The Atheist Blogger

The problem with running an online book club is that we don’t do a vote on the day of discussion, instead saving it till a later date and having 7 days of voting so everyone has a chance to choose the book they want. This leads to some problems with getting the book, and then reading it, all before the month “deadline”. This month Oliver managed to get through the entire book, but I only made it to the final chapters. So essentially Oliver could talk about Hemant’s conclusions whilst I had no idea.

I have hence devised a more complicated system which should make things easier. Instead of having a 7 day vote starting on the 23rd of month 1 to choose the book for month 2, we will have a 7 day vote starting on the 1st of month 1 to choose the book for month 2.

The book for July has been chosen already, and although it was a narrow vote (3:2), Daniel Dennett’s book “Freedom Evolves” has been chosen. I usually try to keep the discussions on the weekend, so that might mean a slightly early date of 26th/27th July. I am also thinking of putting the time forward slightly so that people in the USA can get home from work, and (more importantly) our Aussie members can get out of bed!

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Even though only 2 people turned up for the live discussion (a result of oversleeping and differing timezones) I have had a small number of people contact me saying that they have either read the book or are finishing it and will participate in the forums discussion.

Only one other book was suggested in the submission forum so we have three books up again for the vote. Like last time:

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 June unless something comes up. I’d also like to form a mailing list of regular members so we can better organize ourselves. Please contact me through the contact form using your *real* email address and tell me that you want to be added to this list.

Voting lasts 24 hours.

I apologise for my inactivity on the blog after my somewhat less spectacular return from exams, but when one is confined to a bed for 2 days with a fever, headaches, and completely delirious (suffice to say I did *not* start believing in God) then one’s mind isn’t prone to considering writing a blog post, let alone trying to use a computer…

However, as I recovered I spent some more time on facebook, and got into a rather interesting debate about atheism as a belief. I used to be of the thinking that atheism was not a belief, but rather a “disbelief”, however it took a few well informed atheist commentators of this blog to change my mind.

Realising that belief in no gods and dis-belief (or non-belief) in gods are exactly the same things is quite a confusing thing to get your head around at first, but it is important when considering philosophical questions. The idea that the statements “I do not believe there are Gods” and “I believe there are no Gods” are exactly the same makes so much more sense than trying to convince yourself otherwise.

However as the debate continues, the two sides are still at disagreement, although my opponent is a fabulous person to debate against. I thought instead of taxing my still recovering brain to write a post concerning the entire topic, I’d see what everyone thought at first. A simple yes or no poll:

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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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I’ve recently installed a poll plugin for wordpress seeing as it may come in handy for the future. I may even start having weekly polls on various topics if it gets popular. Anyway, this post is really to test the feature out so I know how it works, and more importantly, if it works!

So, the simple question: Are you atheist, theist, or agnostic?

I get quite a few visitors to the blog, and some people leave comments suggesting they belong to certain religious groups, some not. This is an anonymous poll to see what percentages of people read the blog, that’s all.

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