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+14 +1
Answers in Genesis explains "Were you there?"
One of the common tactics of believers in Young Earth Creationism, and devotees of Answers in Genesis, is to reply to statements about evolution with the question, “Were you there?” Ken Ham has been pushing this approach since at least 1989, and it’s dishonest horseshit, as I’ve explained at length.
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+27 +1
Intelligence, Atheism and Culture
When someone tells me that religious people have lower intelligence than atheists, I translate that immediately into “Well-off people with some economic stability and access to higher education are less dependent on the social safety net religion provides.” That’s all it really means.
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+18 +1
More Atheist Leaders Who Aren't Dawkins or Harris: Alix Jules
This week’s profile/interview: Alix Jules. Jules is President of Black Non-Believers of Dallas (BNOD), an organization created to provide networking opportunities for nonbelieving peoples of color. It is open to everyone; however, its focus is to provide a safe space for godless black and brown nonbelievers. They provide a southern beacon to our friends in shared disbelief, reminding them they’re not alone.
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+14 +1
Gospels vs. the Perfect Miracle Claim
Try to imagine the most compelling miracle story possible. Here’s one; tell me what you think: I met Jesus yesterday. At first, I didn’t believe who he was, but he turned my lawn furniture from steel into gold. I just got back from a dealer who assayed the furniture, confirmed that it was solid gold, and bought it. Over 200 pounds of gold at $1355 per ounce works out to be close to $4.5 million. Guess who’s a believer now!
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+14 +1
WOTM: The Apostate
Would anyone knowingly join a religion with a draconian apostasy clause? I don't think so.
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+14 +1
The Plan | The Atheist Pig
God has a plan for everyone.
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+17 +1
Losing Faith
'Atheism happened to me when I wasn’t looking. Theism happened to me when I wasn’t thinking.' A timeline of some key memories around my personal experience of religion, running from my earliest memories to my emergence from it into atheism.
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+13 +1
The Dragon In My Garage
Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!
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+16 +1
There’s No Religious Freedom to Refuse Service
This has been a perennial demand of the religious right, going back to when I wrote “Unapologetic“, one of my earliest essays, in 2005. And while most of these religious supremacists are upset about birth control, it’s hard to see why it would stop there. If you’re a pharmacist who believes that AIDS is God’s punishment for sinners, could you refuse to fill a prescription for antivirals? The court rightly held that the state’s interest in public health and safety trumps these petulant demands.
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+12 +1
Edgy Deepak Chopra makes a fool of himself, again
Deepak Chopra is mad about being called an evolution denialist, and to disprove the accusation, he fires back with a whole long letter full of misconceptions about evolution. As usual, he relies on painting himself as the brave pioneer at the very edge of science, with a hooting mob of regressive scientific dogmatists haranguing him.
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+12 +1
Respecting Beliefs
TheraminTrees offers an explanation of why he doesn't subscribe to the view that 'we should all respect each other's beliefs.'
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+28 +1
Work Advice: How to handle a boss who puts religion first at the office
His habits and mannerisms make some workers uncomfortable. But are those habits illegal?
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+17 +1
Oh God! The lord’s my sex guru: Pious perverts, quasi-incestuous misogyny and the twisted world of religious sexual repression
Evangelicals are penning sex manuals. The purity movement oddballs are on the move. It's all deeply disturbing.
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+18 +1
Baloney Detection Kit
Based on the book "The Demon Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark" published by Headline 1996. The following are suggested as tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacious or fraudulent arguments:
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+19 +1
Evaluating Personal Experience
There are sound reasons for preferring the data from randomized, double-blind, controlled experiments to the data provided by anecdotes when we are searching for causes. Even well-educated, highly trained experts are subject to many perceptual, affective, and cognitive biases that lead us into error when evaluating personal experiences.
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+4 +1
An Index to Creationist Claims
The most comprehensive index of claims made by creationists regarding biology, cosmology, evolution and geology to be found on the web. If a creationist makes a claim to you, the rebuttal is likely to be found here.
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+17 +1
The Way of the Mister: Atheist Fundamentalist
A comparison of Atheist "Fundamentalism" and Religious Fundamentalism
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+19 +1
Euhemerization Means Doing What Euhemerus Did
One of the theories Plutarch describes and rejects is what we call the euhemerization theory. So context is key here: he is explaining why euhemerization is not believable. His reason? Because anyone who tries to claim celestial gods were once deified historical persons is doing exactly what Euhemerus did: making a fake history out of a supernatural story.
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+15 +1
The untenability of faitheism
Steven Pinker reviews Jerry Coyne's book, "Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible"
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+16 +1
So Wrong For So Long: On Liberal Biblical Reinterpretation
Liberal and progressive believers have a variety of theological rationalizations for why they remain in a church that’s historically been an unrelenting enemy of people like them. One of the most common is that God is continuing to deliver new revelations, updating and overwriting old beliefs, and they have faith that this will eventually result in all believers recognizing the evils of the past for what they were.
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