This is the third and final part of a three part serial. When our story began, our heroine had gone from the deep-rooted but unexamined agnosticism of her childhood, through a credulous hippie woo-woo bullshit phase, to a general belief in some sort of animating spirit that inhabited all living things and that survived in [...]

This is Part Two of a serial. In our previous episode, our heroine had gone from the deep-rooted but unexamined agnosticism of her childhood, through a credulous hippie woo-woo bullshit phase in her college and just-post-college years, to a general belief in some sort of animating spirit that inhabited all living things and that survived [...]

I realized recently that, in all the stuff I’ve written here about atheism, I’ve sort of been taking my atheism as a given. I’ve been writing from a perspective of, “Of course Greta’s an atheist… so what does she have to say about that?” And that’s actually somewhat misleading. I have had spiritual beliefs in [...]

Okay. First: Laura, I get that you’re upset and hurt and angry about this, and I want you to know that I don’t want that. So I’m going to try to say what I have to say, as best as possible, in a way that doesn’t exacerbate it. How can I do this? Let me [...]

“Truly I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” This is from the Bible. Mark 3:28-29. It’s not from the Old Testament; it’s not from Paul, or someone [...]

I’ve been getting into a debate in Julia Sweeney’s forum — and it’s been so ironic it’s making me laugh out loud. It’s over the phrase “fundamentalist atheist.” And the irony is that I’m taking the exact opposite of the position I usually take about language. Normally, I fall very far on the descriptivist side [...]