The Atheist Blogger

I’ve come to a bit of a conundrum and I’d like some opinions of a possible merging of blogs. My first blog (http://adrianhayter.com) was a personal blog I kept for various friends and to share some opinions / work with the world. I never really put much on it, and after I started this blog, it gradually fell into disuse. This is something I greatly regret, but maintaining two blogs can get annoying knowing that you are constantly switching audiences.

Obviously I don’t want to get rid of either of them, so I suggest a simple merge. My personal blog will merge into this one. The Atheist Blogger will continue to be a blog about atheism, but will also have semi-regular posts about myself, my life, and my work. I am sure this would interest those among you who like to hear about universities, computers, and general technobabble, but I’d like to hear a general consensus of opinions from everyone.

I will try to keep up my 1 article on atheism a day minimum (please excuse the past weekend which has been busy), but will also include articles about student life, especially student activism like my Atheist & Agnostic Alliance student group, and general posts about work I do on my course (Computer Science with Information Security)

Nothing else will change. The domain will be the same, the forums will remain, as will the book club. I’m an atheist student, and I want to share my entire life with you, not just my atheistic side!

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.

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!

I found about the “Carnival of the Godless” a few weeks ago through various atheist blogs. For those who don’t know, every 2 weeks an atheist blog is chosen to host the carnival. Links are sent to the carnival and the best ones are chosen to feature. On the day of the carnival, the hosting blog posts all the links with descriptions. It’s a nice way to get good blog posts recognised, and for the hosting blog to get a bit of attention.

2 weeks ago, I thought it would be a good idea to submit a blog post of my own. I thought about submitting something controversial (like the one about Muhammad or Jesus), but instead I chose the post that really started the site off; “101 Atheist Quotes“. This post alone accounts for a small percentage of my daily traffic. It has the most comments of any of my posts, the most views (over 65,000 so far), and probably the most trackbacks.

To cut a long story short, it got featured in the carnival: Carnival of the Godless #89

As I’ve mentioned in some previous comments, this blog’s content is prone to a lot of debates, and indeed there have been quite a few since it’s been set up. While I have no objection to debates (in fact I welcome them), the commenting system of WordPress isn’t the best format to have them in.

As a result, I’ve installed a copy of MyBB which is a great free forum software that I help with. It should provide an easier place to debate and form a community. It’ll also open up the site a bit more, and people can have public discussions and raise questions.

So, without further ado, please visit the forums and register: http://atheistblogger.com/forums/

I have written a short welcome thread (similar to this one) here.