Sunday December 27, 2009
The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society argues it is the True Religion on the basis of six biblical requirements that only they allegedly meet. Atheists may debate these biblical proofs with Jehovah's Witnesses at the front door or because they know Jehovah's Witnesses who wish to leave but are afraid because of nagging doubts. If atheists can refute the Watchtower Society's claim of meeting these Bible proofs, then the doubtful Witness may find it easier to leave with a clean conscience.
Read Article: Debating the 6 Biblical Proofs of the Watchtower Society & Jehovah's Witnesses
Sunday December 27, 2009
I wrote not long ago about how
members of Congress like Jason Altmire are apparently casting their votes based on instructions from Catholic bishops. Now, though, it appears that the religious corruption of our government goes deeper, because Senators are sending legislative proposals to bishops for approval. It's simply not consistent with democracy or liberty for bishops to have veto power -- official or not -- over legislation. This means that legislators who send bills or amendments to religious leaders for approval are actively working against the democratic system upon which their authority is based.
Read more...Sunday December 27, 2009
From: "Nasar"
Subject: Ignorant Site
Your site is the most ignorant site on the internet and i shall push for its closure. Your information is not based on any evidence whatsoever. And surely you think too highly of yourself. I would like to see you face to face but you are too cowardly to confront people with your views that is why you sit cowarying behind your computer screen. Where you a man you would take up a challenge for your claims. Any muslim child could even refute your silly gestures. And the truth is your time clock is ticking out and you will come to know indeed. May you and your site depart from this life quickly.
Read more...
Saturday December 26, 2009
Christmas can be a difficult time of the year for atheists. Although it has become highly secularized in recent years, the holiday has retained strong religious aspects. Many family celebrations of Christmas also include religious rituals which atheists cannot easily participate in without feeling dishonest. Should atheists even care about holidays like Christmas? Should they ignore Christmas, perhaps even create a new holiday as a surrogate? What exactly do atheists do with Christmas?
Read Article: What do Atheists do During Christmas Holidays?
Saturday December 26, 2009
Atheists and humanists are frequently accused of waging a "war" on Christmas, but somehow they haven't managed to damage or do anything to Christmas at all -- Christmas still exists and people are still able to celebrate it however they wish. Christians, in contrast, do seem to be damaging Christmas by their behavior. It is thus arguable that the only War on Christmas is being waged by Christians themselves and if there is any harm to Christmas, it will ultimately be the responsibility of those Christians.
Read more...Saturday December 26, 2009
The surprising success of Mike Huckabee in the Republican primaries forced pundits to confront the power of the Republican Party's base of evangelical Christians and produced a variety of explanations. Mike Huckabee believes that the explanation is simple: God wants him to do well. Many political, social, and religious leaders around the world and throughout history have claimed a divine mandate for their actions, policies, or agenda. In most cases, there is significant resistance from the people -- this is what makes having a divine mandate so necessary. It's harder for people to resist authoritarian leaders who claim to have God on their side.
Read More: Mike Huckabee Believes God is Behind Him: Is God a Mike Huckabee Partisan?
Friday December 25, 2009
Christmas has become generally secular in America, but despite (or perhaps because) of this, it has acquired an almost sacred and untouchable character which people defend to the utmost. Skeptics of Christmas are not received well; those who do object to something about Christmas usually portray themselves as actually defending a 'true' Christmas. I think, however, that a bit more skepticism of and dissent from Christmas would be better for everyone - it might even be better for Christmas.
Read Article: Bah, Humbug! Arguing Against Christmas
Friday December 25, 2009
It's simultaneously depressing and amusing to see Christians blow a fuse over atheists doing little more than expressing an opinion and/or being public about what they think. One might get the impression that some Christians regard the public square -- and indeed the entire public realm -- as their own exclusive property. They certainly don't seem able to handle any sort of direct competition, disagreement, dissent, or criticism.
Case in point this time around is Jane Gilvary, a student at St. Joseph's University who is throwing a fit over the existence of a "Tree of Knowledge" erected in West Chester, PA, by the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia. As an alternative to traditional holiday displays, this "tree" is designed to promote the values of literacy, learning, and skepticism -- none of which seem to be accepted or appreciated by the complaining Christians. Jane Gilvary in particular regards it as little more than "denigrating" for Christians to have to deal with something other than a religious display this time of year.
Read more...
