Why I am an atheist – Ian Pulsford

I am an atheist for many reasons but I think the one that possibly sealed it from a young age happened one Sunday when I was a child.  The sunday school “teacher” asked all the kids present to write down the initials of the person who was their best friend on a piece of paper.  One by one we were asked to read out what they had written and one by one each and every one read out J C.  It happened that there was one girl there with the initials J C.

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Why I am an atheist – Sabine

I am an atheist because when I was about four or five years old, my father brought me down to this little stream at the bottom of our garden and he made me put my hand into the clear cold water and told me about Heraclitus and the concept of panta rhei (everything moves and nothing stays the same). And when I was ten years old, our teacher marched us to a big mosaic/mural in our school depicting Plato’s analogy of the cave. Well, I knew then as much as I know now (45 years later) that I want to always search and find what is real and what can be known and to discover how everything always changes and evolves and not get stuck with some fixed idea/image reflecting from a wall.

Sabine
Germany

Why I am an atheist – Matthew Pocock

It is difficult to explain why I am an atheist without starting at the beginning. I was born in the mid-70s in rural Oxfordshire, England. My parents where Born Again Christians of the ‘burn your Beetles records’ variety, and believed with all the passion and transparency of youth that they where blessed and anointed to do the Lord’s work. They met at a Christian youth event and that has set the tenner for the rest of their lives together. Needless to say, my siblings and I where raised to treat Jesus as the other member of our family, albeit an invisible and all-powerful one. Jesus was firstly the saviour of our family, and only then the saviour of our church, country and the world. It was an intensely personal faith. Our parents believed in strict parenting. Child-rearing and the training of working dogs could be accomplished using essentially the same approach, although children seemed to have longer memories and where better at dissembling than hounds, and while the dog got a newspaper on the nose, we got the cane. It was enough to know that we had done wrong; there was little need to explain why. They loved us dearly (and still do), but I felt we always came a distant third behind Jesus and my parents to each other, in that order.

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Nice article on Atheism+ in the New Statesman

Most of it’s really good and gets it right.

On one level, this is just the logical culmination of the huge upsurge in interest prompted by the so-called "New Atheists" and the growth over the last few years of a recognisable community or movement based around ideas of atheism, scientific scepticism and a progressive political agenda. While atheism is, by definition, no more or less than a non-belief in God, in practice it clusters with a variety of other positions, from pro-choice to campaigns against homeopathy. People who espouse "liberal atheism" as it might be called, oppose religion for political as well as philosophical reasons, just as the forces of religion seem to line up – though of course not exclusively – behind seemingly unconnected issues such as opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage and, in the US, gun-control.

Atheism+ is, at its most basic, an attempt wrap things together more formally, to create a movement that prioritises issues of equality and does so from an explicitly non-religious perspective. Some would say that such a philosophy already exists in the form of humanism. Others prefer the label Skeptic. Atheism+, however, seeks to capitalise on the sense of identity that has grown up around the word "atheism" during the past few years. One supporter of the idea, Greta Christina, celebrates the term as "a slap in the face that wakes people up."

The only problem? The figure caption.

Atheism+ is a reaction against the “New Atheism” of Richard Dawkins.

Nope. The body text had it right: it’s “the logical culmination”, not an opposition to the New Atheism. I’m actually doing a talk on just that next week in Denver — as the New Atheism was the incorporation of science into atheism, Atheism+ is a synthesis of social justice into the New Atheism.

Playing with the Drake Equation

The BBC has put up an interactive web page with the parameters of the Drake equation that lets you tweak numbers and estimate how many alien civilizations might exist. It’s informative because you should quickly realize you can make up any old numbers you want for most of them — we simply don’t have data for most of them, so you have to reach up into your colon to pluck something random out.

They have various presets, including a modern “skeptical estimate”. I just looked at the section on life, and found it weirdly inconsistent. Apparently, the % chance a habitable planet develops life is guessed at 13% (I don’t buy it; that life arose so quickly on Earth after its formation suggests that it may be relatively easy — I’d jack that up to something high), while the % chance that life develops intelligence is pegged at an absurd 50%. We’ve got one planet with tens of millions of species for a data point, and our kind of intelligence popped up once in 4 billion years. It makes no sense to argue for that degree of inevitability for a weird and unlikely adaptation like intelligence…why didn’t it arise in the Mesozoic, then?

Their worst estimate (which looks ridiculously optimistic to me) ends up with only about one civilization per galaxy. That’s also with a conservative estimate that a civilization only spends about 400 years trying to send signals outwards…which would mean that a brief effort to talk to some other civilization within a disc 100,000 light years in diameter is almost certainly doomed to failure. Even in their most optimistic model, with tens of thousands of technological civilizations in a galaxy, stars populated by intelligent life are still about 600 light years apart.

At least the web page makes it obvious that the Drake Equation is like a Ouija board, with the tinkerers just pushing the numbers around until they get the answer they want.

Why I am an atheist – NigeltheBold

There are questions religion cannot answer.

When I was very young, I’d occasionally attend Sunday school. This is not a proper school at all, in spite of the devious label. Instead, it’s a place for inculcating vague doctrines and incoherent models of reality, faint echoes of the thunderous fears of ancient superstitions. The pastors and senior pastors and youth pastors practiced their miseducation through sermons and rituals and the threat of hell and the promise of heaven and the singing of songs, songs accompanied by an amateur organist and consisting of ridiculous lyrics like, “God’s love is like a circle.” Whatever that means.

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What is it with Republicans, sex, and science?

They just can’t get it right. The latest eructation of idiotic error comes from Tennessee, where Stacey Campfield makes shit up about STDs.

Tennessee state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) falsely claimed on Thursday that it was nearly impossible for someone to contract AIDS through heterosexual contact.

“Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community,” he told Michelangelo Signorile, who hosts a radio program on SiriusXM OutQ. “It was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.”

Do they have to take a Stupid Test to be admitted to the party? And score somewhere in the range of a flatworm?

Why I am an atheist – Alan-Michael White

At the age of fifteen, the fetid stink of religion became unavoidable.  Every rotten iota of institutionalized religion became unignorable and unavoidable.  My faith doubled down to brace for this assault.  I read the Bible cover to cover and my philosophy changed to one of personal behavior.  I could no longer believe atheists went to Hell when so many horrible Christians went to heaven.  This was, for me, my first run in with the hypocrisy of belief and religion.  My once firm and indomitable belief that the Bible was the literal word of God had been undermined by the behavior of its followers and the text it contained.

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You have disappointed me, New Zealand

John Banks is a Bible-believing Christian in New Zealand who accepts the literal truth of the book of Genesis.

John Banks told Radio Rhema that he has no doubts the first chapters of Genesis are true.

"That’s what I believe, but I’m not going to impose my beliefs on other people, especially in this post-Christian society that we live in, especially in these lamentable times.”

"There are reactionaries out there, humanists in particular, that overrun the bureaucracies in Wellington and state education.”

How nice that he’s not going to impose his views on others. Unfortunately, John Banks is the Associate Education Minister. Don’t ask me, I have no idea how these kooks get positions of responsibility like that.

I’m also disappointed in the NZ Herald, that chose to end the article with this dull clunk.

Bible scholars are divided over whether this is a literal description or an allegory to help people understand how the world came into being.

Really? Doesn’t this rather suggest that if “bible scholars” can’t agree on this issue of consistency with reality, we should just ignore “bible scholars” instead of citing them as vague authorities in news articles?