Easy to be Entreated

The poster Nogginus read on the MAD board where a famous apologist "declared something to the effect that they have never even once found even one shred of evidence that was damning to the Mormon church". I used to be an amatuer apologist and knew almost all of the dirt on the church, but remained a true believer. I had found a way to explain all of the data in such a way that the Church could still be true. I firmly believed that none of the dirt I then knew about threatened the truthfulness of the Church. It would only weaken the testimony of those who never bother to think of those things in the way the apologist does. But, those things don't really weaken the claims of the Church. You see, the apologist plays in the realm of what is possible, not what is objectively probable. It is technically possible that the reasons the First Vision accounts differ so much is because each time the story was retold, Joseph simply focused on different aspects of the Vision. You c...

"A new Canadian survey has found that believers are more likely than atheists to place a higher value on love, patience and friendship, in findings the researcher says could be a warning that Canadians need a religious basis to retain civility in society. The survey of 1,600 Canadian adults, led by University of Lethbridge professor Reginald Bibby, gave a list of 12 values - from honesty to family life to politeness to generosity - and asked the participants if they found each "very important." In each case, theists ranked the values as more important than atheists." ____________________ I don't have a problem with the data. I have a problem with the interpretation of the data. Further research is required to determine which of the competing explanations of the current data set best fit future data. I tend to prefer this explanation that was given at the end of the article, but only further research will tell us if this explanation accurately describes why ...

Thomas Aquinas put forward five arguments for the existence of god. Here are my responses to the first two: 1) "The Prime Mover" -why does god get to be an exception? If you truly believe that everything that moves was first moved by something else, then who moved god? Why does he get to be a special situation? It is as arbitrary as if we declared that the Big Bang is the Prime Mover, that was not moved itself. You will no doubt object to that as I object to arbitrtarily claiming that there is this special being that has the ability to not have been moved itself. Where is the proof that such a being exists? The original problem remains for both of us, meaning that we don't know how things played out in the distant past, but Thomas's "solution" only gives the illusion that he has solved the problem, it is not a solution at all, for he has to explain how it is that he can have a prime mover that violates his basic argument that everything that moves has to ha...

You may have noticed that I have added the Atheist Blogroll along the sideline on the right of this page. If you are atheist or agnostic and have a blog, you might consider adding your blog to the Atheist Blogroll. It is an excellent way to increase readership. To learn how to join, go here .

My wife and I really enjoyed our UU services today. We are coming up on our 1 year anniversary of attending the UU fellowship. I really like our minister; she is very honest with herself and encourages us to be as well through her sermons. I relate well with her as she is an atheist and spiritual, naturalistic humanist like myself. Today, she spoke about solidarity and gave me a lot of food for thought. I love having my mind stimulated that way and to be able to share that with a whole community. And I was moved to tears as we sang "Blue Boat Home" which goes to the tune of the LDS hymn "In Humility, Our Savior". You can hear a sample here . I copied the words below: " Though below me, I feel no motion Standing on these mountains and plains Far away from the rolling ocean Still my dry land heart can say I've been sailing all my life now Never harbor or port have I known The wide universe is the ocean I travel And the earth is my blue boat ...

Note: These are my doctrinal issues with Christianity. I am not preaching that they should be yours. There are a number of different ways to challenge the validity of Christianity from: - literature analyses that show when certain verses were written which erode claims that they were eyewitness accounts or contradict the notion that certain passages came directly from god to his prophets - to historical reviews that show how the books were selected to be included in the Bible and how Christian doctrines evolved from the Christian fathers to today - from comparative analyses between the different sects (Coptic, Armenian, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant) who all seem to be able to justify their differing beliefs - from archaeological evidence that shows the development of Jewish and Christian myths over time by borrowing from neighboring myths - to everything from DNA evidence to fossil records to cosmic radiation, etc, that shows things such as the creation of the world, the Fa...

A thread on Nom on " Best Practices for Achieving and Maintaining a Happy Marriage " prompted me to write the following and I wanted to get your answers to my question at the bottom of this post: We are focusing a lot on what disbelief by one partner does to the relationship. Clearly, it can have different outcomes on the relationship for we know of some couples that end up disbelieving together, some that divorce, some that feel prolonged tension but work out some way to continue, some who never talk about it, some who respect each other's right to believe as they wish, etc. I think one of the major factors that affect which route a couple will take when one becomes a disbeliever is the quality of the relationship before the paradigm shift. (Disclaimer: I am not saying it is the only factor, there are many, but I feel this is a very important one). Did each partner admire qualities in the other spouse, or did they think their partner was inferior to them? Was there equa...

Otterson recently created a thread called " Opposition in All Things ". Below are his remarks and my response. (Begin Otterson's remarks) "I am not complaining,” my father wrote to my mother from war-ravaged Europe during the closing days of World War 2, when he finally reached the safety of American lines after three years as a POW. “I would not appreciate comfort if there were no hardship. We cannot appreciate joy without sorrow, health if we have never felt pain, or peace until after a war. All things must have their opposites, and we can learn from both." My father was well-versed with Christian teaching, but as far as I know never read extensively of Buddhist thought, or classical Chinese or Greek philosophy, all of w...

