I was the same age as Megan Phelps-Roper when I began questioning everything I’d been raised to believe. And at 27, she has taken a giant step and left Westboro Baptist Church with her sister.

I applaud this woman for this courageous decision. While I do believe her family is absolutely evil, they are still her family. And this choice has left her completely estranged from them. But she still made the right choice, knowing the consequences that would befall.

The act of leaving Westboro is as weird as the church itself. Sometimes it’s described as a shunning process, but that’s not entirely apt. It is, in the eyes of the remaining members, a sort of death, but it’s a gentle one, because the carcass isn’t just dumped or ignored. One church member, who has lost two of his kids to the outside world, told me that he still loved them and that he set them up as best they could with what they’d need to start their new lives—some money, some household goods, even a car.

Megan didn’t leave alone; her sister Grace decided to go with her. They stayed just one night in Topeka. Then, after returning to their family home to retrieve some things they’d not packed the night before—“it was so weird and horrible to ring the doorbell,” Megan says—they left town.

I know from personal experience that it was not an easy choice, and her life was far more insulated than mine. And going public with this decision is even worse. Not only has she isolated herself from her friends and family, but now she has to face the entire world and own up to her past mistakes.

“I definitely regret hurting people,” she says. “That was never our intention. We thought we were doing good. We thought it was the only way to do good. And that’s what I’ve always wanted.”

That’s not how the message was received. “I think I’ve known that for a long time, and I would talk to people about how I knew the message was hurtful,” Megan says. “But I believed it couldn’t matter what people felt. It mattered that this was what God wanted.”

…

“I don’t feel confident at all in my beliefs about God. That’s definitely scary. But I don’t believe anymore that God hates almost all of mankind. I don’t think that, if you do everything else in your life right and you happen to be gay, you’re automatically going to hell. I don’t believe anymore that WBC has a monopoly on truth.”

This girl is pretty amazing, if you ask me.

And according to other sources, there have been other members of WBC who have decided to pull away from the church as well.

Little by little, chinks in the armor of the WBC are showing. Eventually there will be nothing left. It’s taken years, but the younger generation is finally starting to see that what they’re being taught simply doesn’t make sense. There is still hope.

(h/t)

There are way too many quotable quotes in this new video by The Thinking Atheist. It covers everything from how believing in eternal life diminishes humanity to how all of us are physically immortal because we came from stardust and will be stardust again.

It’s truly inspiring.

Bruce Grierson has had an article called The Atheist at the Breakfast Table published in Psychology Today.

It’s risky to say anything categorically about atheists – for a more individualistic bunch would be hard to find. But let’s propose that there are two kinds of atheists: the kind you hear about, and the kind you don’t.

This is undeniably true. I think of myself as falling into the latter category. I am no activist. I’m certainly not militant in my beliefs.The most I do is occasionally blog about my beliefs or post things I find interesting on Facebook.

I highly recommend you click through and read the entire article on Mr. Grierson’s blog. As Hemant noted:

It’s not very often that we see an article actually humanizing Humanists in a mainstream publication. This is a good one, though.

There’s a fairly new book out called Letters from an Atheist Nation: Godless Voices of America in 1903. How cool is that? It reprints articles from the Blue Grass Blade, a free-thought newspaper from the turn of the century.

In 1903, the “Blue Grass Blade,” a Kentucky/Ohio-based freethought newspaper, which started as the only Prohibition newspaper edited by “a Heathen in the interest of good morals,” requested letters from its readers describing how and why they had become atheists. Lawson has meticulously transcribed these letters from the digitized copies available at the Library of Congress’s “Chronicling America” website and has edited them for a 21st-century audience. He touches on the stigma that has been placed on atheism in America and why atheists feel they have to hide their true personalities from their closest friends and family. Like today’s atheists, the writers of these letters hid behind initials and “nom de plumes,” and Lawson has done us a great service by deciphering many of the letter writers’ mysterious pseudonyms to reveal their true identities. Will you find a branch of atheism in YOUR family tree?

The phrases and voices in these letters are over one hundred years old, but the thoughts and sentiments have changed very little, unlike the dogmas and doctrines they were hoping their descendants would have abandoned by now. Their thoughts could be pulled from the latest blogs of non-believers, but these are not merely letters from scientists, scholars, or intimidating intelligentsia, no, these are personal revelations from physicians, lawyers, dentists, veterans, pioneers, settlers, farmers, tradespeople, teenagers, and housewives. These letters are ironically Bible-like in that they are lyrical, repetitive, prophetic, and poetic, but the “revelation” will be left to the reader. If these century-old thoughts sound familiar, it would appear that there is nothing new about OUR century’s “new” atheism.

