thinktoomuch.net

The first couple of the Ten Commandments (numbering is non-trivial, traditions differ):
You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.
You shall not bow down to them or worship them
(From Deuteronomy 5, [...]

[Read more →]

I wrote about Dan Dennet’s TED talk on memes before. Right now, I want to talk about a 25 second section out of it, between 5:00 and 5:25:
I myself am a philosopher, and one of our occupational hazards is that people ask us what the meaning of life is. You have to have a bumper [...]

[Read more →]

While taking a look at pages on quote mining, I came across a rather silly example of how the Bible could be quote mined. In Psalm 14 (NIV) the Bible says, “There is no God”. It does, really! Yea, quote mining can be absolutely ridiculous, not so? Refrain from quote mining. Quote mining is dishonest, [...]

[Read more →]

UPDATE: See the comments for more on the saga. The MySpace group mentioned has been restored.
Skeptico has a post titled Sniveling Cowardly Christians. And yes, the title is justified:
Early this month, MySpace again deleted the Atheist and Agnostic Group (35,000 members). This deletion, due largely to complaints from people who find atheism offensive, marks the [...]

[Read more →]

We need a language with which to talk. For the purpose of this post, I choose The Matrix, because most of us have seen it, and it hopefully left a valuable impression on us. In effect, for the purpose of this discussion, I’m choosing The Matrix as our “Bible”, our corpus, defining the language for [...]

[Read more →]

Polls have shown that atheists are the “least trusted minority”, and that people would likely not vote for an atheist. The God Delusion cites (in the preface) a 1999 Gallup poll:
A Gallup poll taken in 1999 asked Americans whether they would vote for an otherwise well-qualified person who was a woman (95 per cent would), [...]

[Read more →]

Religious people often label atheism a “religion”. Atheists usually fight back, claiming it is not. I want to make a post about this silly debate. In order to prepare for that post, I would like to collect some opinions from my readers, that I can try to make it more relevant and more directly address [...]

[Read more →]

An attempt at a modernistic and rational translation of “The Evil committed by Atheism”. Not edited, just composed, thrown together, and published. Quite verbose. I will prune this down some time.

[Read more →]

I promised eventually explaining why I blame atheism for much of the evil in the world. “God” has surprised me by inspiring me to write this right now.
I blame atheism for fundamentalistic Christianity. Which means, everything you say is wrong with fundamentalistic Christianity, I can throw right back at the atheists. And it’s not their [...]

[Read more →]

Tolerance without understanding seems dishonest. Many “atheists” simply do not understand religion. How could they? They either have not been exposed to it and do not know what it is about, or they come from a fundamentalistic background and have been hurt badly by religion. Many “atheists” simply do not understand religion, but are very [...]

[Read more →]