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Freethought in the light of the sun
It is a perennial question, among atheists, of whether we should evangelize in favor of atheism the way the religious do. It is not hard to see why this question has been so hotly debated, since there are good arguments on both sides. Since atheism is a positive worldview, there would seem to be ...
It was in late December of last year that I visited St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City for the first time. It was a cold, wet evening, alternating between rain and flurries of snow, and a friend and I had gone downtown to see the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. But the cathedral was on ...
The recent fiasco over the cartoons of Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper shows that free speech is still very much under threat. Though this basic human right has long been guaranteed in the Western world, this controversy should remind us that there is still a large section of humanity ...
One of my favorite short-story authors is the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. Many of his stories deal with mind-expanding themes, including "Blue Tigers", about a handful of stones that do not obey the rules of mathematics, "The Book of Sand", about a book with an infinite number of pages ...
The United States of America is populated overwhelmingly by Christians. Poll after poll shows that between 75% and 85% of American citizens identify with some denomination of Christianity, and though this percentage has declined somewhat in recent years, it is still a great majority. It would be ...
Has anyone else ever noticed that, as far as theists are concerned, atheists just can't win? Every single thing we do, or don't do, is interpreted by believers in such a way as to give aid and comfort to their beliefs. Consider: When theists commit evil or criminal acts, it just goes to show ...
Daylight Atheism is now officially entering its second month of operation, and so far I couldn't be happier with the way things have been going. In my first post, I wrote that I planned to update this site twice per week to begin with. You can all see for yourselves how that worked out - I've been ...
(Note: This post was written for Blog Against Sexism Day.) One of the greatest enemies of the feminist movement is and has always been religion. Regardless of when or how this tendency originated, the monotheistic tradition that gave rise to Judaism, Christianity and Islam has historically stood ...
The previous post in the Observatory, "On Presuppositions", discussed a few of the many ways in which bias has been shown to affect our decisions. When we expect or believe something to be true, we very often act as if it is true, and disregard contradictory evidence. Given these undeniable ...
Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars has drawn my attention to a story I've been meaning to post about for some time: Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza and a wealthy far-right Catholic, is financing the construction of a new town in Florida to be named Ave Maria. Controversy ...
There has been considerable buzz in the blogosphere lately about a bill pending in Missouri that would supposedly make Christianity the "state's official religion". When I first heard this news, suitably apocalyptic thoughts occurred to me, as I'm sure they did to many of you. Declaring an ...
Daniel Dennett is one of my favorite philosophers. Few write with his clarity or liveliness, and the topics to which he turns his attention - evolution, religion, free will, the human mind - fall squarely within my area of interest. His explanations are often brilliantly clever, and his conclusions ...
One of the most fundamental differences between atheism and religion is that a religion is, by definition, a group of followers, while atheism is a collection of individuals. Each religion is built on some body of myths and rules that was compiled long ago and is now set in stone, inviolate ...
Malcolm Gladwell. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Little, Brown and Company: New York, 2005. D.L. Rosenhan. "On Being Sane in Insane Places." Science, vol.179, no.4070, p.250-258 (19 January 1973). In 1973, the peer-reviewed journal Science published a now-classic study in ...
One of the questions I am frequently asked is how I came to be an atheist. Personally, I don't place a high emphasis on the details of deconversion - whether it happens gradually or in a Damascus Road-like flash is not relevant to me - and since I did not have an intense religious upbringing to ...