Social justice book reviews
I used to believe in God.
At least, I think I did. I probably believed about as much as any young child can, which isn’t much. I believed God was real only because the trustworthy sources in my life told me he was real. But when I was around ten, I shed my faith, and it was replaced with doubts, which ultimately won over when I was about twenty. Read more
Enjoy this post written for me this week by my sweet husband!
I have been a passionate Pokémon fan for what feels like forever. My enthusiasm all started when I was given a trading card in fourth grade. That card was Cubone. Since then, I have been fascinated by the creatures, story, lore, and everything else Pokémon. But what does Pokémon have to do with an atheist blog?
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As we all know, there’s a lot of pseudoscience floating around out there today. Some people think the Earth is flat, and some people think it began 6,000 years ago. Some think vaccines cause autism, and some think that human-caused climate change is a hoax. And some people think that their being born in January makes them exceptionally sexually compatible with a person born in June. To each their own, I guess. Although I don’t believe in astrology, I can’t help but thinking that compared with beliefs like climate change denial, it’s not horribly harmful. Just silly.
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I had bought Don Johanson’s Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind last fall, and my copy is a first edition that I had found at Cleveland’s coolest cat-inhabited bookstore, Loganberry Books. I then realized that not only was there a Lucy exhibit at the nearby Cleveland Museum of Natural History, but that the author of the book, who was also the original founder of the Lucy fossil, had been based out of that museum at the time. We also found out that it was closed for the day and we would have to come back another time.
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For the first twenty years of my life, creationism was a fact. At least, I was taught that it was. God created the earth in six days, and anyone who tells you otherwise was maliciously and purposely lying to you. Evolution was vilified; it was not only factually incorrect, but it was morally reprehensible, as if facts could sin.
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Have you ever overheard a conversation on something that you’re passionate about, but for one reason or another, it would be out of place for you to interject? This happens to me all the time, and it’s immeasurably frustrating. In most groups I’m in, I’m considered “the atheist” of the group, but since I started my office job in March, this has not necessarily been the case.
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I’ve come out as atheist to college friends, two siblings, and my parents. All of them were, and are, Christian, but even so, every conversation went differently. In the big picture, they went alright. They certainly could have gone much worse, but at the same time, I would not want to ever relive that time in my life. I had a list in my head of who knew and who didn’t know, and once I told someone and had that weight lifted, it was only so long until I would have to tell the next person.
If someone you know has just told you that they’re an atheist, just know that it was probably at least just as hard for them as it is for you. But there are a few things you can do that will make this time easier for everyone.
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a response to a presentation by young-earth creationist Jerry Bergman in which he utilized appeals to authority as his primary forms of argument that “there are a lot of scientists who are being persecuted because they don’t believe in evolution.” Among the men that he used to make his case were C.S. Lewis. On Lewis’ evolutionary stance, Bergman stated, Read more
A couple days ago I was flipping through a creationist book from my shelf, and I couldn’t help but notice that the author rarely ever used the word “evolution” when describing the theory of evolution by natural selection. Instead, he almost always called it Darwinism. Of course, we know what someone means when they say Darwinism, and even evolutionists often call it Darwinian evolution or Darwin’s theory of evolution. But I think that creationists have a very specific reason in using the term “Darwinism” instead of the word “evolution”. That is: they want to equate believing that evolution is true with belonging to a religion that worships Charles Darwin.
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Last night, I successfully completed Presbyterian pastor Timothy Keller’s apologetics book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. I find it fascinating to read through various apologetics books (like The Case for a Creator, Emails to a Young Seeker, and this), and see how they differ and how they don’t. There were a lot of topics in The Reason for God that were familiar, but as with most apologetics books, the author tweaked a thing or two to try to refresh the tired arguments and make them his own.
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