Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey Part 5


The Road Towards Antitheism

I didn't immediately become the antitheist that I am today after studying philosophy in college. After my lapse into hedonism, I gradually reignited my interest in philosophy, but the process took years. As late as my mid-twenties I was more or less still an atheist who kept his beliefs largely to himself. As I had done in my teens, it was relatively rare when I spoke out on atheism and I usually only ever exposed my beliefs in a reactionary fashion, such as when I was confronted with someone else’s theistic or supernatural claims that I thought was nonsense. Over the years however I did seem to increasingly enjoy initiating conversations about politics, science, god and religion and began enjoying the challenges of pitting together antithetical worldviews. I also briefly became an agnostic for a short while when I began concluding that knowledge of the existence of god was unknowable. I guess you can say that agnosticism was the closest I ever veered away from atheism. This foray was short lived however because I came right back to atheism when I realized that agnostics are really just atheists, since anyone who doesn’t actively believe in god is technically an atheist. I also had a lot of trouble reconciling the seemingly contradictory properties of the concept of god, along with what we would expect to see in the natural world if there was a god.  

With my passion in philosophy and science having been reignited, I began seeking out like-minded company. It was shortly thereafter that I caught wind of the creationism vs. evolution debate that was raging across the US and my red flag went off. I suddenly became aware that various states and school districts were trying to get creationism taught in science classrooms under the new guise of “intelligent design”. I thought to myself, “Haven’t we been there before? Wasn’t this issue of teaching evolution in school settled in like the 1920s or something?” I vaguely remembered reading Inherit the Wind in high school about the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee when they put evolution on trial, but I had completely forgotten that the teacher who was accused of teaching evolution actually lost that trial. It wasn’t until 1968 in the Epperson v. Arkansas case that the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the banning of the teaching of evolution was unconstitutional. Slowly after this, school districts across the US replaced biblical creation with evolution in the science classroom, but the creationists were always at it trying to get forms of intelligent design taught alongside with evolution. Personally, I never recalled anything but evolution being taught in biology class, but I of course grew up in liberal New York.

Upon realizing that in the twenty-first century there were young earth creationists at it again trying to get their faith-based nonsense rebranded under a different name and taught in public schools, I felt in a sense a call to arms. I started taking my atheism a lot more seriously. I started researching into all the old tactics theists were using to advance their theistic agenda. I began reading about atheism and watching lectures and debates between creationists and evolutionists, and between atheists and theists. I became obsessed with all the arguments made for and against the existence of god, and realized that there was an enormous amount of people engaged in public debates on the matter. And then I came across Christopher Hitchens who I would come to greatly admire. He’s the polemic type of militant atheist who is actively opposed to religious belief and argued that religious belief, far from being benign and humble, is actually a very harmful and negative belief system. His arguments resonated profoundly with me and introduced a new word to me: antitheist. He was the voice I was looking for; he was the person I wanted to be. He articulated many of the negative views I already held about religion (albeit better): its appeal to authority over reason; its ignorance to scientific facts; its misrepresentation of the nature of our origins and the truth; its emphasis on faith and dogma over evidence; and its primitive ethical systems developed by stupefied iron age desert dwellers who didn’t even know the earth was round. I can go on and on, but you get the point.

Having never been religious myself, and having never spent any significant amount of time around religious people, I began to fully realize just how dangerous the religious way of thinking potentially was. I had a few run-ins with stereotypically ignorant religious types over the years. I knew I didn’t agree with them or particularly like them, but their effects were always at an arms-length from me, never able to wield any significant power in my domain. I had now known exactly what they were capable of when they worked together. It wasn’t just trying to get creationism taught in school that bothered me, the religious right in the US was trying to erode away hard won civil liberties that formed the pillars of our secular democracy and the separation of church and state. I became more political and realized that most who debate on behalf of religion were also against secularism – the one condition I draw that I cannot tolerate being violated. I realized that there was also an opinion war at stake here: the more religious someone is, the less likely they are to support a secular government and the separation of church and state. Therefore, I realized that it was vital that atheists, agnostics, skeptics, freethinkers and anyone who supports the preservation of the Establishment Clause and a society that uses reason and evidence, needed to continue fighting the good fight and make the case for a rational, secular, humane society where its citizens are free from the tyranny of dogmatic religious belief being imposed on them by their own government.  

And thus, the road towards antitheism was paved.



