Let's just ask the right-handers, which I am one, to use left-handed guitars then! I see no reason to think anyone should use right-handed guitars! Let's have a revolution. Let's start strumming with left-handed guitars and do away with the right-handed ones! Usually the majorities rule while minorities suck. Screw that caste system. In the past, left-handed people were demonized by Christian folks. True story. So to correct this injustice let's make right handers conform from now on. Let's do it from compassion and love.To see what produced the stigma and even demonization of left-handed people and what is eliminating it read below. Again, as Dawkins said, "science works, bitches." Faith does not! Get. Point. The.
What I do find disappointing, tremendously disappointing, is that modern people would defend the abhorrent views on slavery we find in the Bible. After all the progress we’ve made. But they don’t just defend these views as the primitive ideas of people in an ancient society; they ascribe them to God. God! The creator of the universe! The unchanging, omni-benevolent designer of morality himself wanted the Hebrews to own other people as property? Wanted people to do hard labour and provide sexual services against their will, amid violent beatings that left them barely clinging on to life?
And it is Christians who ask me where I get my morality from?
Matilda Gage was a suffragist, a Native American activist, an abolitionist, a freethinker, and a prolific author, who was "born with a hatred of oppression". She spent her childhood in a house which was used as a station of the Underground Railroad. She faced prison for her actions under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 which criminalized assistance to escaped slaves. Even though she was beset by both financial and physical (cardiac) problems throughout her life, her work for women's rights was extensive, practical, and often brilliantly executed.
Gage became involved in the women's rights movement in 1852 when she decided to speak at the National Women's Rights Convention in Syracuse, New York. She served as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1875 to 1876, and served as either Chair of the Executive Committee or Vice President for over twenty years. During the 1876 convention, she successfully argued against a group of police who claimed the association was holding an illegal assembly. They left without pressing charges.
Gage was considered to be more radical than either Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton (with whom she wrote History of Woman Suffrage). Along with Stanton, she was a vocal critic of the Christian Church, which put her at odds with conservative suffragists such as Frances Willard and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Rather than arguing that women deserved the vote because their feminine morality would then properly influence legislation (as the WCTU did), she argued that they deserved suffrage as a 'natural right'. LINK.
I give this book two thumbs way up. In addition to courageously sharing his personal story, Loftus applies his considerable training and expertise into developing a cumulative case against Christianity and for atheism. I cannot think of another book like it on the market. Loftus is clearly familiar with the work of evangelical apologists like Copan, Craig, Geisler, and Moreland, as his book is filled with references to their work and objections to their arguments. In fact, his book might best be described as a “counter-apologetics” textbook. Anyone who reads this blog (The Secular Outpost) but has not yet read Why I Became an Atheist should do so. LINK.
I think Dickson and many other “public Christians” are guilty of exactly the same thing. They speak out against the Dawkinses and Krausses of the world, rather than tackling leading atheist philosophers such as Graham Oppy, Theodore Drange and Quentin Smith, to name just a few. Christians devote entire websites to attacking The God Delusion, yet seem to completely ignore books like Why I Became an Atheist,in which John Loftus absolutely does engage with Plantinga, Craig and company, very successfully I think. And then there are classics such as Oppy’s Arguing About Gods, Sobel’s Logic and Theism, and so many more. LINK.
I'm new to agnosticism. And I'm positive of my outlook. However, the emotional aspects of my former Christian faith are still present, i.e. the guilt and the shame. What's the best way to get beyond this. I can see the positivity in a life without religious barriers. I'm just struggling to get there.My reply:
Thank you so much! I've been depressed for the last two weeks.My reply:
I was told he was a former Mormon apologist and maker of Mormon apologist videos. So I clicked on his name and found he has reviewed several atheist books in the last two weeks. Check them all out.
After watching this movie I'm glad I did. [Below is a re-dated post from October 23rd].Solomon Northup (July 1808 – after 1857) was a free-born African American from Saratoga Springs, New York. He is noted for having been kidnapped in 1841 when enticed with a job offer. When he accompanied his supposed employers to Washington, DC, they drugged him and sold him into slavery. From Washington, DC, he was transported to New Orleans where he was sold to a plantation owner from Rapides Parish, Louisiana. After 12 years in bondage, he regained his freedom in January 1853; he was one of very few to do so in such cases. Held in the Red River region of Louisiana by several different owners, he got news to his family, who contacted friends and enlisted the Governor of New York in his cause. New York state had passed a law in 1840 to recover African-American residents who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery...Returning to his family in New York, Northup became active in abolitionism. He published an account of his experiences in 12 Years a Slave (1853) in his first year of freedom.LINK
As I was doing so I was very impressed with it. I know this sounds egotistical but that's exactly what I thought. Maybe I shouldn't say what I think, right? If you're considering whether to get and read it, let me tell a few things to help you decide. I'll tell you about its strengths and weaknesses. Ready. Set. Go.
Using the Internet can destroy your faith. That’s the conclusion of a study showing that the dramatic drop in religious affiliation in the U.S. since 1990 is closely mirrored by the increase in Internet use. LINK.
Wouldn't you want it to if you were born somewhere else, especially if hell was at stake if you didn't believe? Wouldn't you? Yes or no? LINK.
The chart I gave you didn't show how many times the church has taken a stand against the scientific enterprise. Up to the 18th-19th century the church has historically taken a stand against every development in the sciences.You can hear him say it starting about 1:55 in this recording of one of his class lectures:
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I claim it's the only reasonable non-double standard for testing whether a particular religion is true. If you think your religion is true you should read it. If you are a Christian, why do you settle for less than the proof positive which must exist if Christianity is, in fact, true? Why embrace the smoke-and-mirrors Christians scholars keep producing, when they owe you the truth, the whole truth, and, nothing but the empirically demonstrable truth?
World Vision's American branch will no longer require its more than 1,100 employees to restrict their sexual activity to marriage between one man and one woman. Abstinence outside of marriage remains a rule. But a policy change announced Monday [March 24] will now permit gay Christians in legal same-sex marriages to be employed at one of America's largest Christian charities. LINK.
Clearly, those who live in richer countries see a weaker connection between religion and morality....While I see no necessary relationship between atheism and belief in social reform—the kind of reform that makes people more economically and socially secure, and provides government-sponsored healthcare—it’s obvious that if we want to eliminate religion’s hold on the world, we must also eliminate the conditions that breed religion...Providing universal healthcare and reducing income inequality are good places to start. LINK.
