I recently had someone mention an essay, written by Peter van Inwagen, which purports to be an interesting, perhaps even persuasive look at reasons to be a Christian. So, why not, says I? Let’s go take a look at it and see if it stands up to critical scrutiny.
Spoiler alert for the curious: it doesn’t. Continue reading Examining “QUAM DILECTA”
A while back now, I did a video over on YouTube where I took a look at the Cosmic Skeptic, Alex O’Connor and pointed out that, at least when it came to specific charity claims that he was making, he was going entirely off the rational reservation.
Since then, I’ve looked at a couple of his videos here and there and then, I saw this video from the Non-Alchemist addressing it and I thought I needed to respond. Instead of heading to YouTube though, I really wanted to take an in-depth look, so here we go. Links to videos concerned will be below the fold. Continue reading That’s Not Going to Convince Anyone!
How many times have you run into this one? You’ll be talking to a theist and they will tell you exactly what you think. They don’t ask, they tell. They explain that they know you better than you know yourself. Why? Because they can’t face a world where everyone isn’t fundamentally exactly the same as they are.
So let’s talk about it. Continue reading Whatever Would We Do?
Now Drew over at Genetically Modified Skeptic put up a video about how he’s managed to cope with the loss of his religion over the period of five years since he regained some semblance of sanity and while I think some of the points he made are good, I had a lot of things that I wanted to comment on and some of the things that I’ve learned in the 35+ years since I walked away from Christianity. So here I go and I hope that it can help people who are struggling with the change. Continue reading Deconstructing Religion
This comes up a lot and I’m pretty open about the fact that I don’t really trust the religious very much, at least when it comes to their religious beliefs. I take on apologists constantly over on my YouTube channel and it becomes painfully clear that what they’re saying, it comes from their faith, not from their examination of the objective facts.
But is it worse than that? Let’s look at a single case. Continue reading Why It’s Hard to Trust an Apologist
This is what makes being a secular conservative so difficult sometimes because the vast majority of people that you might have one thing in common with, you invariably strongly disagree with them on their underlying principles.
Take Charlie Kirk, for example. In general terms, I agree with a lot of the things he says. It’s just when he opens his mouth about religion that I absolutely cringe. So let’s explore one of his videos and see exactly where the problems lie. Continue reading Where Charlie Kirk goes Wrong
This is something that I’ve thought for a while but could only really put into coherent words recently. Someone pointed out that it’s very similar to my 30 Second Debate Tactic so it’s been floating around out there for a very long time but hey, I’m going to try to articulate it here.
Theists, it doesn’t matter what your book says until you establish a baseline for your claims! Let’s talk about it. Continue reading Putting the Cart in Front of the God
So let’s talk about it. Continue reading Enough With the Emotions!
So, here we go again. A theist showed up on r/AskanAtheist and wanted to know why atheists were so incapable of impressing him, as a Protestant Christian, based on Dawkins’ The God Delusion. So we tried to help him out and that’s when absolutely everything went completely wrong. Continue reading This is Why the Religious are Dumb
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A couple of days ago, on someone else’s videos entirely, a belligerent theist approached me and challenged me to a debate. He was cocksure and obnoxious, saying he’d never lost a debate against an atheist so I said sure. Go right ahead. Let’s see what you’ve got.
Except what he had was nothing he ought to have been proud of. Let’s take a look. Continue reading Debating With Straw Men