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Monday, April 15, 2013

Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey Part 4


Nihilism And The Search For Deeper Meaning

For a while in my early twenties I suppose you could say that I had lapsed into a kind of hedonistic existential nihilism. I started partying more to the point where it basically became my life. Drinking and smoking marijuana became an almost daily routine. The metal head crowd that I had hung out with in high school had fragmented into smaller groups who shared common mutual interests and I had followed along with the ones who were the more heavy drinkers and users. My best friend at the time was a Russian immigrant who came to the US as an early teen. He actually believed in the ancient Norse gods Odin and Thor. Although most of the time we were busy drinking and smoking and going to nightclubs, we occasionally had an intellectual conversation where our world views came into the light. I’d ask him how sincere he was about his beliefs and if he actually thought Odin was real. I’d occasionally attack the logic he used to justify his beliefs and I quickly found out just how irrational some belief systems are and what absurdities they can be founded on. My best friend had came to the conclusion that Odin was real when he was camping one day in the woods and had run out of water. Feeling like he was going to die of thirst, he prayed to Odin and shortly thereafter found a bottle of water sitting in the woods. To him, this was a sign from Odin that he was real, and from that moment onward, Odin was his god. Now mind you, I was probably high when he told me this story, but you can imagine for yourself how utterly preposterous his applied logic was in determining that his god was real.

Most of my other friends were atheist, agnostic, or lapsed Catholics. I did however have one Muslim friend who was one of the heaviest partiers of us all.  One day after driving me home from a party he gave me a book entitled, A BRIEF ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING ISLAM. He told me that he was meaning to give it to me for some time because he recognized in me that I was smart and a thinker about some of the bigger and deeper issues. It was one of those books that tries to use modern scientific discoveries to show that they were predicted in the Qur’an hundreds of years ago before anyone else could have known. This is offered as a case that the Qur’an is “proof” that it was divinely inspired and therefore that Islam is the one true faith. Now the skeptic in me has looked at this supposed “proof” and concluded that it is a ridiculous stretch of the imagination. The Qur’an is so vague in its descriptions of these purported “facts” that it take great leaps of faith to reconcile them with modern science, and on top of that, it gets many of its “facts” flat out wrong. But at that time, I wasn’t fully aware of this, and after briefly looking through the book, I literally threw it down on a shelf and it collected dust for about 5 years.

During this nihilistic party phase in my early twenties I just wasn’t that interested in religion and philosophy. That early spark of intrigue had faded and became replaced by hedonistic indulgence. Living in New York City where there are thousands of bars and clubs, my life revolved around bar hoping and club hoping, chasing after the next one night stand, and getting fucked up on beer, liquor, marijuana and the occasional club drug. I was a nihilist living in the moment, working the odd job here and there, with no deeper purpose, meaning or direction. The occasional discussion about metaphysical worldviews always involved me articulating my skepticism and disbelief but it was almost never seriously challenged because most of the people in my social circle either weren’t believers, or if they believed, they weren’t religious about their beliefs. Although I had an affinity for indulgence myself, as the years went on I started gravitating towards deeper more intellectual topics. I wanted to have intellectual conversations with my friends instead of just talking about whatever gossip and drama happened to be going on at the time. I started growing tired of the mindless self-indulgence that I saw going on everyday amongst my friends. I stopped caring about the silly one-upmanship that we were all trying to pull on each other to gratify our precious egos. I was searching for something deeper and more intellectually satisfying in my life but unlike those people who are susceptible to religion, my natural born skepticism wouldn’t steer me towards god.



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Sunday, April 14, 2013

Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey Part 3


The Atheist Goes to College

When I first got to college I immediately took some courses in philosophy. The philosophy of ethics really attracted me in particular. Unfortunately, at the time I was still in my late teens and was entering the beginning of a heavy party phase, and so my grades were sadly not as good as they could’ve been. However, the seed had been planted, and I began to think more deeply about questions of philosophy and ethics than ever before. I remember being in philosophy class one day and the professor asked everyone to raise their hand if they believed in god. To my amazement, almost everyone in class raised their hand. It turned out that I was one of the few, if not the only atheist in the class. Even with this newfound recognition of my minority status, I never felt any serious pressure to conform to those around me when it came to religion or god perhaps because New York is such a secular city. Even though many people in New York believe in god, they generally aren't religious about and it keep it to themselves.

