A long time ago when I was administering a roleplaying MUD* online, I began to notice that the staffers responsible for creating and running plots and storylines for players kept defaulting to very supernatural themes.
Even a guy who is one of the folks behind Skeptic Magazine and a regular speaker at big atheist conferences, author of books about skepticism, and a champion of science can experience That One Weird Thing That Happened Once (TOWTTHO).
The very best that apologetics arguments can ever do is make a lack of evidence sound slightly less damning.
We’re coming back to the Handbook for the Recently Deconverted shortly, but I saw this today and it just cried out for examination. Ryan Bell is a Seventh-Day Adventist minister who decided to go one year as a functional atheist. Read more
A rather impish part of me wants to write, “The person making the claim is the one who owns the burden of proof,” and have done with the post, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Today we’ll Read more
A rather impish part of me wants to write, “The person making the claim is the one who owns the burden of proof,” and have done with the post, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Today we’ll Read more
There is a book. The book details everything people need to know. Everything. But especially it tells us about The Place. It tells us where The Place is. Who gets to go there. Who the owner decides to invite. Where they will stay when they arrive. What they will do when they’ve gotten there.
It starts, for many of us, with a crystal-clear OHMYGOSH moment where we suddenly see something that simply will never be unseen. A light shines in a dark corner for the first time, and we see what lurks there and can never forget or even ignore it. Exactly what that light illuminates varies by the person, but that’s what it feels like. Suddenly something we thought for maybe our whole lives turns out to maybe be not quite what we thought it was.
Merry Christmas and welcome back! Hope you had a wonderful holiday. Today I want to talk briefly about this really interesting piece I saw about the annual “War on Christmas” that Fox News (Faux Noise?) trumpets and bleats about with Read more
I’ve always loved Christmas. This time of year in general is an important one for me–almost everybody in my family has birthdays in the three months of winter, and most of the anniversaries happen around then as well–and most of the important deaths (“light a candle for me every year,” she asked, and I always do, always, always). So I want to talk about Christmas today, and at the end there’ll be some link love to some posts written elsewhere by me and other folks in case you need something to keep you busy.