Sam Harris on some “misconceptions” about atheism. I personally feel that most of these misconceptions are intentional — that they are loaded in the theist six-gun like rounds to use against an atheist, despite each one having had its powder mostly dampened by the truth.

Every now and then an atheist is not forearmed against these claims, and cannot defend against them, despite them being trotted out and cut down repeatedly and in the exact same fashion every time. It is precisely because some people are unable to counter the more ridiculous claims that they try these arguments out every time — it’s a way of weeding out the thinking atheists from the atheists that are merely trend-followers, because these trend-followers are vulnerable to being converted back to a particular way of magical thinking.

This is dangerously close to a “no true scotsman” argument, but when even I can tell exactly how thoughtful a particular atheist is about their lack of belief, I can see exactly the same vulnerability that the theist sees. Posting these videos and talking about atheism itself is just my way of bolstering those atheists out there that are looking for more and better arguments against those claims that are brought out to the pony show time and again.

When I was first dabbling in discussing religion online, it was only the non-realtime format of e-mail listserves and Usenet that gave me time to do research between posts — if I had been talking to a strong theist in real life, I would likely have been defeated rather easily. Consider this blog the newbie area where you can build XP and level up without fear of getting ganked. We even have honest-to-goodness training dummies that I let out of their pens out every now and then.