Advocatus Atheist

A possible book in the works. I've decided to compile and edit the best blogs posts about Atheism and Secular philosophy, refine and edit them, and make a book out of the best writings I have here. Let me know if it's something you'd be interested in, why or why not, in the comments section below. Thanks!

Why Texas ? Why??? Texas State Board of Education board members want people to know that: America ’s laws and government should be based on the Christian Bible. When I read this, I was like, WTF?! You’ve gotta’ be kidding me. Sadly, it’s no joke. But it gets worse folks. If you’ve been reading the news lately you’ll probably be aware of the fact that they made disreputable changes to the social studies curriculum, changes which will affect five million (that’s right—five frackin' million!) student's educations. How is this? The Texas State Board of Education is the second largest purchaser of K-12 school textbooks (after California). Meaning what Texas requests as the educational curriculum standard usually becomes the country wide standard. Why should this bother us? Well, first of all it seems the board members are making up a fake history as they go along—and have sent the expert historians, sociologists, scientists, and political science experts packing—which shoul...

I thought I'd try out Word Press to see what all the hubbub is about. I have to admit I like the functionality of it, the options, the formatting, better programming language, and better post moderation (and I do like the idea of blocking spammers). The downside, no advertising revenue, no ad-sense, it's import feature works fairly okay--as it imported all of my posts, but it keeps the format during the import only to then  publish all wonky on Word Press. I have to reformat nearly everything manually just to be readable. It would have been nice if they would have just imported as a plain text to begin with, because fighting two formatting types causes everything to be offset, the wrong font, type set, color, etc. Blogger also gives you the option to *justify the alignment of your text without HTML formatting. There's no *justify option in Word Press, and for a place called Word Press that just baffles me. Another downside is that it has too many tabs, features, which ...

For me the Atheist's symbol, a Scarlett letter A (most frequently written in Zapfino font), represents mainly three things: 1) Group Affiliation, 2) Positive Symbolism, 3) Aesthetic value. First off, I do not see the Scarlett A itself as a symbol of belief... it's a symbol of affiliation with those who reject the belief of theism for whatever reasons, ergo atheism (hence the choice of the letter A).  For those worried that affiliation equals religious institution, that shared beliefs equal dogma, and that agreement means conforming to some diktat, don't jump the gun just yet. Modern icons are used by various groups with affiliation in mind, just think of the popular sports icons such as the New York Yankees logo or the red crescent of the Red Cross, these symbols do not necessarily denote any sense of dogmatism, but act as a way to show one's affiliation by  showing their personal support for their favorite sports team or local charity. Affiliation need not mea...

Embarrassed by Faith Sometimes I run across an atheist or ex-believer who was so embarrassed by their prior religious affiliations that they don’t even want to talk about it. Granted, this is their right, but for me personally I find that by addressing my past embarrassment I can get it out there as a cathartic exercise in showing what not to do, how not to think, how not to act.  In fact, I think it will be more than cathartic to address my past proclivities in the hopes of not only better understanding why it is atheism makes so much more sense, but perchance it might act as a beacon of reason to help guide others out of the stormy waters of unreasoning dogmas. I grew up in the Assemblies of God Church . You can look them up if you don’t know their basic tenets. In essence they are an Evangelical branch of Pentecostal Christianity which takes a legalistic and fundamental approach to Biblical authority. They believe the Bible is the God inspired word, believe in divine hea...

Atheism Defined: Introduction How does one come to be an atheist? For that matter, what is an atheist? What does it mean to embrace atheism? What do atheists believe? I’ll tell you what they don’t believe. Atheists don’t believe in God. That, at least, we all can agree on. Yet for many who adhere to religious faith of one kind or another, and believe in God, such a concept is not only dreaded, it’s downright detestable. This is why religions of various stripes often deem atheism heretical. As such, there have been many attempts to define atheism according to the theistic worldview, since atheism is in opposition to theism, but still many people are under a misconception about what atheism is and what it means. It is to the point where the majority of atheists get marginalized in society and are frequently discriminated against as moral abominations (see: the article "Atheists as "Other"..." in the American Sociological Review ). I wish to set the record ...