I didn’t know that there were people who stood up for reason and rational thought at the turn of the century. Though it makes sense – people stood against slavery and for the rights of women; why wouldn’t they also stand against religion and irrational thought?*

*Note: I am not saying here that the same group of people did all three, only that people were willing to stand for what they believed in.

(via)

I’ve been having a conversation with one of my Christian Facebook friends about evidence. He freely admitted that there is no concrete evidence for the existence of a God.

Then he followed it up with that tired argument, “You can’t prove love at all, either.”

And while I know that’s a terrible argument, I found myself in the position where I was unable to verbalize why.

And I can’t very well say “You’re wrong because I know you are.” That’s the kind of circular logic that is so frustrating from the Christian side. So I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this topic, and talking to my best friend about it, trying to come up with the words to explain what I mean.

What it boils down to is that whether you can or can’t prove love (you can, by the way, but I’ll get to that shortly) it has no bearing on whether or not you can prove God. It’s completely irrelevant to the conversation.

There is no evidence for God.

If you can show me some, I will consider it. But you can’t, because there is none.

As far as love goes…

Actually, I’m just going to post what someone else has said on this matter, because it’s eloquent and succinct and is far better than anything I could come up with on my own.

This is a very silly argument; it fails utterly. First of all, love isn’t unprovable. Sure, it’s can’t really be defined perfectly, but if there are happy, committed relationships, then that’s love and it’s real. QED.

Most importantly, even if the claim, “Love is unprovable but we know it exists,” were true, it would be totally irrelevant to whether or not God exists. Let me paraphrase the questioner’s argument:

There exists one thing whose existence can’t be proved; therefore God, whose existence can’t be proved, exists.

This is nonsense! The conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise.

At best, the existence of some unprovable thing, X, proves only that unprovable things can exist. Thus, if God’s existence or nonexistence is unprovable, then the existence of X thing means only that God might, or might not, exist. In fact, whether or not X exists, God might or might not exist. So, the existence or non-existence of X basically has no bearing on whether God exists or not.

Last but not least, this argument attempts to show that an unprovable God exists. Leaving aside the obvious paradox, let’s say that God’s existence isn’t practically provable. This means that there is no reasonable expectation that anyone will ever see something for which the best explanation was God (if someone saw such a thing then s/he would have evidence for God’s existence, which would invalidate the assumption of unprovability). In other words, for anything I might ever see, there will always be a better explanation than God.

So, the God of the Bible couldn’t be unprovable. That God interacts with the world, as through prayer, the holy ghost, etc etc.

Finally, it’s also worth pointing out that the argument uses the idea that God’s existence can’t be proven to prove that God exists. So if the argument succeeds in proving God’s existence, then it has invalidated its own premise.

Let’s review our assessment of the argument:

1. The premise is false.
2. Even if the premise were true, the conclusion would not be proven.
3. If the conclusion were valid, then the argument would be invalid.
4. Even if the conclusion were proven, it wouldn’t apply to the Christian God.

By now it should be easy to see why this is an utter failure of an argument.

So yeah… pretty much what Mr. George Locke said.

A very long time ago, I created this blog in my quest to find my voice and truly understand what I believe and why.

It was one of the best things I’ve ever done in my entire life. This blog took me through the journey to become a better Christian, to understand why I was a Christian, and it helped me learn what I thought were the truths of the Bible.

The deeper I studied, the more self-aware I became, and the more self-reflection this blog prompted pushed me further down the path I am now on.

I became an atheist.

And then I promptly stopped all of that writing and self-reflection. There were various reasons for it, but I realized something last weekend when I was at the Reason Rally.

I am now pretty much where I was when I started this blog six years ago. I know I am an atheist. But if you asked me why, I would be hard pressed to give a coherent and logical answer.

I attempted to answer this question over on PZ Myers’ blog:

I am an atheist because I no longer blindly accept what people tell me. I used to be a conservative, practically fundamentalist, Christian. I was raised that way and never thought to question it. Then I started blogging. I made a Christian blog and arrogantly thought that I could convert the world. I ended up meeting a whole host of people who believed differently than I did, but the really crazy thing was that they weren’t demonic or evil the way my pastor always depicted them! Once I realized that they really were just people like me, I began to question everything I’d ever been taught. It took me two long and painful years to finally accept what I’d come to know – there is no God.

But that’s a surface answer. I can’t hold my own in a conversation about atheism vs. religion. I can’t give coherent answers that debunk religion. And I have been content to stay this way. It’s easy to say “I am an atheist” and then carefully tread the line so as not to offend the many Christian friends I have on Facebook. But… that’s not the kind of person I want to be.

I am smarter than that.

So, this is me opening my blog back up for self-reflection. It’s time I take a stand for the things I say I believe. And it’s time for me to intellectually understand what it is that I believe (or rather – don’t believe).

Won’t you join me?