About twenty years ago, Voyager 1 looked back toward it’s launching point and took the now famous “Pale Blue Dot” photograph. The arrow points to us. That’s Earth… from about 3.7 billion miles away, which is just a little bit outside our solar system. In the grand scale of the universe, that’s hardly any distance …
Category Archives: Philosophy
Reality, Death, and Family Cats
There’s a great post on Unreasonable Faith by guest blogger Vincent Skolny (of Avangelism.com) about kids, their understanding of death, and the nature of reality. He writes about his three-year-old daughter’s understanding of death as it relates to a recently-deceased family cat… and herself. A small excerpt from the conclusion: Death isn’t confusing at all: …
I love xkcd
xkcd is such a great web comic, not just for the humor, but for the insights. It’s also wonderfully techie and appeals to the geek part of me. Today’s comic is one of the funny and insightful ones (reproduced with the original title text for your hovering enjoyment). What I love about it is the …
Bertrand Russell on God and Religion
A Facebook friend linked to this video (3:25 in length) and I thought it worth sharing. Bertrand Russell answers some questions (in 1959) about God, religion, and why he’s an atheist. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aPOMUTr1qw As a side note, when I was 13 and starting to seriously question religious faith, Bertrand Russell’s book Why I Am Not a …
Religious Irrelevance
While watching the riders at a 4-H horse show today (my daughter is a 4-H member), I started considering the role that religion plays in people’s everyday lives. I don’t live in the most religious area of the country (South-Central Pennsylvania), but even so, on my commute to and from work, a total drive time …
Outside the Chapel Doors
For the past few days, I’ve been mulling over the issues of health care and global warming (or climate change, if you prefer) in the context of who opposes the issues. It seems that almost every person who opposes (meaningful) health care reform and who denies global warming is either very conservative and/or very religious …
Herding Cats and Situational Etiquette
In the atheist community, there are two sure things. The first is, of course, that atheists don’t believe in any gods. The other thing is that a lack of belief in any gods is pretty much the only universally common attribute of atheists. Atheist groups sometimes have trouble gaining or keeping members because, as the …
I feel pretty! Oh, so pretty!
I’ve read a number of accounts where atheists are accused of being narcissistic, because we supposedly set ourselves up higher than God… more important… smarter… too independent. We think we’re better than God, so the claim goes. I’ve always found that very odd since, by its very nature, atheism generally indicates the opposite view. We’re …
God Hates Children
God has ordered some pretty despicable things to be done during his tenure over mankind. The destruction of entire cities, blights, plagues, multiple smitings, disease, pestilence, and genocidal floods. It’s an impressive resume by any mass murderer’s reckoning to be sure but there’s more! God loves to torture and kill children or gutlessly order his minions …
Positive Atheism
Frequently, the writings of atheists tend to be critical of religion, theistic beliefs, and dogma rather than positive toward non-belief. It’s a necessary tack to take on a regular basis when confronting religious activism in politics, education, health care, and science. I do it myself. However, sometimes it seems that there isn’t enough written about …