I was bored and trawled through a Christian site to address some silly questions.
Hey! Next week I’m planning to do a livestream to talk about Lucy Cooke’s Bitch, an excellent book about biology’s long history of bad science whenever the subject of women comes up, and going through many examples of the complexity of sex in zoology, and also talking about the short shrift women get in science. If you have any interests along those lines, or have read the book, or are, like, a woman who’d like to make sure the man talking about this subject stays in line, send me an email and let me know what times work for you, and maybe we’ll talk.
Brown doesn’t do honest.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michael_Brown
You found these questions on stream.org, but the original appears to be on Brown’s own site askdrbrown.org, where you can drop answers in the comments.
I notice (22:55) that Michael Brown is one of your Patreon supporters. I’m going to guess that is a different Michael Brown.
About 60 years ago I became an atheist. On a Sunday after a particularly long church service my father who was the son of a minister asked a question. Do you believe everything that was in the service? Now this was a church and a minister that my father had selected for us to attend. My immediate impression as a teenager was NO. There were too many things in the sermon particularly that did not jive with the science that I knew. I have been an atheist ever since. I can’t prove there is no god but here is no evidence of one. Now you should know that my grandfather (the minister) became an economics professor (with a PhD), My father got a PhD in Physics and I have a PhD in Geology. I have never forgotten that experience. This video just reaffirmed my reaction to religious bigots.
Easy pickings.
It really irritates me that so many Christians can’t see the evil in their god.
Why aren’t you a Christian? “Because I’ve met Christians”.
Why don’t you believe in the Christian god? “Because I’ve read the bible”.
Giving my head a shake while reading those questions would have given me a huge migraine.
@ 2. Reginald Selkirk : Michale Brown is an exceedingly common name. I know one personally myself..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Brown
@ 8
The RationalWiki article doesn’t go into it, but I recall that Brown sent a letter to the Israeli government, asking that they apologize on behalf of Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus.
PZ looks healthy .
Number 6 – anyone who could possibly think like this is ahuman.
My answer is that I never gave it much thought, and when I did, it seemed highly implausible.
Thanks for the link to Dr. Brown’s questions. Here’s a response I just posted there:
Dear Dr. Brown: Now that you’ve asked your “honest questions for atheists” and got at least a few honest and substantive answers, I’d like to ask YOU a question: when and where do you plan to publicly address, process and respond to the answers you’ve got?
I ask this because for several decades I’ve heard many many Christians publicly asking questions of atheists, and never showing any sign that they’ve ever seen or heard any answers from anyone. The attention-grabbing headlines are either “Umpteen Honest and Sincere Questions for Atheists” or “Umpteen Important Questions Atheists Can Never Ever Answer (#5 Will Rock Your World!)”. I know for a fact that many atheists have indeed been answering those questions, for about as long as Christians have been asking them; and yet none of those oh-so-sincere questioners have ever shown any sign of hearing any of the answers.
In fact, you’re the only questioner I’ve yet seen who even provides a space for us to post our answers; which is why I’m coming here to ask you: What is your response to our answers now that you’ve actually got them? I eagerly await your response. Thank you.
His comment “system” thingie removed all my paragraph breaks, and I had to re-insert them. That’s just one of my many complaints about the organization and layout of his blog.
OT
Mitch McConnell is being evil again.
“Mitch McConnell says Americans have too much money and do not want to work”
https://youtu.be/C3_HitbFdUc
@14: “Mitch McConnell has too much power and is destroying democracy.”
#13 Raging Bee. Excellent. I agree with you. Theists of all stripes do a lot of JAQing off, but precious little processing of the answers they get. You might even be forgiven for suspecting that they are hoping no one will answer, so they can offer that as proof of their belief’s irrefutability.
it is their conceit that they think no one can answer their questions which are so overwhelming that the only answer possible is god which ever one they believe.
#3 / rwt6115:
Same – I was 7, we left (Methodist) church, Mom asked if I wanted to keep going to church, and I said not really. 45 years later, still an atheist.
dersk
@Raging Bee:
I have a sneaking suspicion that Michael L Brown will collect the comments to his questioning post, and will at some point either pick the weakest responses or the most easily misconstrued responses, and construct one or more sermons or additional blog posts based on how sad [his misconstrual of] those responses are.
Go ahead, tell me I’m too cynical.
I’ve seen his other headlines, and no, you’re not being “cynical” at all. My own guess is that he’ll either totally ignore and forget the whole “sincere questions” thing, or just make up “answers” that fit his script. I’ve seen no response, or promise of a response, so far. The best we can hope for from that kind of Christian is that he’ll quote each answer verbatim, followed by “But the Bible sez that’s wrong!”
UPDATE: Dr. Brown has published another post in which he acknowledges seeing the answers he got (but he also admits “his assistants” had to point it out to him); and he then promises, word of honor an all that, to actually respond to our answers — in a book he’s promising to publish, mind you, not on the actual blog thread he’d created. So I’ve kinda been proven right, at least so far…I guess I’ll have to buy his damn book (or wait for a library to buy it, with taxpayer money) to see if the rest of my prediction proves accurate…
(Also, his follow-up post was chock full of self-pitying jackassedness on the subject of “resisting with courage” the LGBT+ “agenda” while acting all horribly brokenhearted about how hurtful his words “sound.” But that’s a whole ‘nother story…)