Contra Steve Martin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wogta8alHiU there are songs for the atheist. Not many. You have to come up with a dozen contemporary songs to equal Mozart’s Requiem and that’s just based on time. But some atheist songs do exist. In March of 2019 I did this search “Music for atheists humanists” in YouTube and got one […]
Category: MaybeNoGod
Closed-Minded?
Sometimes a god believer will say something like “you are just too closed-minded”. And maybe that’s true. I have been an atheist for 50 years and I can’t even imagine being tempted to believe in a god. Ricky Gervais says he wishes there was a god. I don’t. The world and everything I see would […]
Easter vs. Christmas
In an issue of Time magazine, pastor Rick Warren from the Saddleback church was asked which of the two major Christian holidays is more important: Christmas or Easter. The pastor did not take the bait and said both were necessary and equal. This gives a good place to compare atheism and theism, at least for […]
Quote from Hitchens
“Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody … had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge … Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the […]
Pascal’s Wager
Blaise Pascal considered the question of belief. “Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.” I have […]
Why I am not a Catholic
It was around year 11 of my 16 years of catholic education when I started to realize that praying was simply talking to myself. I was open to hearing some response but there was none. This realization came gradually. It was only a few years earlier that I figured out that Santa Claus isn’t real. […]
The DBAD Speech
At The Amazing Meeting in July of 2010, astronomer Phil Plait gave a memorable talk informally labeled DBAD or “Don’t Be a Dick”. You can hear this talk on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrFRbGjUtJk He makes the point that most people don’t move from being credulous to being a skeptic because someone jumped in their face and called […]
Atheist (are we allowed to use that word?)
I have often worried about the word “atheist”. It feels like the most honest label if you need to give me one. But is it really so important? In a discussion between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michael Shermer, they seem to congratulate each other for having used other words to describe themselves: non-believer or agnostic. […]
Quotes from Women
“You either have a God who sends child rapists to rape children or you have a God who simply watches it and says, ‘When you’re done, I’m going to punish you.’ If I could stop a person from raping a child, I would. That’s the difference between me and your God.” ― Tracie Harris “All […]
How to become an atheist
If you are curious about atheism, here is the least painless way I can think of to learn. I recommend following this order. Take a day, make it a Sunday if you are a Christian, and decide that you will be an atheist for that day. Does it feel radically different? Do you feel […]