At age 21, while studying music education at Florida State, a single event changed my life completely. This experience hit me so hard that I completely flipped on one of my most deeply-held beliefs. I moved, in that brief moment, … Continue reading Justification, Truth, and the Skeptic’s Mistake
(Feel free to go straight to the video, or read on for some background and detail on the ideas in the video. It’s a fairly short post.) In second grade, we did a science project on how different parts of … Continue reading Why Are (Some) Atheists So Fundamentalist?
Atheist YouTuber and “Street Epistemologist” Douglas Letkeman invited me to do a live conversation online this past Monday night. We talked for an hour and 45 minutes! Over 100 people joined us in the live chat, including half a dozen … Continue reading Atheism and the Strange Library
Our family walked down to Hillsborough Bay, where a spectacular view of the fireworks could be enjoyed. Bayshore Boulevard, with its seemingly ancient stone rail, stretched along the water, just down the street from Grammie’s house. I stood on my … Continue reading Why Are We Afraid To Talk About Our Beliefs?
I loved Star Trek from the time I was five years old. The show inspired my early artistic skills, here displayed in the marker sketch made by my 5 year old self. Star Wars hadn’t come out yet, so there … Continue reading That Is Not Logical, Part 1
This video records the Q&A after talk I gave to the University of Missouri SASHA club (Skeptics, Atheists, Secular Humanists, and Agnostics). The title was “Responsible Belief,” and I shared with them a model of how beliefs are formed and evaluated responsibly. That went about 30 min. Then, we had Q&A and everyone stayed. It was a wonderful conversation and one of the highlights of 2015 for me. At some point, I may post the original presentation. I’ve broken the 30 min of Q&A into 3 separate videos, and this is Part 1. If you’re interested in how a Christian … Continue reading Responsible Religious Belief Q&A
(That literally happened to me one time.) Ok, this joke still needs writing, and that’s not my thing. But I do want to try and tease out a related conversational knot that’s been giving me trouble. In short, the knot involves the answers to the following questions: What does it mean to be an atheist? What does it mean to be a theist? What does it mean to be an agnostic? Why does this matter? Because labels matter to us. If someone called me a “feminist,” my reaction might depend on what they mean by the term. If it just … Continue reading An Atheist, an Agnostic, and A Theist Walk Into A Bar
I debated whether to even write this post. Here’s why: many people think that ANY concession to the “other side” amounts to total defeat. For many, to admit that atheist beliefs are reasonable amounts to admitting they are correct. But this is just plain wrong, and I’ll explain why below. Nevertheless, this post may disturb some theists. Setting the Intellectual Stage I’m going to set the stage here with a few concepts. Then I’ll tell you whether there are good reasons for atheism and what they might be (if there are any). The first idea that needs stating is this: you … Continue reading Are There Good Reasons To Be An Atheist?