For religious people, the standard setting for the giving of thanks is entirely incidental to the meaning of the occasion. The family around the table, the turkey or ham, the football game — all of these are just props and ritual. None is essential to thanking God.
What for a religious person, though, is just the setting of Thanksgiving is for the atheist the entire celebration itself. Family and fun, and marking the change of the seasons, is its only meaning and significance.
I suppose that to a religious person an atheist Thanksgiving must appear a thin thing, lacking reverence and grandeur. But then, again, a person who reveres a grand God must feel diminished in her own eyes. Giving thanks to God must engender in the religious the sense that they are powerless supplicants to a higher reality. Another thing we atheists are happy about, then, is that nothing at all depends on the will of a spirit in the sky.
The quote above is from Mark Mercer, chairman of the Philosophy department at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Submitted by J. M. Green
Today I am thankful for my life, liberty and the ability to pursue happiness. I'm thankful for my health, my family and my friends. I'm thankful for the people who appreciate my work who recommend it and defend it against objections to the contrary. Today I am a very grateful person. I am usually this way though, so there isn't any change because it's Thanksgiving Day. It's the best way to live life if possible. Here's wishing the less fortunate among my friends can at least appreciate the simple things in life. When life seems frustrating or debilitating then just focus on breathing if nothing else.
This year I've tried to categorize them rather than list them in order of importance. Enjoy. Again, this listing might be changed slightly as the end of the year approaches.
The following interview was conducted by "The Promethean" which is the email newsletter of Prometheus Books. Enjoy.
In the powerful movie
Music Box, Jessica Lange plays Anne,
a lawyer defending her Hungarian-American father against charges of being a war
criminal who tortured Jews in the Holocaust.
Anne finds these charges to be unthinkable, given that she knows her
father to be a loving man. Tensions rise as the prosecuting lawyer claims that the
caring father she knows is a carefully-constructed persona which hides the true
nature of his past.
Anne manages to secure
evidence which results in the dismissal of the charges against her father, but
the prosecutor urges her to stop living in a fantasy world, and to dig deeper
into her father’s past, to find the truth.
Anne finds herself facing a difficult choice:
pursue the truth at great personal cost, or settle
for the easy answers and safe world of what she has always thought to be true
The movie serves as a powerful illustration of the mental
trauma which Christians face when they are first confronted with rumors of
unsavory secrets in their family history.
Could the loving Heavenly Father which they have known actually be a
brutal and heartless psychopath?
Do
they dare stir the dust of doubt by digging around in the ancient archives of
Yahweh, reading what was written about him in old diaries and tattered
documents?
A good friend sent me an ad he's placing in magazines and newspapers with this as a title. It's really good. See what you think:
As He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him. (John 9: 1 -3)
Here’s my commentary on these three verses in a nutshell:
In the comments here a Christian said, "you cannot use the scientific method to show you are most likely not a brain in a vat WITHOUT begging the question." Luiz Fernando Zadra responded nicely as follows:
When Christians are asked why their all-powerful, loving god does not intervene when people are carrying out acts of horrendous cruelty and violence, they have an answer. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they have an emergency exit. This mental escape hatch allows them to stop wrestling with the implications of a god who stands idly by and allows psychopaths to carry out their cruelties, unopposed.
Long ago, Epicurus pointed out that a god’s inaction in the face evil calls into question its power and goodness:
Harrison's prolific writings are very good. I highly recommend them. He has a new book out called "Think: Why You Should Question Everything," which looks excellent as well. I don't have an opinion on his first book, "Race and Reality," since I haven't read it. His others are important and needed. Check them out.
Think about it. Once religion is forced out of it theological apologetic protective shell, there’s the same credible level of logical proof for the human made world of Gods, angels, devils, demons and other spirits as there is for the human made world of mineral spirits or, to put it another way, both the same printed texts that are used to
prove theism is true provides the very same level of
proof that a printed label
proves real Spirits do exist in a
can of mineral spirits .. . . no joke!
God is like a parent who tells his children "Do as I say and not as I do."
God commands us to do good, to be kind, to be merciful, and seek after justice for the disenfranchised, but he doesn't do it. Do as I say and not as I do, is the divine message.
God is the ultimate hypocrite. Christians worship a divine hypocrite who is above ethical standards. Yet they maintain God is the standard for ethics. A whole industry of apologists for this hypocritical God has arisen to justify his deeds and his inaction in our world. It doesn't make any sense at all. Christians don't make sense. They call good evil and evil good. Woe to people like that, God hypocritically said (Isaiah 5:20).
What can justify this divine hypocrisy? 1) Creation. He's the creator. We aren't. So he has the right to take our lives because he made us. 2) Omniscience. He has it. We don't. So he knows what is best. Power (or ownership) and Knowledge. This supposedly justifies why he acts differently than he commands us to act. This is why he can do evil and call it good. This is why he can tell us to do as I say and not as I do. Do these twin attempted justifications offer an adequate apology for God? No, no, no.
Here are pictures of two of my bookshelves. Say that I'm ignorant. Go ahead. Say it. ;-) And yes, I've read most of the books or significant parts within them. Click on a picture to enlarge it.
The following quote is well articulated, even if I don't agree. I have tried to disabuse cipher of the following cynical position to no avail. I consider it a rhetorical exaggeration that makes a very forceful point, and not completely false given the nature of faith. It's meant as an explanation for why most of our best attempts at arguing Christians out of their faith fail miserably. It was said in response to David Marshall's unwillingness to admit he lost his debate with Phil Zuckerman recently, where Marshall wrote, "He didn't win the debate -- he admits he didn't rebut my arguments."
When I went up to Canada to debate Rauser in June we recorded five separate discussions, linked below. Enjoy.
Now what? Say he didn't mean what he said? Say it wasn't really a good endorsement after all? If it isn't that good of a book why would he write a blurb for it at all? Get it. See for yourself.
Rauser is also taken to task and he responds, 
In what follows I want to write a brief review of it while making a few observations. I will probably write more about it from time to time, especially when one of these myths is brought up in our discussions here.
To read other posts in review of his brilliant book click on the tag below. In this last one I want to highlight how much of a crusader he is, a radical, and how much I like it. He is dead serious. We know this from his radical remedies for the present faith virus pandemic.
