Social justice book reviews
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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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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This week, I finally did something I have been wanting to do for a long time: I put “atheist” on my Facebook profile. It was less of a dramatic coming-out than I had anticipated; to see it, you would have to go to my profile and scroll through my “About” section and find it listed under “religious views”. I could have made it into a post that will show up in people’s News Feeds, but I didn’t find that necessary. I did, however, follow a number of atheist pages, and maybe one day I’ll share some of their posts for all my friends to see.
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Over the years, I have received a lot of emails and messages from other closeted atheists asking for advice. Most of these messages have been from atheists in high school, wondering what to do in regards to having this secret among Christian friends, parents, and church members. I decided that compiling my advice together could hopefully prove helpful for at least one of my younger readers.
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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
I’m finally going to start a new series that I’ve been so excited to share on here for over a month, which is…. more apologetics! Rather than taking another class, I’m going to be looking at an apologetics book written by a professor from my college. I decided that it was so bad that I would review and critique it as I went along instead of one long review at the end of the book, which I usually do. Read more
After four long and miserable years, I finally escaped from this mind-prison of a school once and for all at my graduation on May 19th. As far as I am concerned, this college has achieved the opposite of its goal of “nurturing my walk with Christ.” Instead, it accidentally shaped me into the dedicated atheist that I am today. It was the pivotal point in my life that pushed me from agnosticism all the way to atheism, to this blog, and out of the closet. Read more
In the fall of 2017, I went to a talk at school called Homosexuality and The Christian. It was a small informal thing in the student union, held by a resident director. She talked from personal experience, saying that she had close friends and family members who were gay. She went on about how to deal with “same-sex attraction” as a Christian, reiterating the views of a Christianity-homosexuality scholar named Matt Yarhouse. I believe that he ultimately advocates for celibacy if one is same-sex attracted and it disobeys one’s religion, and he suggests that one can find companionship with friends and in the church, and of course, in Jesus Christ himself. Read more
I once read an article from Grove City College where its president boasted about welcoming students who are Jews, Sikhs, and atheists. He said that while students must obtain a fixed number of chapel credits, they don’t need to be Christian or even spend time in the actual chapel! That’s every atheist’s dream, right?
If you’ve been following my rather tumultuous experience being an “undercover” atheist taking Apologetics 101, then you’ll know it’s been a rough ride. My professor tends to teach his opinions as facts, make up completely unfounded statistics, and give a lot of plain wrong or illogical information.