Believing in Transformation | Psychology Today

The human mind always seeks solutions to problems and occasionally finds itself in a complete stalemate. Death is one of them, the ultimate one. Human beings can’t imagine our own absence. The concept of nonexistence for an existent being is, at best, baffling, like endless space or other universes. Such puzzlement precedes enlightenment.
When confronted with [...]

Should We Respect Religion? Does Religion Deserve Respect?

By Austin Cline, About.com
An increasing source of conflict in the world today is centered around religious believers’ demands for respect. Muslims demand “respect” that would forbid criticism, satire, or mocking of their religion. Christians demand “respect” that would amount to something very similar. Nonbelievers are caught in a bind when it’s not clear what “respect” [...]

Science Allows us to Say God Does Not Exist

A popular objection to atheists’ arguments and critiques of theism is to insist that one’s preferred god cannot be disproven — indeed, that science itself is unable to prove that God does not exist. This position depends upon a mistaken understanding of the nature of science and how science operates. In a very real and [...]

Douglas Adams Speaks

This was originally billed as a debate only because I was a bit anxious coming here. I didn’t think I was going to have time to prepare anything and also, in a room full of such luminaries, I thought ‘what could I, as an amateur, possibly have to say’? So I thought I would settle [...]

Reality and Its Rivals: Putting Epistemology First

 Being epistemically responsible – not taking appearances at face value and seeking external confirmation for belief – inevitably pushes us toward intersubjectivity and science. This in turn increases the plausibility of the claim that there’s nothing over and above the natural world, what science shows to exist.

About the most crucial distinction we can make as [...]

What is Naturalism?

Naturalism, in essence, is simply the idea that human beings are completely included in the natural world: there’s nothing supernatural about us. Naturalism is based [...]

A Question of Faith

Like Wolpe’s book, Maher’s movie raises questions about faith; unlike Wolpe, Maher isn’t interested in answers. “Religulous” is a profane, condescending, and often funny rant against religion — Christianity especially, but also Judaism, Mormonism, and Islam. Maher’s mocking documentary promotes the idea that only oddballs, cranks, and nincompoops can take religion seriously. That’s a fairly [...]

Morality, Religion and Atheism

Many Americans doubt the morality of atheists. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, a majority of Americans say that they would not vote for an otherwise qualified atheist as president, meaning a nonbeliever would have a harder time getting elected than a Muslim, a homosexual, or a Jew. Many would go further and agree with [...]

Psychology of Supernaturalism; why humans are so screwed up

Psychology of the Supernatural
Sometime during the upper Paleolithic era 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, humans experienced cognitive changes that created the ability to use our modern symbolic language.
These cognitive changes were only possible because a virtual space had been created in the minds of archaic humans.
The need for greater impulse control (niceness) in archaic [...]

Theology, Apologetics, and Religious Philosophy

Same Questions & Topics, Different Motives
By Austin Cline, About.com
Both theology and the philosophy of religion have played important roles in Western culture, but not everyone understands the important differences between them. The motives behind theology and the philosophy of religion are very different, but the questions they ask and the topics they address are often [...]

No Soul? I Can Live with That. No Free Will? AHHHHH!!!

Imagine a world where no one believed in free will. Life would no longer have meaning, right? We’d be robots, puppets on a string, living a mockery of a real human existence. And why be moral? After all, if we do something bad, we didn’t freely choose to do it, and so we cannot be [...]

Naturalism, Values and Community

Many atheists have an almost phobic reaction to any discussion of morality. I sympathize with this reaction. Let’s face it, morality is a messy subject. It contains the seeds of condemnation, punishment, alienation and guilt. But we shouldn’t shy away from this discussion just because religion often uses a moral code [...]