Updates for April

Posted: May 19, 2012 in Blog Entries
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This is coming out a little late, but there were a few things that went up in April and early May which I need to officially post here.

First, a not so subtle nod toward Bertrand Russel, explaining quite briefly why I am no longer a Christian, and then a brief reflection on the transition I’ve made and the various responses (or lack thereof) I’ve encountered from old friends and new acquaintances alike.

The whiskey column did not go up in April, but from what I hear, ManArchy will get back on the ball soon, so stay tuned for that.

Links:

Why I Am Not A Christian
- May : An American Atheist

Think About It
- April : An American Atheist (Audio version also available)

Enjoy the Silence

Posted: April 15, 2012 in Essay
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My latest:

To this day, I’ve had no more than three* people simply send an email to say, “What happened?” That’s three people out of more than a hundred people I counted as close friends who now seem content to watch me waste my life and end up in Hell without lifting a finger. But you know, those are the kind of friends I can do without.

Read more on An American Atheist.

Or listen to the audio version on this past week’s podcast.

Something to Ponder on Easter Sunday

Posted: April 9, 2012 in Essay, Non-Fiction
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Excerpt:

So Jesus died for my sins. By his stripes, I am healed. This is what the Bible says, but I have to ask, why?

Pause for a moment and consider that Jesus was already God, and he already had all those powers while alive. He healed many, he forgave many people’s sins, all the while walking around with mankind as living proof of God’s existence.

So killing Jesus did what, exactly? What could this accomplish that he couldn’t have done while alive? Think about it. This was God’s plan for salvation, according scripture, but was it a good plan?

Read more at An American Atheist.

Patrick Bateman Versus God

Posted: April 9, 2012 in Essay, Non-Fiction
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Excerpt:

Not long ago I had a thought so shocking I had to say it aloud and see if it still made sense: “What if Patrick Bateman was God for a day?” I immediately imagined the roof of a church collapsing on its hundreds of groveling parishioners, a tsunami killing thousands, catching many unawares, malaria and polio, the plague, the crusades. Childhood leukemia.

“Shit,” I thought. “What if he already is?”

And I found that question had just as much weight, so I posed a few more questions, this time typing them out onto my laptop.

“What kind of commandments would an all powerful Bateman issue his followers? How would he use an army? Would the Old Testament look any different if Patrick Bateman were in charge instead of God?”

Read more at An American Atheist.

Predators Who Pray

Posted: March 18, 2012 in Essay
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My latest essay is now live. You don’t want to miss this one:

On the one hand, I’m glad most of my daily gripes would be considered first world problems; televangelists, insurance claims, the price of gasoline, waiting for the new season of Mad Men, dreading the release of another poorly written teen vampire series.

Having secured our position at the top of the food chain, at least in the developed world, it seems the most dangerous predators we now face are the sociopath, the pedophile, and the religious zealot. Sadly, though not terribly surprising, these all too often overlap with truly devastating consequences.

Read on –>

The Saccharin and the Profane

Posted: March 11, 2012 in Essay
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My latest essay is now live over at An American Atheist.

I was on a walk with my three year old daughter when she heard one of her favorite sounds; a train’s whistle. In the evenings you can hear the whistle of the local line if you’re in the right spot and things are otherwise quiet. My daughter has taken quite a liking to these trains and it’s not uncommon for us to stop when walking near the tracks and wait for the Sprinter Line to go by on our way to the beach.

She looked up to me, brimming with excitement, and asked, “Train, daddy? Train, daddy?”

“Yeah, sweetie-pie,” I replied, “that’s the train.”

With her excited tone dropping, however, she then said, “No. No train.”

“Why not?”

She stopped walking and thought for a moment, looking up and down the street with her hands stretched out, and she said, very matter of fact, “No tracks. No train.”

I was stunned. She was looking for evidence and didn’t see any. …

On the opposite end of this spectrum, Rick Santorum has claimed (among other things) that no one has ever died for lack of health care, despite a recent Harvard study suggesting that an average of 45,000 people every year do just that. Put another way, that translates to one death every 12 minutes. Facts, it seems, have yet to find purchase as the currency of our national discourse when dealing with this increasingly ultra-conservative GOP.

Santorum’s response to this rather robust Harvard study was as crude as it was tautological: ”People die in America because people die in America.”

There’s just too much to sum up here. Check out the full essay here  –>

A Perfectly Congenial Conversation with The Angry Atheist

Posted: March 7, 2012 in Audio
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I joined The Angry Atheist the other day for a quick interview on my deconversion and eventual acceptance of the term “Atheist” among other things.

Who’d would’ve thought Atheism is not a bad word?

An ex music pastor and writer forAn American Atheist, Anthony David Jacques joins The Angry Atheist for an hour. Anthony graduated from North Central Bible College in 2004 with a degree in Music Theory and served as a Music Pastor until early 2009, when the questions of his youth, and many collected since then, became too much to allow him to lead worship in good conscience.

Why not have a listen here?

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