College is traditionally when we truly grow, and as I started making new friends and spent time with a more diverse crowd of people, I learned that religious belief and concepts of “god” were about as diverse as people’s tastes in food and music. I learned that no two people quite believe in the same concept of god. Many friends I made who called themselves “Catholic” were really only Catholic in title. They had premarital sex, used birth control, were pro-choice, they never actually went to church, and on the outside conducted themselves almost indistinguishable from any other secular nontheist. These kinds of people are what I like to call non-religious theists. They technically believe in a god that perhaps intervened a long time ago, but they more or less accept that events that happen in the world are natural, and they aren’t at all religious about their beliefs. I don’t have that much of a problem with these kinds of theists as quite a few of them I have called friends during my life; they’re more like the benign tumors of theism. It’s only if and when they cross the line of secularism that my alarm goes off. So many of those students who raised their hands that day in philosophy class and affirmed their belief in god really just believed in some sort of vague spiritual force or energy that exists somewhere out there, or they believed in some kind of powerful anthropomorphized being they call “God”. It’s another form of relatively benign belief in the supernatural that I can live with, as long as that line of secularism is respected.

Some theists say that colleges are just atheist and secular factories designed to transform good natured god-fearing kids into godless moral relativists. I’ve argued with quite a few of these types over the years, but as I recall, there is a bit of truth to this claim. In my introduction to ethics textbook, which I still have, it does ask the reader to question the source of their morality and we had a few class exercises that challenged the idea of grounding your morals in religion. For example, if you believe that you should do what god says because otherwise he will punish you, we learned in class that in a sense it would turn morality into a mere obedience system whereby the actual “morals” themselves could be meaningless and all that would matter is what you believe god commands you. God could command you to plunder and kill, and you would be obligated to do so unless face his punishment. This was my first introduction to what I would later learn is called the Euthyphro Dilemma and it was the first time I had thought about morality in such a way. Most college students who came from religious backgrounds who were confronted with this dilemma I’m sure have had to reconsider why they believe it’s good to obey god. These kinds of courses do force the theist to reexamine their beliefs and I suppose that is why many theists think colleges exist only to churn out godless secularists. As a non believer, was never challenged in college on the metaphysical grounding of my beliefs, but I was challenged often as to why I hold certain ethical views – but that was the whole point of the class. Contrary to what many theists presume, we were never taught the idea that moral relativism was the solution to all of the world’s problems.

While cleaning my apartment I came across some old college term papers from one of my philosophy classes. There was an assignment where we had to create a mock trial whereby we were to imagine ourselves being accused like Socrates was in The Apology of blasphemy or some sort of thought crime and we were to write a transcript of the trial’s proceedings. So (naturally) I imagined myself living in a world where atheism was a crime and I was put on trial and asked to justify my lack of belief in god. In it, I explain to the prosecutor why I’m an atheist:


I myself am an Atheist, I don't think religion is evil, I understand it has many good aspects of it, but I just do not have a place for it in my life. Let us say for example I didn't live in this era and place of religious freedom. I probably wouldn't be an Atheist, but lets [sic] say I was in a time and place where Atheists faced punishment or even death. I am accused by the authority for not believing in God. My devotion to Atheism is so that I am willing to [face] whatever punishment they have for me, even death.

Pros [Prosecutor]: So you began to question the very existence of God. Was there a particular moment in your life when you began to question God, such as a traumatic event or was it a gradual process?
Me: It was a gradual process. I didn't wake up one morning and say "I don't believe in God." I guess as I got older I just didn't except the explanations religion gives you. I mean it's so vague.
Pros: So you weren't convinced from what you were taught as a child. And I’m assuming you have your own theory and beliefs of how the world was created. What is it that you believe in?
Me: Evolution.
Pros: Evolution. I see. I've heard of this theory. Something about how we humans, are descendents from Monkeys.
Me: Yes, and it was the Apes not the Monkeys.
Pros: And this is what you believe in? You are positively sure that evolution is true.
Me: From the evidence I have see, yes, and it makes a whole lot more sense to me than religion had.

It's funny how I justified the world's existence through evolution, which not only does it not address the origin of the universe, it doesn't even address the origin of life itself! At nineteen, I wasn't as knowledgeable about the cosmological arguments or any of the other ones which theism uses. (That didn't stop me from getting an A on the paper though.)


