The Atheist Blogger

Kieran Bennett has been possessed by the Holy Spirit…or possibly a Christian fundamentalist. Whichever it turns out to be, the latest Carnival of the Godless is one of the most weird things I have ever read. If I had a hat I’d tip it to Kieran for his creativity. Now you’ve had your fun Kieran, go relax…you crazy aussie you.

Time for some blog promotion! I subscribe to quite a few atheist blogs in my feedreader (Liferea for all you Linux fans), and I thought I’d give you a summary of my favourite ones:

Friendly Atheist (http://friendlyatheist.com)

No atheist feed is complete without the blog of the “eBay atheist”. As the chair of the Secular Student Alliance, Hemant Mehta is a great person to add if you are in education and want someone who understands your view. He also seems to update his blog about 5 times a day, so make sure you don’t miss anything!

Atheist Revolution (http://www.atheistrev.com)

Now with a brand spanking new domain, Atheist Revolution is almost the opposite of Friendly Atheist. Whilst Hemant Mehta strives not to be overly offending to people of faith, vjack is openly critical of religion and belief in gods. If you like to read determined attacks on religion, read this blog! vjack has recently started a new feature called “Blogging Tips” which are aimed at new bloggers who want to make a good start to their blog.

The Atheist Jew (http://baconeatingatheistjew.blogspot.com)

As the author explains on his website, he is an atheist since he doesn’t believe in gods, but he is also a Jew since his mother was a Jew. It’s his heritage, not his religion. This blog is based in Canada so if you are Canadian it will keep you up to date with the national atheist information. The Atheist Jew, like Atheist Revolution is a great place to go if you want to see relgion / belief openly mocked.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.