The Atheist Blogger

Atheist Digg-like site The Atheist Spot has been sending questions out to atheist bloggers and posting the answers in a new series called “Get to know an atheist blogger”. It’s a great idea (I’m not just saying that because I got asked) because bloggers tend not to write direct references to their life all in one place. Those of us who do have “About” pages tend to write about the blog and not the author. By asking 9 simple questions, we can reveal more about ourselves as actual people.

The first atheist blogger is relatively new on the scene, but is publishing a book at the moment, and caused a minor controversy over a post calling for atheists to get out of the closet. Regular readers will remember that my response was the “re-emerge” from said closet, complete with a megaphone and sparkly jacket. He is of course, Craig A. James.

The second in line is one who everyone probably knows, although whose persona is shrouded in mystery (for good reason too). Nevertheless, vjack from Atheist Revolution is a very successful and popular blogger and a must read.

Look out for my answers to the questions on The Atheist Spot blog, but I’ll post a link when they are up anyway. Now if you’ll excuse me, my laptop has got itself stuck with an American keyboard, and I hate having to push Shift + ‘ to get a “

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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!