Social justice book reviews
I started this blog as a way to vent about the things in my life that bothered me. Usually it’s been different aspects of religion invading my life that made me so upset. Since those days, I’ve managed to separate myself from religion, and so I haven’t blogged many rants for a while. Well, today’s post is in a nostalgic spirit as another rant rears its ugly head just in time for Mercury to enter retrograde tomorrow, February 17th.
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The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? by Rick Warren has been a bestseller in the Christian world for decades. It was on the New York Times Bestseller List for over 90 weeks and sold 18 million copies in its first six years. It has over 215,000 ratings on Goodreads averaging 3.93 stars and over 2,400 ratings on Amazon averaging 4.7 stars.
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This week I finished Andrew Seidel’s book The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American. As is my custom, that means it’s time for a book review! I’m particularly excited about this one, because The Founding Myth is one of the few books that I have rated as five stars on Goodreads—and it’s one the most highly rated books on my whole shelf!
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Last month marks the three-year anniversary of my blog, but this week marks the end of not only a year, but a decade. I want to end this year with a little bit of introspection on who I am as an atheist.
I’ve made a few posts before on what type of atheist I am, my own personal evolution, and how my blog is changing. But I want to go into more detail about why I’m not your stereotypical atheist, even though perhaps I used to be.
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I remember sitting in class at Grove City College in the fall of 2015 and disagreeing with every single Christian point that the professor made. I didn’t really know about the word “atheist” then, and I didn’t exactly know what I was, but I knew I wasn’t a Christian. It was probably around this time when the events of this post took place, and when I first tried watching the famous Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate. It was also around this time that I first saw Zeitgeist: The Movie.
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Back in April, I had the pleasure of meeting Freedom From Religion Foundation co-president Dan Barker. It was a fun evening consisting of a lecture on his newest book, Mere Morality, and a following book signing. At the event, there was a table where you could buy one of Barker’s books or pick up a copy of the FFRF’s periodical, Freethought Today. Also on the table were several “nontracts,” courtesy of the FFRF. Dan explained that if you’re familiar with the tracts that religious people tend to hand out, these are the same idea except… the opposite.
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If you hang out in the atheist part of the Internet, then you’ve probably come across at least a handful of some of our cringey memes. They’re some of the more shameful creations that you’ll see from our community. You get everything from ugly fonts, low image quality, and multiple layers of filters on screenshots, to fallacies, oversimplification of philosophical questions, and things that are really just mean. Below are a few popular memes that I’ve seen since I started my Twitter, and why I think they should probably just not exist. Enjoy!
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One of the first things I did when I wanted to educate myself on atheism was read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Predictable, I know. I was a sophomore at the super-Christian, super-conservative Grove City College and all that I knew was that my professors hated Dawkins, so he must be doing something right. When I bought my own copy of The God Delusion, (the first book in my collection), I kept it hidden inside the cover of another, unsuspicious, book. I was still a closeted atheist at college, but more so to my Lutheran family at home.
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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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Let me tell you a story.
I was twenty years old, and a junior in college. I was in one of Grove City’s required classes called Civilization and the Speculative Mind, a class about worldviews, philosophy, and Christian theology. I wrote my term paper for this class on why naturalism does not inevitably lead to nihilism. It was a response to the claims made by James W. Sire in the class textbook The Universe Next Door. He had made three “bridges” between naturalism and nihilism which I had set out to debunk. They were:
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