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Friday, April 12, 2013

Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey Part 2


Natural Born Skeptic

So there I was, a kid growing up in New York City in the 1990s, hailing from a secular home, and completely non-religious. I wasn’t all that different from my peers around me to be honest with you. New York is what I like to call the secular metropolis. Most of my peers and friends growing up weren’t religious at all. None of any of my close friends went to church. Belief in god and religion almost never came up in conversation. Looking back it seemed we were all a bunch of teenage nihilists, with a healthy rebellious spirit. We’d rather drink beer, talk about music and girls and ideas on how to get into trouble to keep us from being bored. Throughout all of my teen years I went through life basically living under the assumption of atheism. I seemed to have an intrinsic inclination towards the naturalistic worldview. I don’t recall ever believing that there were supernatural agencies at work behind anything that happened to me. I even thought that the spiritual idea of karma and the “what goes around, comes around” philosophy was nothing but wishful unsubstantiated nonsense. To me, things just happened, and it was foolish to look for a deeper intentional agency to explain what naturally occurred. When I got an outbreak of acne as a teenager, I didn’t go blaming it on god or karma; I blamed it on my genes that I inherited from my parents as the root cause. There was always a rational scientific explanation in my worldview.

There was one time when I was about 8 or 9 and was playing in the park that was part of the apartment complex I grew up in with the neighborhood kids and I remember this strange girl suddenly showed up. Her name was “Linda” and no one had ever seen her before.  She must’ve been visiting someone living nearby, perhaps a relative. I remember her trying to play with us and that all she wanted to talk about was god and that Jesus Christ died for our sins and how we all needed to recognize this amazing event. We weren’t particularly amused. At some point, I remember sitting down with her on one of the benches with my friends and I was spearheading a campaign of rationalism and doubt against her infatuation with the divinity of Jesus and her insistence that we all believe like her. My memories are a little fuzzy, but I recall that we went back and forth debating for hours until dusk that afternoon. Then there were other times when someone would make a speech about how karma rules the world, and I instinctually interjected with a dose of skepticism against such claims letting it be known that there was no such evidence to justify those beliefs. It seems that I was a natural born skeptic, or perhaps a natural born atheist. When Blasé Pascal spoke of the person who says to himself, “[I] am so made that I cannot believe”, he was speaking about people like me.

In high school I started hanging out with these kids who were wannabe Satanists. They were metal heads who fancied death metal and thrash metal and rejected most mainstream alternative and hard rock as being too “gay”. Although I never quite got into death metal, I started getting into Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails and thoroughly enjoyed the caricatures they made about the religious right’s hypocrisy. In this new crowd that I hung out with, it was cool to hate on and make fun of religions like Christianity. I couldn’t have imagined what it would’ve been like to have been an actual practicing believer in god during those days. I would’ve most likely have had to keep those beliefs “in the closet” so to speak or else face the taunts and teases and possibility of being ostracized. But still, even in this anti religious environment in the late 1990s in high school, when death metal music and Marilyn Manson were at their peaks, I wasn’t at all a militant atheist. I never spoke adamantly about my lack of faith in god; I was never confrontational or tried to convert others to think like me. I pretty much kept my atheism to myself, only making it publicly known when the topic of god occasionally came up. But whenever god or religion did come up, I always remember expressing the voice of doubt towards anyone who even remotely believed.



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Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey Part 1



Chapter 1: From Skeptic To Antitheist


In The Beginning

I have to be honest when I say that I never actually believed in god. The closest I ever got to believing was a relatively short phase of agnosticism. I was raised in a secular home by secular parents that I guess could be described as culturally Catholic. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, especially in my early years, although I was never really taught the connection between these celebrations and Christianity. I was actually sent to a Christian preschool when I was 4 not because my parents were trying to inculcate me into religion, but because it was cheap. It was there that I was first exposed to religion and was taught some of the traditional Christian beliefs. Before eating we were all instructed to say, “God is good, God is great, let us thank Him for our food, amen.” For some reason I never once questioned why I was being instructed by the teachers to say this before lunch as I recall now years later, especially since we didn't do this at home. I guess it was just something I did as a child who was too young to question the rationale behind what I was being instructed to do.

That year at the Christian preschool academy was not something I look back at as a bad or traumatizing period in my life at all. I actually have fond memories of that time. What’s interesting to me about it is that the experience never rubbed off on me in any lasting way. Once I got home it was back to my godless secular family, where mom and dad were about to separate. My dad, who was never at all a religious person, moved out of the house when I was about 7 and like almost all kids whose parents divorce, I stayed and lived with my mother. My mother was a lapsed Catholic and never inculcated me with any religious beliefs. I remember asking her when I was a kid about 5 or 6 what happens after you die, and I remember her telling me that “when you die you just die.” She said you basically just go into non-existence just like it was before you were born. I’m not sure why, but I was actually satisfied with that answer. I just didn't expect there to be any rewards or punishments of any kind in some afterlife. It all just seemed so natural that when you die, your consciousness becomes extinguished like the flame of a candle that has run out of wick. I never had any problems with the finitude of life and accepting that one day I would die and cease to exist. Reflecting on this years later, I now actually prefer that death is final.

