The following is an article I wrote for the October / November 2011 issue of Free Inquiry (the magazine of the Council for Secular Humanism), reposted here with permission from the editors. The Oct/Nov issue is a special issue on Mormonism, and one other MSP regular also contributed to it. I am an atheist, but ...
Originally published at the USU SHAFT site. I’ve enjoyed several of the videos produced by The Thinking Atheist. This video, however, should make them reconsider their (already rather smarmy) name. In the video, several atheists relate their Christian upbringing, which they now not-so-fondly remember as ‘brainwashing’. Dawkins has sometimes gone so far as to claim ...
I’ve read a number of articles and book chapters over the last month or so that have started to change the way I think about religion. After leaving Mormonism and becoming a secular humanist and atheist, I thought the superiority of my new views would be self-evident to anyone who took the time to consider ...
I just finished reading a two-volume set on atheism and secularity. There were a number of interesting findings in the books. I’ll probably post about a few more of them. But I’ll start with this one from p. 98: “Whereas 62 percent of heterosexual respondents are believers, only 42 percent of LGB respondents are believers. ...
You get arguments like Lane Williams’s in the MormonTimes this morning. Williams begins by lamenting the fact that atheists occasionally receive media attention: Reporters have provided a great deal of attention to these atheists, stoking the controversy over the existence of God. Even if reporters had no purpose to question religious faith, doubts have become ...
I was very sick when I converted to Mormonism. I like to joke that I wasn’t getting enough oxygen to the brain, but the more mundane truth is that I was confronted with the reality of my mortality, and like many people, I panicked. I couldn’t really die, right? I’m too solid, too complex to ...
Over at the faithful Mormon blog Faith-Promoting Rumor is a discussion enticingly titled “Do Relationships Make the Church True and False?” This post is a short enough one that you should just go over there and read it, but I guess I will still highlight some points here…when I was reading it, I will say ...
http://newsroom.lds.org/blog/2010/06/apostle-talks-religious-freedom-to-boston-youth.html Note to Andrew S. et alia explaining this post: It looked as if the Newsroom Blog link to Nelson’s comments re atheists had gone dead and so I posted a screen grab of the post here. Since the link is live again, I’ve taken that down and left the link in its place. As ...
I’m not exactly sure what is going on, but apparently the LDS Church is increasingly worried about this whole atheism thing. Russell M. Nelson just gave a talk to young adults in Massachusetts in which he railed against atheism. This combines with a talk from the October 2009 conference (I didn’t listen to it, but ...
I play soccer on occasion during the lunch hour at my university. One of the other players (probably the best player) is an Iranian-American, “H”, who is also Muslim (he’s in IT). He asked me what I teach and when I told him Sociology of Religion, he became very interested. He said his favorite topic ...
While some sociologists have been talking about the growing None population in the U.S. for a while now (see this report for an example), you know things have to be getting bad when researchers employed by the religions themselves are starting to worry about the health and vitality of religions in the U.S. The latest ...
Religion has a lot different facets that different people find appealing: identity/community transcendence/awe/altered states of consciousness rituals tradition/culture purpose/guidance belief in the supernatural And surely many others. It’s my impression that people tend to focus on a few of their favorites among these components and ignore the rest. It’s just as true of the devout ...
Leave it to atheists to consider the pets post-rapture. Apparently a group of atheists have put together a service for “heaven-bound” Christians to care for their “Eternal Earth-Bound Pets” should the rapture occur. Maybe we should contact the owners of the domain to see if they have made any money on their rapture pet insurance. ...
What’s an interesting interview question to ask a bunch of Mormons? Here’s the background: As you know, I’m going to the Sunstone Symposium next week, and — since my panel topic is “Bridging Stereotypes through Blogging” — I thought it might be fun to bring some of my Mormon conference experiences to the atheist community. ...
Why act ethically if not out of (self-interested) thoughts of your own eternal reward? According to the LDS-Freemen (hat tip TBBB), you wouldn’t: Is it okay for me to admit that the reason I have faith and hope in an afterlife is because I am interested in myself? Is that selfish? I don’t think it’s ...