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An atheist activist on Facebook asked why he should care at all about Cee-Lo changing the words to “Imagine” to sanitize its anti-religious sentiment last night. Me? I think it’s a great idea to seize on this story. What I’m discovering from this incident and from the one last month where Rick Perry made an [...]
Archive for the ‘New Atheism’ Category
Why Cee-Lo’s Imagine Fail Matters
January 2nd, 2012 
Daniel Fincke Answering Greta: My Goals As An Atheist Writer
December 21st, 2011 Daniel Fincke In order to deal with the questions of whether we should argue with religious believers or insult and mock religions, Greta Christina raised question of what the atheist movement should be aiming at. If we adequately define our goals, then we can assess what is or is not counter-productive to achieving them. I agree with Greta [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion, Religion 
Tags: Anti-Intellectualism, Atheistic Religion, Authoritarianism, faith (i.e., Mocking Religious Beliefs, moral and cultural regressivism, moral and cultural stagnation, Nationalism, patriarchal values, Pseudoscience, racism, Supernaturalism, Superstition, the willful belief contrary to rational evidence), traditionalism for its own sake 
17 Comments »Christopher Hitchens On Visiting Kim Jung-il’s Nightmarish North Korea
December 20th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Here is an article he wrote on North Korea. Your Thoughts?
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December 20th, 2011 Daniel Fincke for Christopher Hitchens, by Helen Sotriadis of Too Many Tribbles. ©2011 helen sotiriadis. View the photo “in the dark”. More of her photos inspired by Christopher Hitchens are here. See a video slideshow of more of her photos here.
Christopher Hitchens and Freethinking Parenting At Its Best
December 18th, 2011 Daniel Fincke One of our last, and by far the most touching, videos we have of Christopher Hitchens comes from the Texas Freethought Convention this past October. Watching him with the charmingly and precociously smart little girl in the video, he is downright grandfatherly: Mason was interviewed afterward: Why did you decide it was important to ask [...]
Hitchens’s Eulogists and Detractors
December 17th, 2011 Daniel Fincke When Hitchens was asked earlier this year “whether he felt he had been a good person”: he gave a dismissive shrug: “Not particularly.” For that definition to apply, he said, the world expects a good deal of selflessness. “And while no one scores very high on that, I score lower than most.” He had seen his [...]
A Few Christian Replies to Hitchens’s Death Worth Noting
December 17th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Shortly before Christopher Hitchens’s death, Andrew Sullivan movingly reminisced about him and gave a sense of how their friendship was so strong despite such differing views on faith:
Hitch-22 As Read By Hitchens Himself
December 17th, 2011 Daniel Fincke On YouTube you can listen to Christopher Hitchens read his entire memoir Hitch-22 to you. Got an afternoon? Your Thoughts?
Hitchens on Mother Theresa, Hitler, and Immortality
December 17th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Few of those left on the planet can say this much this true this well, in just 7 minutes: His documentary take down of Mother Theresa can be seen here.
In Memory of Christopher Hitchens, A Nietzschean Lion
December 16th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Christopher Hitchens was not fond of Nietzsche. When I picked up his Portable Atheist I flipped to the table of contents to see what Nietzsche selections he’d included. And saw none. None?? Possibly the most famous, unabashed, and irreverent atheist of all time was not worthy of inclusion in Hitchens’s compendium? A brief remark found [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Authoritarianism, Authoritarianism, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, News Discussion, News Discussion, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Personal, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Why I Am Not A Christian, Why I Am Not A Christian Tags: and Child, Camel, Christopher Hitchens, Hitchens and Nietzsche, Lion, lost a lion, Nietzsche, Three Metamorphoses of the Soul, Three Transformations of the Soul, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Tribute to Christopher Hitchens, Truthfulness 11 Comments »On Atheistic Religion
December 10th, 2011 Eric Steinhart We’re rational animals. Which means that we’re rational. And that we’re animals. Many biological and neurological necessities are satisfied by religion. Your neocortex has to live with your limbic system. And as long as we humans have limbic systems in our brains, we’re going to be religious (more on that later). Atheists tend to downplay [...]
An Atheist’s Reply To Rick Perry
December 8th, 2011 Daniel Fincke James Kotecki responds to this. Friendly Atheist has a reply of their own up too. Your Thoughts?
Dan Barker Makes Sense of the Gospel Message
December 3rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke I know Dan Barker claims to be only a former Christian minister but he still has a gift for bringing the Gospel message alive in a fresh, new way that makes powerful sense of it. It’s weird it would take an atheist’s description to make me see angles in the story of salvation which I [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheist Videos, Atheist Videos, Christianity, Christianity, God, God, Hilarious, Jesus, Jesus, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Religulous, Religulous, Satire, Satire 3 Comments »Greta Deftly and Thoroughly Explains Atheist Anger To The Bewildered
November 30th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Greta’s talk at Skepticon IV hits the nail on the head about the nature and justification of atheist anger: Her blog post on atheists and anger from 2007 is a definitive go-to piece for me when I am asked about atheist anger. Your Thoughts?
