Reading Time: 3 minutes The ideological Turing test that was running at Unequally Yoked has concluded, and if you’re like me, you couldn’t wait to find out how we did. Well, the results are in: here’s the answer key (some real surprises there!), and here’s how the voting shook out for the atheist round and for the Christian round. […]
Debating
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Cast Your Ballots Now!
Reading Time: < 1 minute I wrote last month about the ideological Turing test going on at Unequally Yoked, and the first round of voting is now beginning. Leah has posted 15 sets of answers to a standard set of questions, some of them written by genuine atheists, some written by Christians pretending to be atheists. Do you think you […]
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Take the Ideological Turing Test
Reading Time: 2 minutes My guest blogger alumnus, Leah of Unequally Yoked, has proposed a very interesting challenge for Christians and atheists alike which she calls the “ideological Turing test“: One of the greatest gifts of my time at Yale has been living, writing, and arguing in a community of smart people with whom I fiercely disagree… The imitation […]
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You Call That Religion?
Reading Time: 3 minutes This is a guest post by Leah of Unequally Yoked. Adam is on vacation. Spoiler Alert: the post below discusses the final number of the musical The Book of Mormon. The Associated Press, in a review titled “Zany Musical ‘The Book of Mormon’ Will Convert You” said despite the sacrilege you might expect from a […]
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The Mormon Test
Reading Time: 3 minutes This is a guest post by Leah of Unequally Yoked. Adam is on vacation. When in argument with Christians, it can be hard to find a good way to explain why you doubt their precepts. John Loftus has a good idea with his Outsider’s Test for Faith, but most Christians believe that their faith can […]
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Adapt or Die
Reading Time: 4 minutes This is a guest post by Leah of Unequally Yoked. Adam is on vacation. My previous two posts on mockery have drawn a lot of criticism, including charges that I am an accommodationist. If that were the case, the definition of accommodationism had gotten way too broad. Trying to treat people with respect is different […]
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Atheists Don’t Debate (Except When We Do)
Reading Time: 3 minutes A Review of When Atheism Becomes Religion, Part II In chapter 3, Hedges gives a two-and-a-half-page-long excerpt of a debate he had with Sam Harris at UCLA in May 2007, moderated by the columnist Robert Scheer, about whether Islam encourages suicide bombing: HARRIS: OK, well, let me deal with your taking the measure of the […]
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Creationists Flee from Criticism
Reading Time: 5 minutes A few weeks ago, I was alerted by a Google alert to a post, “Conversation With An Atheist“, on the site Everyday Christian. Since I’m always interested to find Christians who want to converse with atheists, to see what they have to say about us and to us, I checked it out. It turned out […]
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The Three Kinds of Theism
Reading Time: 4 minutes If you’re an atheist who’s setting out to debate religious believers, there are three main categories of theism you can expect to meet. Although religious belief is one of the most diverse of human phenomena, with a limitless variety of gradations and exceptions, I think these three suffice to classify nearly all of the theists […]
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Thoughtful Iconoclasts: A Response to Madeleine Bunting
Reading Time: 5 minutes I last mentioned Guardian columnist and Templeton Foundation fellow Madeleine Bunting in 2007, in “On Being Uncontroversial“. She’s recently written another column attacking atheism, alleging that the New Atheists are drowning out, in her words, “real debates” about religion and faith. Personally, I don’t see the basis of her complaint. I think we’ve been provoking […]