Critical (But Positive)

I’ve known for a long time that I’ve wanted to write, and after finally deciding to start work on ‘Pent Up Anger’ I thought it might be good to start sharpening my writing skills by using this poor unloved blog as a canvas for my creativity. Hope you enjoy, and please feel free to leave creative suggestions or comments.

I have often mused about what started me down the path to unbelief.

Unlike most atheists I’ve encountered, I wasn’t born without religious yearnings. As a child, I enjoyed a quiet faith thanks to my illustrated bible and my nominally Catholic mother. The stories and parables filled me with hope and the characters of Jesus & John the Baptist, David & Goliath and Adam & Eve were all as real to me as Santa Claus was.

As I grew up, my religious belief remained with me, though not to the extent that it would become later. I stayed silent during classes about evolution in science and biology. I argued fervently for a creator or ‘designer’ during extra-curricular philosophy. And in the library, I often studied books on comparative religion and even the occult. While many of my friends became interested in Wicca, I spent a good deal of time reading about Christianity, Judaism and even Islam. Years of exposure to moderate Christianity had made me skeptical of witchcraft and paganism.

My belief in Christianity, however, wasn’t realized until later. Clouded by adolescent hormones and a curiosity about monotheism, I fell victim to a pretty young girl who dragged me to church. Yes, of all the methods of evangelism, ‘flirt to convert’ is by far the most insidious.

Continue reading “Questioning Genesis” »

Time has been flying away since starting my new job, but I felt it was time for a new post! As they say.. ‘This above all, to thine own blog be true’. Yes, that was bad. I can hear the groans.

One of the criticisms that many people have of the ‘new atheists’ is that it looks an awful lot like religion. On looking very broadly, it would seem that we have a leader (or 4 actually), we have many ‘holy’ books which are spoken of with reverence, we have a conference that looks alot like Hillsong, we’re desparately trying to have our voice heard in the media, have our views seen in politics and we both have a huge number of people evangelising both online and offline.
Continue reading “Atheism as a religion” »

There’s a lot of talk on the interwebs about atheists ‘coming out‘. Thanks in part to Richard Dawkins OUT campaign (see banner to the right), atheists are being urged to come out and tell everyone about their beliefs (and rightly so).

In my mind, there are two types of atheists. There are the ambivalent atheists, and the true atheists. Now, I use the word true more as a joke than as a judgement, because all forms of unbelief are intrinsically the same!
Continue reading “Coming out is hard” »