Reading Time: 6 minutes It’s always painful when someone you love dies. The loss and the separation inevitably hurt, and it takes time to adjust to the new reality of life without having him or her around. Because this is a recurring thing, society has evolved ways of marking and mourning the loss of loved ones which speak to the […]
afterlife
Posted inReligion
Shane Hayes’ Questions We Can’t Escape.
Reading Time: 10 minutes Hi and welcome back. Today we’re going to return to Shane Hayes’ new apologetics book, The End of Unbelief, as we examine what he thinks are inescapable questions–and demonstrate that they’re pretty escapable after all. It’s important to note that he phrases these questions in terms of them being humanity’s inescapable questions, when in reality […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Carroll/Novella Debate: Naturalism is hard, therefore supernaturalism!
Reading Time: 2 minutes This great quote came from Reddit where a commenter was reacting to my piece on the Carroll/Novella vs Alexander/Moody debate. It’s spot on:
It’s always a false dichotomy with these guys. Either the materialist explanation of consciousness has to describe absolutely everything in its entirety down to the atom, or else magic is true! “
Posted inScience
Carroll & Novella vs Alexander & Moody. Some terrible, terrible arguments
Reading Time: 2 minutes I really enjoyed watching the debate that is the talk of the town just now. Eben Alecxander, author of bestseller Proof of Heaven with team mate Ray Moody were arguing that death is not final, that there is an afterlife.
Posted inFilm/TV, General
My Life in Movies: Groundhog Day
Reading Time: 10 minutes In honor of the late Harold Ramis, the next movie to illustrate my deconversion has to be Groundhog Day. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time, as I know it is for many others, and few movies have stimulated as much philosophical and theological debate. There’s so much that could be said—and already […]
Posted inThe Secular
Is Christian Heaven More Real than any Other?
Reading Time: 2 minutes You’re comfortable with the concepts you’ve grown up with, but that doesn’t mean that there’s good evidence for them. Let’s look at a very unusual kind of heaven to see if the Christian concept is any more sensible.
Posted inGeneral
Near-Death Experiences Without Being Near Death
Reading Time: 3 minutes I’ve written before about near-death experiences and what they can prove about the existence of the soul. Now another study has come to my attention, one that has an even more potent conclusion. (HT: Boing Boing) It’s long been known that the content of NDEs is influenced by religion and culture. People who have them […]
Posted inGeneral
The Harm Psychics Do, Continued
Reading Time: 3 minutes You know, I was going to write about the Pastafarian who won the right to wear a metal colander on his head for his driver’s license photo – but by the time I got home from work yesterday, half a dozen other atheist bloggers had already posted about it, so never mind. Here’s something a […]
Posted inGeneral
The Logic of Genocide
Reading Time: 3 minutes Last month, I wrote about the hideous spectacle of ordinary religious people defending genocide because it’s commanded in the Bible – with some of them professing to not even understand why nonbelievers would have a problem with this. Greta Christina also highlighted this horrific mindset in the writing of William Lane Craig, the renowned Christian […]
Posted inGeneral
Another World Creeps In
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’m an atheist, in part, because I’m a moral person. When I first read the books that are called holy, what I found were countless passages that are abhorrent to the conscience: God drowning the planet in a global flood, massacring the innocent firstborn of Egypt, ordering Abraham to murder his son as a test […]