Fellow Atheists, What Do You Like Or Dislike In Holiday Cards?
November 29th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Marta is one of my Christian friends who comments a lot around here and always seems to sympathize with my secular values quite a bit. She raises a good question that I’d love to see you readers address: I wonder about your thoughts on atheism/secularism and holiday cards? Recently I tried to find some cards [...]
Learning About Love From The Bible
November 24th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Using the “New Comprehensive Self-Referencing, Taking The Words on the Page To Mean What They Actually Say Version” of the Bible (that’s the NCSRTTWOTPTMWTASV), NonStampCollector shows us how the biblical God of love (the God who is love) models and illuminates for us all the virtues of love described in 1 Corinthians 13: Your Thoughts?
On Not-Pologies, Forgiveness, and Gelato
November 23rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke Kinds of Forgiveness Let’s start with the theoretical. How should we characterize forgiveness, and when and why should we forgive people? Full forgiveness involves three things: 1. Waiving all just moral and/or legal penalties, including all forms of restitution and compensation, that we would normally demand for wrongdoing. 2. Restoring amicable emotional, social, and/or professional [...]
Posted in Applied Ethics, Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Ethics, Ethics, Morality, Morality, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, News Discussion, News Discussion, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State, Virtues, Virtues 39 Comments »Sam Singleton’s Revival Act That Began Gelatogate
November 23rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke Andy Drennen saw a portion of this act and had this response: Once the store slowed down, I decided to walk down the street to learn more about the convention, fully thinking it was something involving UFOs (“skeptics”). What I saw instead was a man conducting a mock sermon, reading the bible and cursing it. [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheist Videos, Atheist Videos, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, PZ Myers, PZ Myers 32 Comments »The Injustice of the Universe and Christianity
November 22nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke Matt Dillahunty has a nice five minute reply to someone who believes in Christianity in order to believe justice will be meted out even to those escape worldly justice. He weaves several important considerations about the irrationality of basing a belief on such a desire and about the problems with Christianity’s views on justice: Your [...]
Calling Out And Debunking William Lane Craig’s Smears Against Infidels and Apostates
November 21st, 2011 Daniel Fincke Is William Lane Craig a philosopher? Some atheists seem to want to dismiss him as strictly a theologian and in no way a philosopher but sometimes he clearly attempts to make strictly philosophical arguments. By strictly philosophical arguments I mean ones whose premises make no necessary appeal to any presumed religious authorities but theoretically could [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Christianity, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Personal, Secularism, Why I Am Not A Christian, Why I Am Not A Christian Tags: Apostates, Sex and Apostasy, Why People Leave Their Faith, William Lane Craig 16 Comments »Atheists Perceived As Less Trustworthy Than Rapists??
November 21st, 2011 Daniel Fincke I may have underestimated in the past just how bad misperceptions of us are: Consider one of the experiments. One hundred and five students read a brief vignette about a man who fails to take responsibility when he hits a parked van with his car, and then pockets money from a wallet he finds on [...]
Thinking According To Scale
November 21st, 2011 Daniel Fincke PZ and Crommunist offer nice denunciations of the significance of a graphic which has been going around the internet which concludes that the chance of any given individual alive today ever existing was 1 in 102,685,000. Below the fold is the graphic, key snippets of their remarks and the lesson to draw for how we should consider [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Biology, Biology, Ethics, Ethics, Evolution, Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Metaethics, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, Naturalistic Fallacy, Naturalistic Fallacy, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Probability, Psychology, Psychology, PZ Myers, PZ Myers, Science, Science, Sociobiology, Sociobiology Tags: Crommunist Manifesto, Grind the universe down to its finest powder, Hierarchical Reductionism, PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins on Reductionism, Terry Pratchett, The Blind Watchmaker 3 Comments »John Shook: Proving God’s Existence Is Impossible
November 17th, 2011 Daniel Fincke This semester I have been teaching Philosophy of Religion using John Shook’s superbly thorough, systematic, incisive, and critical summation of the arguments for and against the existence of God, The God Debates: A 21st Century Guide for Atheists and Believers (and Everyone in Between). The book is impressive enough that I would give it the [...]
Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Atheism, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Epistemology, Evidence, Evidence, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophy Of Religion 14 Comments »Matt Stone: “Neoatheists Are Setting Atheism Back A Decade”
November 16th, 2011 Daniel Fincke The usually genius co-creators of South Park Matt Stone and Trey Parker are profiled in a post on Esquire.com and they are harsh on Richard Dawkins and all-soft on religion: As they told In Focus magazine a few years ago, “What we’re sick of — and it’s getting even worse — is you either like Michael Moore or [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion, Religion 27 Comments »To Hitch
November 15th, 2011 Daniel Fincke To an admirably brazen and rapier tongued man who has made me cheer inside with relief more times than I can count as he has unapologetically dressed down the corrupt, bullied the bullies, and dismissed bullshit, and always done all of this in the most morally unequivocal, creatively articulate, and charmingly pugilistic way. To a [...]
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