When I was heavily active on the atheist boards, one of the most common "challenges" we got from Christians was "Why do you even bother to be good ( Read more... )

The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Daniel Patrick, is well-known among wonks for his hyper-traditionalist views of religion and its role in public life. In short: he's for it, as long as it's his flavor of Christian. He wants gays back in the closet, women to stop being sexy unless they're married and then only for their husbands, and trans people ( Read more... )

Like a lot of people, I had the whiplash moment when I read about the Odgaards in the New York Times' recent Evangelicals Despair. The article focuses on the couple in New York who ran a charming general-purpose wedding chapel before gay marriage. When threatened with the loss of their business license, they ended up selling the chapel to a church ( Read more... )

I've been reading David Weber's Safehold series. I can't recommend it unless you're an absolute Weber fan; it's pretty much the worst Weber fanservice I can imagine all rolled into a single, many-millions-of-words-long story. It's not really a work of modern fiction; it's more like an fable or apologue, a "moral story" in which the good guys are ( Read more... )

World Net Daily's David Kupelian asserted that "The left is such a toxic experience it's driving people crazy ( Read more... )

I'm not sure why this guy claims "No atheist can honestly answer some of these!" I'd really want to know which ones he believe I'd lie about:

How Did You Become an Atheist? *Shrug* I was never very convinced about the stories they told me in Sunday school. None of it made much sense, and I never felt much connection to the idea of a god. I ( Read more... )

I've often wondered if C.S. Lewis didn't read just a bit too much Buddhist literature in his time. The Great Divorce is one of those books that reads like a Buddhist tract. It starts with a premise of universalism, if not a reincarnate one: We all awaken in the Hell we deserve, and there we are given one (or more) chances to make it into Heaven ( Read more... )

The atheist community has been passing around Pastor Alin's sad little The Misery of Atheism: Who Does an Atheist Thank? blogpost and answering him.

When I first read it, what struck me is this bit: God has been very gracious to me. I have a wife, I have a house, I have food and a computer, I have a bed and clean water. And when I think on these ( Read more... )

Since traffic was terrible this morning and my iPod's batteries were too dead to work effectively, I was stuck with the radio, and as is my unfortunate wont, I dialed into the morning's AM radio and stumbled upon right-wing talk show host Mike Gallagher commisserating with an interview subject about how "Government had become God, the arbiter of ( Read more... )

There is a fundamental ground on which Christianists, Rushdoony's Seven-Mountain Dominionists, and their co-religionists walk, and it is best described by evangelical proseletyzer Greg Stier in his ham-handed article, How to share the gospel with an atheist (gotta love the stock photo he used): Assume that, down deep inside, they do believe in God ( Read more... )