The only exposure in my family to religion was through my maternal grandmother, who my mother, my sister and I would occasionally visit on weekends as she lived only a block away. Although my mom was not religious as an adult, my grandmother was a devout Catholic. She was a biblical literalist who believed that Genesis, Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark and the flood, and all the other preposterous stories in the Bible all had literally happened according to how the Bible said they did. I remember her trying to teach me about the Bible when we would visit and I remember immediately putting up a wall of skepticism. Since I could remember I was always into science and I knew about evolution, the age of the earth and the universe, and I knew that they all contradicted what the Bible said. So like a typical skeptic, whenever my grandmother tried to tell me about Adam and Eve I brought up evolution and dinosaurs and she’d struggle to explain how that all worked with the Bible’s version of history. I must have been about 6 or 7 when these “debates” happened, and looking back, I can see that it was just my nature to be skeptical towards anything that contradicted known science. As I grew older my grandmother would occasionally ask if I had reconsidered Christianity again, I guess hoping that my skepticism was just a phase. But I’d always be honest and tell her that I was still a non-believer and she eventually stopped proselytizing. She was a very nice woman and died of old age when I was 25. I have fond memories of her.



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Thursday, April 11, 2013

Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey: Introduction


I want to first start off by saying that I’m not one of those atheists that blames all of the world’s problems on religion. Religious belief has certainly been the root cause of some of humankind’s problems throughout our history, but it is no way is the root cause of all of them. There are many reasons why we harm one another and our environment that has little to no religious motivation. So when I criticize the social effects here of religious belief, I am by no means claiming that religion is the root of all evil.

With that out of the way I want to articulate as best I can why I think the atheistic or naturalistic worldview is perfectly rational and justified and is preferable to theism. The atheistic worldview is built on the naturalistic worldview, also known as metaphysical naturalism. For short here, whenever I refer to naturalism or the naturalistic worldview, I will be referring to metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is roughly defined as “a worldview with a philosophical aspect which holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences”, or “the thesis that nothing besides the natural world, or nature, exists”. There is also methodological naturalism, which is an aspect of naturalism that assumes metaphysical naturalism to be true when conducting the scientific method (meaning to assume natural causes when doing scientific research since supernatural causes are out of the reach of the scientific method).

Now all of science operates more or less under both aspects of naturalism. Even though this is true, science doesn’t have to be committed to the idea that the natural world is all that there is, and a quick check of history will tell you that many of the famous scientists (or natural philosophers as they were once called) of years past did assume supernatural causality was responsible for observed phenomenon. When Isaac Newton for example was at the limits of his knowledge in understanding the complex rotations of the planets under his theory of gravity, he appealed to the supernatural to explain that which he could not. It took another genius, Albert Einstein, to discover what gravity was by means of a natural explanation – general relativity. Over the years as our scientific knowledge grew larger, these supernatural assumptions were slowly debunked and replaced with natural explanations. And to date, everything that science can currently explain is explained by naturally occurring phenomenon. This has resulted in the widespread prevalence of naturalistic causality and explanation becoming the preferred worldview and methodology of choice for scientists. So if it is true as many theists claim that knowledge of the supernatural dimension is forever off limits to the scientific method, then scientists are justified in their metaphysical and methodological naturalism, because such unreachable knowledge is never objectively observed, fails to sufficiently explain anything, and therefore might as well not even exist.

To claim that a being or phenomenon exists outside of what science can determine through observation and experimentation, is to open up the imagination to potentially unlimited amounts of conjecture as to what might exist beyond our senses. You could literally posit the existence of anything that the human mind could conjure up, customize it anthropomorphically to your liking, and say that it’s off limits to being empirically verified. No one will have any way to know for sure if this being or phenomena exists or not, but if its alleged effects could be explained naturalistically or shown to violate known physical laws, then the naturalist is justified in at least disbelieving this being or phenomenon exists until adequate evidence is produced.

