The Atheist Blogger

Whether you like the term “deconvert” or prefer “conversion to atheism”, a recent investigative essay by Kieran Bennett has had quite a varied response. In light of this, I thought it might be interesting to run a poll to see how many people attribute their “deconversion” to Kieran’s conclusive factors.

Unlike previous polls, you can select multiple answers since there are probably multiple reasons. I’ve tried to reword a few factors so that ex-Muslims, Jews etc can also answer.

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Kieran Bennett (an atheist blogger and member of the forums) has analysed 117 Christian deconversion stories, and written a very interesting and informative essay on “What works in deconverting Christians?“.

His investigation found that:

• 14.89% were dissatisfied with some of the answers given to them by priests or other religious people.
• 14.89% saw that the religious doctrine wasn’t compatible with science and reality.
• 12.76% came to the realisation that religious dogma was “internally incoherent” and illogical.
• 10.63% read the Bible and found that for the Holy Book of Christianity, it didn’t reflect modern day Christianity at all.
• 8.51% found the corruption and scandals following the church as a persuasive argument against following their doctrine.
• 8.51% gave up on prayer and religion when they realised that nobody was going to listen, let alone answer to them.
• 8.5% thought the similarities of Christianity with so many other religions (and yet so different at the same time) the primary factor of their deconversion.

Surprisingly, less people found that an exposure to atheism / philosophy / skepticism was a factor in their deconversion (I guess we’d better try harder). Likewise, only a couple people saw the association of violence with religion and attributed it to their lack of faith.

As for how we can deconvert more people, Bennett hits the nail on the head, and comes to the conclusion that whilst we can push and prod people towards the big ideas (science, logic etc), a successful deconversion is all down to the individual. We can’t force our ideas onto people, only sow the seeds of doubt by asking the right questions.

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Received this email a few days ago:

Hi Adrian -

I am writing with a unique opportunity for you. Chuck Colson, former Counsel to President Richard Nixon, who converted to Christianity before spending time in prison on a Watergate-related charge, has written a new book called The Faith: What Christians Believe, Why They Believe It, and Why It Matters. Chuck is the founder of Prison Fellowship. His radio broadcast, BreakPoint, airs daily to five million listeners. In the last thirty-three years, Colson has visited more than 600 prisons in forty countries and, with the help of nearly 50,000 volunteers, has built Prison Fellowship into the world’s largest prison outreach. You can learn more information about Chuck’s new book at www.Zondervan.com/TheFaith.

The reason I am writing is that Chuck wants to have a friendly dialogue with a few atheist bloggers about his book. We’d like to invite you to be one of the bloggers.

This is a unique opportunity in that you’ll be able to dialogue directly with Chuck Colson about his book The Faith and Christianity. (Well, he has asked that the dialogue flow through me, but Chuck personally will be replying in person to all the dialogue.) Zondervan will periodically promote this dialogue on our blog, so this should generate more traffic to your blog. Also, this will be an opportunity for your blog readers to react to your dialogue with Chuck.

Let me know if you are interested? If so, I will mail you a free copy of Chuck Colson’s The Faith. We’d like to try to have this dialogue sometime in June, so we’d give you a couple of weeks to read the book and generate a few questions for Chuck. I’ll then get those questions to Chuck and his reply back to you. You’re welcome to then post the dialogue up on your blog, and respond with some counter-points or questions too if you’d like, which I’d again get to Chuck. I don’t know for sure how much back and forth Chuck will want to do, but I know he’s up for at least one round and my hunch is he’d be up for a few rounds of dialogue. An important point though is Chuck would like to keep the dialogue friendly & civil. Fair enough?

If interested, please send me a mailing address and I’ll get you a copy of Chuck’s book. Let me know if you have any questions on this. Thanks for considering this unique opportunity!

Mike Pritchard

At first read I was a bit puzzled, not because I’d never heard of this guy (although I’d heard of Watergate), but because I wondered why they actually were contacting me. Yes this blog is getting more popular day by day, but it’s one of the youngest out there. It’s only been 3 months since I first bought the domain and started posting, and although it’s been a fast ride from there, I’d still call the blog quite new.

Nevertheless, I decided to take their word for it, and emailed a response saying I would be delighted in reading his book. I gave them my address (I only live here for the next 7 weeks so I really don’t care), and Mike told me he’d send a copy of the book along.

In the meantime, I’d contacted Hemant Mehta because if they wanted to get the opinions of atheist bloggers, I reckoned he might be one of the one’s they would have gone to (especially considering he’d written a book). However he has had no such emails, and he reckons (as I do now) that to find some atheist bloggers, they just used Google. Naturally because of the domain name, a search for “atheist blogger” comes up near the top position, same goes for “atheist blog”.

Today I found out that I am not alone! A mainstream atheist blog (The Atheist Experience) has reported the same email, so I feel like this might actually turn out worthwhile. If anything it might generate a few questions of the book, and if Chuck is sincere in his dicsussion, it will prove to be a nice forum for atheist and Christian views.

I look forward to receiving and reading it!

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Today’s article was written by Luis Dias, a blog subscriber.

