Reading Time: 6 minutes Hi and welcome back! We’ve been talking about personal evangelism lately — that person-to-person kind of recruiting that evangelical laypeople do themselves when they’re away from church. Recently, I’ve noticed that evangelical leaders have been demanding this evangelism more and more from their flocks. And by the same token, the flocks seem to obey less and less. […]
pascal’s wager
Posted inReligion, The Secular
Santa’s Wager: What If You’re Wrong?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Over the past couple of months, my six-year-old son has become more and more interested in parsing out fact from fiction. With the Christmas holidays approaching, the subject of Santa’s existence starting cropping up a lot. He began asking me questions like, “How does Santa get into Daddy’s house if Daddy doesn’t have a chimney?” […]
Posted inUncategorized
Esau Have I Hated: The Problems of Pascal’s Wager
Reading Time: 6 minutes As an out-of-the-closet atheist, I’ve been asked many times before by well-meaning Christians, “But what if you’re wrong?” There is an argument called Pascal’s Wager, which suggests one would be safer to believe in God only to find out he doesn’t exist than not to believe and find out he does. This argument is extremely […]
Posted inCartoons, General
To Hell With It
Reading Time: < 1 minute Blinky wonders and Spatsby has answers. Believe it all with or without good reason or you’ll be sorry. Thus saith holy deity, Todd.
Posted inGeneral
A Response to Pascal’s Wager (Fiction)
Reading Time: 8 minutes Mathematician Blaise Pascal famously compared belief in God to a wager. In this scene from my book, a Christian and an atheist argue about the strength of this argument.
Posted inGeneral
Pascal’s Problem: A Mathematical Disproof of Pascal’s Wager
Reading Time: 4 minutes Guest post: Pascal’s wager takes a gambler’s probabilistic look at the promise of the afterlife. From this perspective, betting on Christianity’s afterlife is just a smart bet. But this conclusion doesn’t stand up to analysis.
Posted inThe Secular
But What If You’re Wrong? A Response to a Christian Pastor
Reading Time: 4 minutes During any given week, I have a number of conversations ongoing with inquisitive folks who read the blog and want either to send me encouragement or else to challenge me to reconsider my disbelief in their religion. From time to time I like to share a sample of those conversations with the rest of you […]
Posted inReligion
Because It’s Funny and Sad: the TEN QUESTIONS.
Reading Time: 15 minutes I want to talk about who comes up with these questions and why, because I think that’s far more germane to our community.
Posted inReligion
Seven Totally True And Absolutely Compelling Arguments Against Atheism.
Reading Time: 10 minutes So let’s understand here that though the title of his piece is “Why I Don’t Believe in Atheism,” what he’s actually doing is offering up his (and his denomination’s) seven best arguments against what they believe is atheism.
Posted inReligion
The Christian’s wager: why faith is a bigger gamble than disbelief
Reading Time: 6 minutes I once had a conversation about death with a friend who worked in hospice care during a transitional time in her life. Like many of us who deconverted from religious faith to atheism, she wondered how the change of thinking would affect her outlook on death and the brevity of life. Working around death for […]