I have a lot of religious friends on facebook because a lot of people from college and high school have looked me up (and I went to church school during those years). This means that I get to see a lot of status updates and posts from people saying how great God is or how he's helped them or whatever. I generally just ignore those ( Read more... )

I've been reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. At one point he mentions this list of proofs for the existence of God. Some are commonly presented proofs and some are just silly. It's a very long list and I haven't read them all yet, but here are a few of my favorites so far.

( To the Proofs! )

After watching Expelled last night, I felt the need for some more intelligent discourse today, so I've been reading from the other side of the debate today. Here are some selections from Bertrand Russell's "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (reprinted in Christopher Hitchens' The Portable Atheist):I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of ( Read more... )

According to Ben Stein, "Evil can sometimes be rationalized as science." Expelled reveals the ways that evil can be rationalized and disguised as argument and intellectual inquiry, too. That may seem extreme, but the ideas presented, the sorts of sloppy arguments made, and the twisted rhetoric used in this movie are dangerous and have the ( Read more... )

Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land is a book that it seems like I should like. It deals with issues of religion, including a strong critique of religion as we know it, presents socially progressive ideas about sex and relationships, and relies upon a fundamentally humanist, individualist philosophy ( Read more... )

James Blish's A Case of Conscience is worth reading for its attempts to bring together science and religion and for its insistence on taking religion seriously in a science fiction novel (a rarity). The chief protagonist, Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a Jesuit priest and a biologist, is a member of a team sent to the planet Lithia to evaluate the ( Read more... )

Penn Jillette's essay for NPR's "This I Believe," called "There Is No God," is well worth checking out.

It's a very hopeful and (for me, anyway) compelling statement of atheism. Jillette illustrates the ways in which atheism is not just a lack of something but is a thoughtful and emotionally fulfilling way of being in the world.

( Full text below the cut. )

I should start my own church: the Cathedral of Something. We will worship Whatever and sing hymns of apathy to You Know.

After partial_charge's response to my entry about Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, I figured Sam Harris's The End of Faith deserved to be the next of the recent spate of books about religion by atheists and skeptics that I would read. So I hunted down my copy of the book (seriously--I think books are beginning to take advantage of my distractedness and ( Read more... )

Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything book isn't bad, but it isn't all that great, either. His arguments are nothing new (at least to me) and his tone frequently veers too far into the snarky and ad hominem. Given these flaws, God Is Not Great falls short of being a truly interesting and useful argument about ( Read more... )