Social justice book reviews
Believe it or not, everyone has their faults—even atheists! I know, I’m shocked too. This week we are going to turn our attention away from creationists and humble ourselves with a little bit of atheist introspection. No one is perfect, and when it comes down to it, most of these points should just serve as a reminder to be a decent person, no matter what your beliefs. Regardless, here are nine things that some (not all) atheists do that they probably shouldn’t.
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Recently, I came across a post on my old church’s website that a few months back, they hosted a presentation by a creationist on “The Best Evidence Against Evolution.” You may know that a while ago, I wrote a series for this blog trying to discover the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod’s official stance on evolution. In the end, it seemed that they decisively hold to young earth creationism, although the church still has no definitive stance on whether evolution is actually true.
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Last month, my blog turned two and a half years old! That means that today, I’ve been blogging for 136 weeks and this is my 136th post. Over the years, people have asked me for my greatest advice for blog writing, whether that is how to grow a following and get noticed or how to go about writing for an atheist blog when you’re still in the atheist closet. Today, I want to share with you some of my answers to some commonly asked blogging questions.
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If you follow me on Goodreads, then you may have seen the painstakingly slow journey I have been on in the past months with Yuval Noah Harari’s nonfiction bestseller Sapiens. It felt a bit like a textbook at times, which contributed to it being a pretty slow read. But it was definitely something that I wanted to read all the way through, because most of its readers have been raving about it since its publication in 2015.
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This is one of those weeks when I spent days waffling back and forth about what to write about come Saturday. I had considered writing a response to some anti-abortion videos I saw about a month ago, but I had no idea how to go about it. I am not too well-versed within the abortion debate, so I didn’t know if it would be worth trying to put my thoughts on it together in a blog post. But as I was re-watching these videos from Christian YouTuber Becca Eller, I saw that she, too, had been nervous to talk about abortion but decided to give it a try anyway. So I’m giving my response to her videos a try too.
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There are a handful of famous arguments for the existence of a god. Some have been around for centuries, and new arguments are popping up every day. One such argument is the Kalam cosmological argument. A classic which has recently been re-polished and re-popularized, it has withstood the test of time in its field.
The Kalam cosmological argument sounds a lot more complex than it really is. There’s not much more to it than a simple, yet flawed, syllogism of three steps. They are: Read more
For many of us who were raised Christian, among our favorite memories are those of watching VeggieTales from a VHS tape on a big clunky square TV screen. This was something I did a lot growing up in the 90’s and early 00’s. To be honest, I really enjoyed learning bible stories from talking and singing fruits and vegetables. I fondly remember so many of its silly songs, but there’s one that has always stuck out to me from the rest.
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The Christian persecution complex is one of the great marvels of American society. It truly is amazing. Read more
When someone finds out that a loved one is an atheist, they tend to have a lot of questions. One question I was asked when coming out was “If you don’t believe in God, then what do you believe?” I was confused by the question at the time. What do you mean, what do I believe? I thought. About what? Morality? Science? The cosmos? Music? Pineapple on pizza? After thinking about it further, I think that “So, what do you believe?” is a pretty good question to ask an atheist, since all you can assume to know about an atheist is that there’s one thing they certainly don’t believe in, and that’s a god or gods. Everything else is up in the air.
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As I mentioned in last week’s post, I’ve been wrapping up another book, and this week I finally finished it! I read Kenneth Miller’s Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, which arose from the 2006 court case Selman v. Cobb County School District.
This dispute began innocently, with textbook publisher Prentice Hall and a run-of-the-mill biology textbook. Frustratingly, but not surprisingly, the religious climate in Georgia at the time made teaching honest biology harder than it should be. The Cobb County School District included with every biology textbook a sticker:
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