I was all set to defend Sam Harris against Chris Hedges critique of him. Though Sam Harris has made some sweeping generalizations about Islam – “We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran” – it’s not fair to put him on the same [...]

An article on Alternet tries to make the definitive case that atheism is not a belief:
For me, and for the overwhelming majority of atheists I know, our atheism is a provisional conclusion, based on careful reasoning and on the best available evidence we have. Our atheism is the conclusion that the God [...]

Cool interview with Bad Religion frontman, and strangely erudite genius, Greg Graffin.
Graffin also has a PhD in zoology from Cornell.   When he is not on stage, he teaches evolution at UCLA.
Graffin is an atheist who doesn’t like to characterize himself as an atheist. “I bill myself as a naturalist because if you say you’re [...]

A good reminder of just how off base it is that the pope blames the Holocaust on atheism:
Christian theologians, Catholic and Protestant, reassured Germans that Nazism was in full accord with Christian principles. This was not a marginal effort; at the 1934 Oberammergau passion play, watching Jesus being hoisted on the cross, the audience saw [...]

Hey atheists, this should diminish your opinion of Sam Harris.
Should a 15-story mosque and Islamic cultural center be built two blocks from the site of the worst jihadist atrocity in living memory? Put this way, the question nearly answers itself. This is not to say, however, that I think we should prevent our fellow citizens [...]

A Facebook posting about this post on Atheism led me to the New Mysterianism (something I should have known about, but didn’t – but this is why the internet exists, thanks Damon).  Described as:
A philosophical position proposing that the hard problem of consciousness will never be explained; or at the least cannot be explained by [...]

Why the new atheism tends to get on my nerves.  A piece by Julian Sanchez called Agnosticism and the Varieties of Certainty counters the idea that atheism is really just agnosticism – i.e. it’s not a fundamentalist belief that God doesn’t exist, because that can’t be proven either.  His basic premise is that because God [...]

Recently on Daily Kos I got into a long discussion (argument) with an atheist about the possibility of God. Think it pretty well distills my point of view (as well as the point of view of the hardened skeptic) so I’m posting it here. The discussion began in a post about 2012 – [...]