I have been working on the following post for a while. I was going to wait until I finished reviewing each of the distinct classes of spiritual experiences, but I want to go ahead and post what I have so far. When I was a true believer, I experienced many wonderful sensations that I was taught to attribute to God. When I came to no longer believe in God, I still had the desire to have those wonderful experiences because I enjoyed them so much and they enriched my life. Due to the particular path that led me to no longer believe in God, I had become fairly sure that those phenomena were produced and experienced solely by my physiology despite the strong impression that they were caused by some external source. The key to illiciting those internal experiences was to find what the necessary conditions were that led the body to produce those mental states. Or, to be more specific, how do we activate the neurons responsible for producing the phenomena? As far as we can tell, all ment...

Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot"

Perhaps it might be helpful to review a few terms. The following comes from the wikipedia entry on theism . It is possible to categorize views about deities in a variety of ways. One common procedure is to classify views about the existence of deities. This classification system categorizes view about deities as: theism — roughly, the belief that gods or deities exist atheism — roughly, an absence of belief in any gods or deities, or a belief that gods or deities do not exist at all. deism — the belief that a god or gods exists, but does not interact with events at the scale of human beings agnosticism — roughly, the belief that it is not possible to know whether gods or deities exist, or the belief that one does not know. Some classifications group atheism and agnosticism together under the classification of nontheism — absence of clearly identified belief in any deity. The main subcategories of theism are: polytheism — roughly, the belief that multiple gods or deities exist ...

One interesting aspect to post-Mormonism is what we do with our new found ability to chart our own path in life. In Mormonism, everything is spelled out as to what one must do and believe. You are "free" to obey or to choose the path of unrighteousness, for there is only one right way to believe and live. They permit you to make a few choices such as what you study in school or where you live, but most other decisions, even the size of your family (it must be large) are dictated to you. But, now, a whole world of real choices are open to us. The choice is no longer the right way or the wrong way, but which way do I want to go out of all the possibilities. We still have to deal with the judgments of the larger society and our families, what is legal and what is acceptable, but the field is much more open than it has been. Please share what you use to guide your decisions in what to believe and in what to do. After being burned badly by earnestly believing something that I can ...

The construct of god as an explanation for anything causes more problems than it solves. 1) One has not given an explanation if one has not proposed a mechanism. Giving god credit for something leads to the illusion that one has offered a satisfactory explanation, when one has actually not said much of anything. To illustrate, allow me to use "gremlins" for the word "god". Where did the matter/energy for the Big Bang come from? "Gremlins did it". It sounds like I gave an explanation, but I proposed no mechanism, so I never really answered the question or explained where the matter/energy came from. So the question still remains. Yet, some theists criticize atheists for not having a definitive answer for this question. My point is that theists don't have an answer either. "God" by itself is not an answer. Where did god get the matter/energy from? "Oh, he is omnipotent so he can just do things like that". That is not an explanation. I...

I don't claim to know who or how the BoM was written. But, there is one point of confusion about the Spalding-Rigdon theory that has been exacerbated by most who have written on the subject, both anti and apologist alike. It is very important that anyone looking into this topic understand what I am about to tell you as most everything that has been written on the Spalding-Rigdon theory focuses on the wrong book. I am borrowing generously from websites for which I will provide links to below. The following is from: http://www.mormoninformation.com/srtheory.htm The "Spalding-Rigdon theory" was first given wide publicity in 1834 with the publication of the book Mormonism Unvailed. In it, the author followed up on indications previously published in Ohio-based newspapers that a man named Solomon Spalding was the real (and unwitting) originator of the Book of Mormon. To make an extremely long story very, very short, the theory goes that Solomon Spalding authored a work called...

I just created a personalized search engine powered by Google that finds original sources and scholarly articles online about Mormonism. Includes both apologetic and critical information. Check it out: Scholarly Mormon Resources http://google.com/coop/cse?cx=014509711727122143429%3Agjfubl0yhfq If you like it, spread the word. You can put it on your website or blog page.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." -- William Shakespeare (Hamlet) Before I begin, I want to make it clear what I am not saying. I am not saying morality or good and bad do not exist. I am saying that they only exist as subjective constructs. I am not suggesting that if no objective morality exists, that we should then allow anyone to do what they want. The question of “what do we do now?” is separate from “does objective morality exist?” I am only treating the latter question in this post. I do have a moral system that in many ways is likely to be very similar to yours. What does objective mean? Objective means having actual existence or reality; uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices; or based on observable phenomena. It is contrasted with the adjective subjective. Subjective means proceeding from or taking place in a person's mind rather than the external world; or particular to a given person; personal. What is morality? Morality...