Although, I strongly believe the natural world is all that exists, I don’t claim to know this empirically. It is impossible as far as I know to prove a negative (i.e. that god doesn’t exist). All the atheist or naturalist can hope for is that plausible, natural alternatives can be produced to explain the existence of things believed to require supernatural causes. One criticism of naturalism is that it cannot be scientifically proven. Although that is true, it also cannot be proven that we’re not all living inside a giant computer simulation and that the reality we experience is not in fact real at all. No one can empirically prove or disprove such a claim, and anyone who doubts such a claim, more or less has to take it for granted that their cognitive faculties are reliable. Naturalism, much like atheism, cannot as far as I know be empirically proven, but this is not at all required. All the naturalist/atheist merely has to demonstrate is that there is no valid evidence for the claims made by theists that the supernatural exists and that there exists natural explanatory alternatives, and he or she is justified in holding the disbelief in the supernatural.


When it comes to the claim made by some naturalists that we should only believe what can be scientifically proven, an idea known as scientism, I partly disagree here. First, anything that can be scientifically proven we know to be true, unless all of our cognitive faculties are unreliable – which we have no evidence for and no strong reason to believe. Second, the existence of truths that cannot be scientifically verified, like mathematical and logical truths, aesthetic truths, metaphysical truths (like believing we are not living in a computer simulated reality), and ethical truths are only to a certain degree not scientifically provable. We cannot scientifically prove that 1 + 1 = 2, we cannot use science to prove logic, and we cannot even use logic to prove logic. We could show that if our universe behaves logically by fully understanding its laws of physics, then it would make sense why mathematical and logical truths exist, but ultimately these kinds of truths might have to be accepted as a given set of axioms. Science can show us why we might prefer certain kinds of beauty from the socio-cultural and biological evolutionary process, but science cannot prove whether a specific painting or work of art is beautiful. Aesthetic beauty fundamentally lies in the eye of the beholder. Ethical truths cannot be determined alone by science because once you interpret the scientific data that a given set of ethical values hinges on, you will have to make sense of them using philosophy. Although science does indeed play a role in determining moral values, it doesn’t have the final and only word on morality.

In short, just because we cannot empirically prove that the natural world is all that exists, the naturalist/atheist is rationally justified in adopting naturalism because there is no evidence to the contrary. When it comes to the existence of extraordinary claims, like the supernatural, I essentially employ a verificationist attitude: when adequate evidence is produced, I will incorporate it into my belief system, but until then, the default position is disbelief. This is why atheists are called skeptics. We believe a healthy dose of skepticism is needed in our lives to separate fact from nonsense. This is because all kinds of people are making fantastic claims not only about the supernatural, but also about the paranormal, and they’re offering little to no evidence to back up these claims. As a skeptic, I just can’t go on believing that such claims are all true without adequate evidence because that’s being gullible; and being an agnostic on all such claims would then force me to consider the truthfulness of some of the most imbecile and irrational ideas mustered out of every half-thinking brain. Rather, if the assertion is not knowable a priori, or backed up with adequate evidence, the default position should be disbelief – especially if it violates all the known laws of physics. Therefore, since no such evidence exists that supernatural occurrences and agencies are real, the naturalist is perfectly justified in disbelieving in every unscientific claim.


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Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey





I think it's important that we all tell our stories about how we arrived at our core beliefs. Each and every one of us is unique in our life experiences that shaped our journeys towards atheism. For some of us, it was a long process rife with emotion and with many bumps along the road. For others, it was a sudden realization - an epiphany of disbelief as the result of an argument, a book or a person. I want to share my story with you about my personal relationship with disbelief. It's a very inward and subjective reflection and I'd really appreciate it if others can find hope, inspiration and can relate to it on some level.

Blase Pascal wrote of those who are so made that they cannot believe. That would describe me. I've been a natural born skeptic ever since I can remember and have had the luck of growing up in a secular country, and in a secular metropolis. I've since discovered just how important it is to preserve this system that has benefited me and millions of others so well regardless of whether they've been religious or not.

So please read and enjoy my atheist journey from skeptic to antitheist.



Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey

Introduction

Chapter 1: From Skeptic To Antitheist
Part 1: In The Beginning
Part 2: Natural Born Skeptic
Part 3: The Atheist Goes To College
Part 4: Nihilism And The Search For Deeper Meaning
Part 5: The Road Towards Antitheism


Chapter 2: Atheism With A Purpose
Part 6: Why Fight Religion?
Part 7: What Kind Of Atheist Are You?
Part 8: Purpose And Meaning In A Godless World
Part 9: Purpose And Meaning In A Godless World (Continued) 
Part 10: The Journey Ahead

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