Friday December 25, 2009
Is Astrology an art or is it a science? This may seem like an odd question, but the fact of the matter is that astrologers appear to want to have it both ways. On the one hand, they claim that what they do is something like an art, requiring a particular "feel" for the nature of celestial events and human beings. On the other hand, they try to paint their work with the brush of scientific accuracy and validity in the hopes that such an association will help justify what they do.
Read Article: Is Astrology Art or Science?
Thursday December 24, 2009
Perhaps the mid-winter holiday season centered around Christmas should be a time of festivities, but in America many other things intrude as well. Atheists are faced with questions about whether they should participate and if they should reveal their atheism. Conservative Christians insist that Christmas is meaningless without their religion -- and say that both are under assault from atheists. Should parents lie to encourage belief in Santa? How reliable are gospels stories about the Nativity?
Read Article: Atheists, the Christian Right, and Christmas Traditions
Thursday December 24, 2009
Some Christians' obsession with people using "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas" causes them to act as if the issue were something like an ethnic identity. Happy Holidays still includes Christmas, so it doesn't exclude Christians, but some Christians treat it like a deliberate insult designed to denigrate and offend them. Thus they adopt an attitude that is both defensive and hostile, and that's wearing thin even with other Christians.
Read more...Thursday December 24, 2009
Many families have a tradition of attending church services on religious holidays, even if they never go to church at any other time. Indeed, the fact that church is ignored the rest of the year may make these holiday visits all the more important in the eyes of some family members. When a person becomes an atheist, though, they may not want to keep going with their family. Is family tradition important enough to go to church on a religious holiday?
On the one hand, it would seem to be an act of hypocrisy for a nonbeliever to attend a religious service as if they were a member of the community of believers. If you don't really believe any of the myths and stories upon which these holiday religious services are based, what are you really doing there? How can you truly "participate" in a religious service when you reject that religion?
On the other hand, it is a family tradition, one which the atheist may have participated in when they were younger and still a believer. Attendance at these holiday services is in many ways not so much about the religion and religious dogmas and has become more about families participating in traditions and practices. These traditions don't just link people together now, but also link together family members from the past with those in the future.
As with many other things, your decision on this matter will ultimately depend upon where your levels of comfort and offense lie. If the church in question is one where the messages are particularly obnoxious towards freethought, you are probably best off finding some way of avoiding attendance. However, if you find that you particularly enjoy the holiday music, regardless of the actual content, then perhaps it's worth going.
In addition to figuring just where your comfort and offense levels lie, you'll also need to decide what attendance will mean to you. If you can find no meaning, much less pleasure, in attendance, then you should consider finding something else to do and looking for some way to help your family become more comfortable with that. You might even try to find other traditions that could substitute for church services and gradually replace them over time.
Wednesday December 23, 2009
The term 'juggernaut' is thought to come from a Jagannath, an idol of Krishna pulled along on a cart under whose wheels devotees would throw themselves. Christmas in contemporary America is a juggernaut in that respect: people willingly throw themselves under its wheels and it crushes everything it comes into contact with. You can't escape it and it dominates everything in culture, politics, and media for upwards of two months. What's an irreligious atheist to do?
Read Article: Silent Night, Godless Night: Surviving Christmas Eve, Day as a Godless Atheist
Wednesday December 23, 2009
Many Christians believe that Christmas is inherently religious and Christian, which means that it cannot be celebrated in a secular or otherwise non-Christian manner. This is easily refuted by pointing to all the ways in which people celebrate Christmas without any references to Christianity or religion on any level. Few Christians, in fact, celebrate Christmas in an exclusively religious manner. More and more, people just don't care about the Christian elements anymore.
Read more...Wednesday December 23, 2009
Atheists approach religious holidays in a variety of ways. Many atheists ignore religious holidays because they wish to divest themselves of all the trappings of religion. Others rejects the holidays of some religions (Christianity and Christmas) in favor of the holidays of other religions (Nature religions and Winter Solstice). Still others go along with traditional religious holidays but observe them in a secular manner -- which is not unusual because so many religious holidays have become highly secularized today.
Read more...Tuesday December 22, 2009
Many conservative evangelical Christians at this time of year want to 'put Christ back in Christmas' and insist that 'Jesus is the Reason for the Season.' With these slogans, they hope to remind people that Christmas is a Christian holiday and that without Christ, there would be no Christmas in the first place. Such Christians are offended that so many people enjoy the holidays without any reference to Jesus or Christianity and want it to stop. Unfortunately, they don't have much of a case.
