Advocatus Atheist

"Though I am an atheist, in the basic sense that I do not believe there are any gods, you will find... that whether God exists or not really doesn't matter all that much. Every component of my philosophy can be arrived at independently, and stands on evidence and reasoning that would not change tomorrow if a god announced himself to the world today. Rather than being a starting assumption, my atheism is but an incidental conclusion from applying my worldview to the current state of evidence."                                                                          --Richard C. Carrier

Richard Carrier covers this topic at Skepticon 3. Both funny and informative! Worth a viewing.

Atheists are Dogmatic too! Sound Familiar? Christian apologists often fall into the same category of poor researchers and dishonest rhetoricians. Today as I was reading Richard Carrier’s Not the Impossible Faith , which is a direct rebuttal to J.P. Holding’s book The Impossible Faith , I came across this excellent quote in which Carrier describes the shady tactics of apologists like Holding. The fact that he didn’t do so simple a check as this proves that Holding is just mining his sources and doing the absolute minimum to prove his case instead of honestly and seriously studying the sources and making sure his claims are correct . Holding doesn’t read Josephus. He just jumps to single sentences that help his case—not even caring if there are any other sentences that hurt his case. And while I knew the facts, and then took the trouble of tracking down the exact references, Holding is completely ignorant of the facts, and therefore incapable of tracking them down. Instead, he...