It used to be my friends would know when I had some downtime at work because I would post links to funny videos and LOLcats on my Facebook page. Nowadays, I'm posting articles about the legality of bringing criminal charges against the pope, the importance of church and state separation, the undermining of science and what Westboro Baptist Church is up to this week. I've had some good discussions and gotten some complaints.
I'm coming to terms with myself as an atheist, and caring more about protecting the rights of others. I'm becoming more informed about my world, and having to form opinions about things I had never seriously considered before. Opinions have to adapt and change as perspective and current information changes. Facebook is not the right forum for this kind of exploration. It's time to try something else.
What I'm hoping to accomplish here is to confront issues from as many sides as possible and develop informed opinions about them. Taking only my perspective into account, this will likely fail. Hopefully the process will be interesting enough to attract a few like-minded critical thinkers who will contribute and help it succeed.
I have a question for you:
ReplyDeleteAs a scientist, how is it that you are an atheist and not agnostic?
This may not be true for everyone, but from my perspective an agnostic believes that there's probably SOMETHING going on in terms of a God or Spirit or Universal Energy or What-have-you, but we don't or can't know for sure. For a while I described myself by saying 'I think I'm agnostic.'
ReplyDeleteAn atheist doesn't rule out the possibility that there is SOMETHING going on, but they haven't seen any evidence that convinces them to believe in said SOMETHING. If I do encounter some convincing evidence of a higher power, I'll change my mind. For now, the available data supports the hypothesis that there is no such thing, so that's the theory I'm working with. It feels pretty scientific to me.