A skeptic's quest for books, science, & humanism
I love learning. The time in my life that I have done the most learning has been since graduating from college three years ago. I don’t mean learning life lessons, but reading, writing, and researching my favorite topics just to learn them. When I was in high school and college, I didn’t love learning the way I do now, but school was my time with the most readily available resources, and I’m wistful that it’s passed me by.
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I started working at my first-ever office job in March of 2019. During a typical week, I would go into the office for three days and work from home for two. I enjoyed working in an office, mostly because it was the definition of success and of being a true adult after college. My coworkers were all very close friends with one another, and I enjoyed the lightheartedness in the air that came with the camaraderie. Unfortunately, I don’t think I ever truly made my way into that circle of friends (I’m talking best-friends-outside-of-work level friends) for many reasons. I believe that the overarching reason is because they all shared common interests that I could not have cared less about.
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Last week, I decided to share my process of consolidating my “Curious Atheist” identity with my “real-life” identity, and it felt a bit heavy. On the other hand, beginning next week I have a lot of exciting posts on the way, including a new series on paleoanthropology and creationism! To give my upcoming posts the time they deserve, I thought that today I’d be a little more laid back and share with you some of the artwork that I’ve made over the years. Of course, creating this post took a lot longer than I had planned (what was I thinking?), but regardless, here are photos of—and stories behind—my art pieces!
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This month, I will be celebrating my twenty-fourth birthday, and last month I was celebrating my one-year marriage anniversary. That’s because I got married soon after graduating college, and I got engaged during college.
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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (and happy birthday to me)! Last week I gave my review of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and this week as everything slows down during the holidays, I’m giving my blog post over to him. Here are 30 of my favorite Dennett quotes from Breaking the Spell!
David Hogsette’s E-mails to a Young Seeker is one of the most… fascinating books I’ve ever read. I first discovered this quirky apologetics book when I had to edit it as an assignment in a class at Grove City College—and not even a religion class, but an English class. Being the passive aggressive individual that I am, I decided that I had too many edits to be contained in one assignment, and I wanted my critique of the garbage presented to me at that school to be public. Read more
I believe that religious deconversion is a process. Throughout this process, the person evolves. Some evolve more than others, and some endure the changes in more ways than one. For me, deconversion went like this: Christian → agnostic → atheist. My evolution underwent several transformational stages. In between Christian and agnostic, there was the initial period of doubt followed by a period of apathy. In between agnostic and atheist, there was curiosity and intrigue about general arguments regarding the existence of God. This intrigue made me very passionate about atheism itself. I have been engrossed in the interplay between religious and secular, reading about both to get the most precise answers I could. Read more
This summer, I’ve spent some time going through an apologetics book called E-mails to a Young Seeker: Exchanges in Mere Christianity. The author is a professor at Grove City College, from which I recently graduated and where I encountered this book during an assignment in an English class. Throughout campus, Dr. Hogsette, or “Prof Dave”, as he calls himself in the book, was praised as a gifted author and apologist, but with every page of this book I find myself disagreeing more and more. (Check out my full introduction and Part 1, too!) Read more
A while ago, I tried to write a post showing the absurdity that is my life by proposing a hypothetical situation in which the roles of Christianity and atheism were reversed. In order to express just how much Christianity was forced on me at school, I wanted to say, “Imagine being a closeted Christian who had to take classes on atheism, sing songs about atheism, read books on atheism, and attend atheist church.” Quickly, I realized that this entire situation is flawed because by nature, atheism doesn’t operate in the same way that religion does. Read more
This week I was able to spend some time reading apologetics book E-mails to a Young Seeker by a former professor of mine, David S. Hogsette. I made it through to the fifth “email exchange” between Hogsette (or as he tirelessly refers to himself, Prof Dave) and his fictional “seeker” college student. Read more