Sunday visitors
I had an interesting encounter the other day. I thought I'd chronicle it here because it perfectly encapsulates my approach to religion…
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Objective morality
Just for a minute, imagine a world where there is no objective morality. No God or gods, no Great Spirit, no reincarnation, no cosmic consciousness, no universal oneness, no karma, no angels, no demons, no supernatural elements at all. Imagine a world where, because those entities don't exist, they can't be the source of morality, and therefore there is no objective basis for our morality. What would this imaginary world look like?
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Mystery multiplication
Something happened and I can't explain it: therefore the answer is something which is many orders of magnitude more unexplainable than the original mystery.
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Correction
Surely you've seen this floating around:
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God: An Autobiography
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Children's religious stories
My daughter is somewhat interested in the Greek myths. She loves hearing about the gods and goddesses and their exploits from some of the more famous stories. It's easy to find books written for kids on the subject too: simpler story structure, illustrations, and the more gruesome bits ever-so-slightly glossed over. I saw three or four suitable books in a single trip to Half Price Books. These books present just the stories as stories and do not try to editorialize or moralize. Also, the stories are pulled out of the source material and re-written to be religiously-neutral, and they do not necessarily follow the rhyme and meter of, say, Homer's texts.
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Two theories of morality
While there are certainly more than two, these are the two theories of morality which concern me most. If I lived in India, "Theory 1" might be about reincarnation or seeking Nirvana, but living in this part of the United States at this time, it has to be the whole God/Jesus/Heaven/Hell thing.
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Reminder about American Atheists
Just a reminder to everyone: Although the organization called American Atheists has the word "atheists" in its name, it is not an all-inclusive group. In fact, American Atheists only has a few thousand members, and, depending on how the survey questions are worded, there are anywhere from several million to several tens of millions of atheists in the United States. So, when the group named "American Atheists" does something ridiculous, keep in mind that literally 99% of atheists (myself included) in the USA are not in that group, and are not necessarily represented by its actions and views. That is all.
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A Quick Guide to Evaluating Other Religions
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Evaluating religions
Pseudo-code for evaluating religions
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Arguments that don't make it
I recently had a conversation with a friend about religious beliefs. This friend brought up some of the reasons why he believed his religion was true. I didn't think they were good enough reasons to justify belief in a god, and since I had asked for reasons before, I thought I'd list some of the more common arguments and why I don't buy them. Note that this friend did not make all of these arguments, and I did not make all these responses.
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Why I am an Infidel
I often use the label "atheist" to describe myself, and even though some tend to add meanings at will, most people have a general idea what that means.
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