For an atheist, it is quite easy to disregard religion as a building of irrationality embedded in mankind as some kind of a “meme“, as proposed by Richard Dawkins on “The God Delusion”, a collateral damage of our gene’s architecture, a cultural self-perpetuating virus that has a life of its own and abuses traces of our gene’s that have evolved otherwise for the good and survival of mankind, as its propensity to obey, trust and sacrifice. If not this theory, it may be entirely other. It doesn’t matter: Religion is often seen as a delusional aspect of mankind, one that should be abolished away with use of Education and Enlightenment.

Religion is well aware of its own rational problems, for even ardent theists know damn well that if the Naturalist (Materialist) view of the universe is true, God has a real tough time explaining his own existence. No wonder why theology puts God in the “supernatural” world, a world made of lullabies and fairy-tales, where everything is possible, miracles do happen when no one is present(except fervent believers) and angels are questioned about how many of them can dance on the head of a pin and actually answer it!

Of course, this doesn’t address the obvious reality that religion is connected with the evolution of very good traits in civilization, as the notion of love thy neighbour, peace martyrs, sharing communities, charity, etc. Yes, all of these can be (and are) very debatable, but its essence I believe it is not. Commonly as well, we often see the fear of theists who will claim that the absence of God in people’s lives will open the path to a tasteless life, full of “sins”, crimes, hatred, absent of love and marvel. Yes, there are few atheists in jail, but couldn’t that be related with the higher education of atheists, rather than with atheism itself? Atheists are seen as cruel “realists” who only see matter and energy, and deny the truth of a soul, of a beauty beyond pure materialism. Incapable of seeing beyond their own eyes and senses, cynics and sceptics, void of a grand meaning of life with a big L, how can they be a Good People?

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Thanks to everyone who voted for the book club this month! If everything went right, this means we should have 7 people to discuss the book at the end of May. Of course if more people want to read it and discuss, please be my guest.

The book chosen is Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design by Michael Shermer.

It can be found in both hardback and paperback at Amazon, although currently it is actually cheaper to buy in hardback (a special deal).

Thanks to all who are participating, and I hope you enjoy the book!

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Pretty self explanatory. Vote for the book you want to read for the book club. I have no way of stopping anonymous voting etc, so I’ll just ask politely:

Please don’t vote unless you intend to read the book and/or contribute to the discussion

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Discussion will be on 31th May unless something comes up. It would probably be easier to contact me with the times you are available from, and I can then arrange something that fits us all.

Voting lasts 24 hours.

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No More Mr. Nice Guy has posted the 90th Carnival of the Godless over at his blog, and it’s well worth a look. This is the second time I’ve submitted something to the carnival, and I’m pleased to report that my article proposing an online atheist book club got through.

Speaking of which, we’re still working on the chatroom, and people can still post suggestions in the forums. Voting will be on May 1st.

On a further unrelated note, I won’t be posting as much for the next 3 weeks as I have revision followed by exams. I’ll still write the odd article, and if people want to sent stuff in (even short stuff) I’ll gladly post it for them. Wish me luck :D

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Matt’s Notepad has a great article in which he debunks some of the most well known Creationist / ID arguments concerning Evolution.

The arguments can be found here: http://mattcbr.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/repeated-ignorant-creationistid-arguments-a-solution/

Some similar arguments that debunk Creationism have been written by Talk Origins, and Richard Dawkins has a list of “Debate Points” that cover Evolution, atheism, and faith that you might find interesting.

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I’m split on how to react to this story. A woman last January was spotted “driving on the wrong side of the road and through red lights at speeds of up to 70mph”.

Unfortunately, her car veered off the road and onto the pavement, killing a mother and her daughter. At the scene, the driver told investigators:

Somebody had their foot on my foot and their hand on my hand - it wasn’t me driving, it was Satan

The work of the Devil?

Today she got cleared of causing death by dangerous driving.

However, she only got off the charge by entering a plea of insanity, and the jury decided to accept the plea within 15 minutes.

This whole event raises questions about how to handle religious nutcases like this woman. Should we really play along with their “insanity” when two women are dead? On the other hand, at least the courts recognised that claiming the devil did it is pretty stupid.

Hopefully she’ll be locked up for a long time in a mental institution. It’s one thing to suffer the delusion of God, but blaming your insanity on Satan and killing two innocent people is just too far.

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It seems that there are more people confused about what agnosticism means than what atheism means, and I’d like to take the chance to explain what it is, as well as dispel some common misconceptions.

Just like atheism and theism are different sides of the same coin (the belief in God coin), agnosticism and gnosticism are different sides of the same coin (the “knowability” of belief). If you have a belief in anything, you are either gnostic or agnostic about that belief.

Misconception: Agnosticism relates directly to belief in God

Whilst the modern use of the word “agnostic” is usually attributed to people who say they are “unsure” of the existence of God, it is neither a good usage of the word, nor a “direct” usage. If you are truly agnostic, you have to claim that everything is unknowable, right down to simple proofs like “1 + 1 = 2″, or “Humans need oxygen to breathe”. Such a view is rather silly, and I challenge any true agnostics to give up oxygen for a day or two and see how they feel about it afterwards.

I’d wager that everyone in the world is a gnostic “oxygenicist”. We don’t need to question the validity of the claim that oxygen is needed. It’s a known fact.

Personally speaking, I would further classify myself as a gnostic “gravitationalist” since the theory of Gravity is probably not going to be disproven. It’s a sound theory, and much better than anything flat earth theorists can come up with.

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