Tag: atheism

the God Delusion

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One of my goals for this year is to read my way through a stack of books that have been sitting on my desk for months now. They are about atheism, religion, philosophy, science, social issues, parenting, and a few works of fiction. We'll see how far I get.  This post contains some affiliate links. Thank you for … Continue reading the God Delusion

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Hey, Christians. Feeling Persecuted? Don’t Be Evil!

Some light reading for your weekend.

AwayPoint

Christians and LionIn the debris of the Hobby Lobby ruling, the Atlanta Banana published a satirical news report: Little Caesar’s Pizza had been granted the religious freedom to feed Christian employees to lions.

Never mind that the trope of Christians getting fed to lions may have been made up by early Christians themselves; the Little Caesar story was almost inevitable. Faced with a barrage of conscience claims, frustrated secularists are wondering whether there’s any limit to the privileges some people will claim in the name of “religious freedom” or any limit to the exemptions and entitlements they will be granted by co-religionists in positions of power.

Turning frustration into humor is a time honored tradition, but serious Bible believers are unlikely to find the Little Caesar’s story funny. The notion of martyrdom as the apogee of faith is as old as the Catholic Church. To quote Christian History for Everyman…

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Games Christians Play: Three Common Examples of Confirmation Bias

While many argue that Christian Science isn’t really “Christian” the “logic” used in their Confirmation Bias follows a similar track. It uses slightly different language, but the logic is very similar.

godless in dixie

People often ask me why I left my faith.  There are no good short answers to that question, but one of the simplest ways to explain what happened is to describe the games I was taught to play to protect my beliefs and to keep them immune to falsification.  Stepping outside of my own thought processes long enough to see how these games work probably went further than anything else I did to convince me that my religion was all inside my own head.  “Know thyself,” the Greeks wisely advised.  That’s certainly where it started for me.

dilbert_diss

Confirmation bias can be a powerful thing.  When you have a strong personal need to believe something, you set out to verify your belief with a mixture of motives.  You want to know if what you believe is true, but the cost of disappointment may be so high that you become susceptible to…

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