Read Article: Is Jesus the Reason for the Season? Godless Christmas without Christ
Tuesday December 22, 2009
December is a time of the year when many people think about the nativity stories about Jesus -- but do they think very
closely and
carefully? If they do, they will notice that only two of the four gospels say anything about the nativity (odd, if it's really important) and those two accounts are very different. The popular nativity scenes most people think of are a blend of the two gospel stories.
Read more...Tuesday December 22, 2009
Many atheists debate whether they should celebrate Christmas in a "traditional" manner, celebrate in some other way, or just ignore the holiday entirely. There are decent arguments for all perspectives on this issue and a lot depends on a person's individual circumstances, but one interesting argument is the idea that sticking with traditional celebrations prevents people from accepting or recognizing that you're an atheist rather than a Christian.
Read more...Monday December 21, 2009
Christians sometimes complain that atheists and secularists are trying to remove religion from the public square, but the truth is that Christians are so accustomed to have the public square all to themselves that they can't stand it when they cease to be privileged and others are treated equally. We can see this in the reactions to atheists erecting signs alongside religious holiday displays at Christmas: atheists are accused of intolerance and hate speech for relatively mild criticisms of religion.
Read Article: Atheist Signs at Christmas: Should Atheists Challenge Christmas Displays?
Monday December 21, 2009
What does Christ have to do with Christmas? Many religious conservatives complain that modern liberalism and secularism have driven Christ from Christmas, but if we take a closer look at how Christmas is celebrated in modern America we find that there wasn't much of Christ there to begin with. What's there to "defend"? Maybe Christ hasn't really been an integral part of the American Christmas for a long time.
Read more...Monday December 21, 2009
Image courtesy
PriceGrabber.com
Christmas is prevalent throughout American culture. Everywhere you go, you can find Christmas greetings, Christmas decorations, Christmas displays, Christmas advertisements and more. All over people experience social and cultural pressures to "conform" and adopt this traditionally Christian holiday as their own, regardless of what their actual religious or cultural beliefs are. How can a secular, non-religious family cope with the political, religious, and consumer pressures being created?
Book of the Week: A Solstice Tree for Jenny
Sunday December 20, 2009
The most popular symbol of Christmas, except perhaps for Santa Claus, may also be the least Christian: the Christmas Tree. Originally derived from pagan religious celebrations in Europe, the Christmas Tree was adopted by Christianity but never entirely at home in it. Today the Christmas Tree can be a completely secular symbol of Christmas celebrations. It's curious that Christians latch on to it as if it where inherently Christian.
Read Article: Oh, Christmas Tree: Christmas Tree as a Secular Symbol of a Secular Christmas
Sunday December 20, 2009
Is American politics following American culture by creating images and ideas that have no basis in reality? Postmodernist critiques of American culture as creating "imitation reality" that determines "real reality" may start being applicable to American politics as well, not to mention American culture. Christmas is an excellent example of how an imitation reality can determine people's perception of "real reality" for two reasons.
First, so much of the "nostalgia" associated with Christmas is manufactured nostalgia -- and manufactured by corporations trying to separate you from your money while getting you to believe that this hyper-commercialism is inherent to Christimas. Second, so much of the symbols, practices, and traditions we associate with Christmas was also manufactured in recent history, often by corporations which were once again trying to sell things.
Read more...
Sunday December 20, 2009
From: "Nancy"
Subject: HMMM....
well all i can say is....man do you have a lot of false information on your websight..i must say that it disturbed me very much to know taht people who claim atheism are so stuck on thier own idea that when others are searching for the truth..they end up coming in contact with FALSE INFORMATION...that may sway them to think that maybe they tooo should be atheist....
Read more...
Saturday December 19, 2009
Multiculturalism can mean a lot of things, but it's generally part of an argument that minority cultural traditions and practices should be given a more equal status alongside majority cultural practices which have long dominated people's lives. This presents challenges to people prefer those majority cultural practices, but sometimes they find a way to make it work for them. One example is the attempt to defend explicitly Christian celebrations of Christmas in a multicultural context.
Read Article: Christmas & Cultural Diversity: Is Secular Christmas Antithetical to Diversity?
