A few days ago, I wrote about the re-issuing of the Creationist pamphlet on a local church’s website. A person who attends the church had contacted me about some upcoming sermons they are having. I told her that I was disappointed that Parkview Christian Church had decided to put up the pamphlet even after they said they would remove it due to the massive errors. Well, now I received a brief email response from Pastor Tim. He says (referring to… Read more
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, responded to Richard Dawkins’ overall anti-religious attitude at the 2006 Beyond Belief conference. Tyson is quite articulate himself. Watch him: (By the way, many of the Beyond Belief sessions are available to download and watch on your iPod.) I started to agree with Tyson that Dawkins would do well to be more of the educator and less of the bulldog. I mean, part of being a teacher is understanding where your students… Read more
Through my work in groups like the Secular Student Alliance, I’ve been able to meet many of the leaders in the atheist community. So far, I haven’t met as many Christian leaders, but perhaps that’ll happen more when the book is released next spring. I’m hoping to put some interviews with these leaders up on the website in the near future. Similarly, I’d like to put up interviews with younger people who may or may not have made up their… Read more
If you haven’t heard it yet, This American Life re-broadcast a story last week about Carlton Pearson, a pastor who was once rising in the evangelical ranks. Pearson is also responsible for introducing the Christian world to Pastor T.D. Jakes. So why was Pearson once rising as opposed to still rising? Because he stopped believing in hell. And then all hell broke loose. Because “when there’s no hell (as the logic goes), you don’t really need to believe in Jesus… Read more
What does an atheist gives thanks for on Thanksgiving? Rachel gives one example here. I’d love to hear what other atheists experienced over the weekend. Any controversies with the family? Let me know. *** Heather tells of her conversion. From agnostic to atheist. She also explains why. *** You’ve seen the video on YouTube. If you haven’t, see it here: Now, see the interview with the creator, Zachary Kroger. Read more
PZ Myers linked to a post I made on his site yesterday morning. All of a sudden, 2318918903 people decided to drop on by. Which was very cool. (Hi new people!) I found the website statistics particularly interesting. Below is the graph of the number of visitors from the past week. Guess which day the Pharyngula post appeared. A similar blogbump (only *much* larger in scale) happened a couple months ago when Fark linked to an article from Humanist Network… Read more
For anyone who is interested in this stuff… there are a few new additions to the site. 1) On the sidebar to your right, there is now a list of the most popular posts. 2) For any post, you can now subscribe to the comments. This means if you’d like to follow what people are saying for a particular post, you can now do so, with or without posting something yourself. 3) If you need to contact me, there is… Read more
After being invited to Parkview Christian Church to have a discussion about atheism and Christianity with the pastor, on stage, for all three weekend services, I wrote about a pamphlet used by the Church. It was called “Creationism for my Child’s Teacher” and it was riddled with mistakes. Pastor Tim Harlow even responded to the comments you all made. Pastor Tim (a man I respect and like for several reasons… not including his views against Evolution) stressed that he wrote… Read more
Sarah is an atheist on MySpace. She gets unwanted email all the time, but one deserved a response. She talks about it here. It makes you wonder if this guy was trolling MySpace for single girls or for atheists (which might even be creepier…). *** Shawn shares his views on why he did not choose to become an atheist. He only chose to examine his religious beliefs. [tags]MySpace, atheist, Christian, atheism[/tags] Read more
I had dinner with an acquaintance last night. This girl doesn’t know too much about my personal beliefs and my involvement with non-religious groups, but she does know I’m an atheist. She’s a Christian, though she defines that loosely and doesn’t believe in organized religion. Our conversation eventually came to what our respective beliefs are. This girl was telling me how she had met a guy who changed her life a few years earlier. They met by chance at a… Read more