well, atheism. I didn�t think this lack of knowledge was a good thing, mind you. Once I realized secular thought was a real option, my first instinct was to quickly build a knowledge base. I listened to the audio version of God Is Not Great and The God Delusion . Here�s an atheist confession for you: I didn�t like either. I�m probably not supposed to say this, but I�m not a Hitchens fan in general. I�ve since given Dawkins a secon...