I’ve been an atheist for around 8 years, most of which I’ve spent in the religious closet, so to speak. Before that, I was an agnostic, searching constantly for answers but not positive that there wasn’t some kind of god out there that created everything.

In all that time, I kept my godlessness relatively private, telling very few people. Mainly I wanted to avoid confrontation. I didn’t really know how to debate or defend myself, so I felt it was a personal issue and kept it to myself.

In the last 8 years though, I’ve watched this poor country polarize itself in politics and religion to an alarming degree and wallow in gross ignorance. I’ve realized relatively recently that being in the closet wasn’t helping anything.

I couldn’t be myself when talking to people because being a skeptical atheist is a huge part of my life. I guess when I fully and finally sloughed off the dead weight of god, religion and superstitions, I also lost a large part of the foundation of my belief system. It really rocked me. I realized a lot of what I believed was nonsense and lies.

So I’ve had to rebuild what I believe in, my atheist worldview, so to speak.

The thing is, being in the religious closet has only served to isolate me from other people of like mind, as well as keep ideas limited to just what I read or experience personally. Then I discovered the atheist and skeptical world. I realized I wasn’t alone, and I finally came out of the damned closet. Read more…

This will inspire you. It sure inspired me. 40 inspirational speeches in 2 minutes and 15 seconds. Let me know what you think of it.

I wrote a transcript because it’s so awesome: Read more…

As an atheist, it’s important to understand what the Burden of Proof is, and how it works. Why? Because theists misuse it against us. In return, we need to be better educated and set them straight.

The burden of proof (latin: onus probandi), falls under the maxim ‘necessitas probandi incumbit ei qui agit’ or, “the necessity of proof lies with he who complains”. The burden of proof usually lies with the party making the new claim, in terms of law.

But where we are much more interested is in science, where the burden of proof lies with someone suggesting a new theory or stating a claim. They therefore must supply evidence to support it.

So if someone makes a bold claim, it isn’t another person’s responsibility to disprove it, but rather the responsibility of the person making the claim.

Also, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, meaning the less reasonable a statement seems, the more proof it requires. Read more…

I learned about a study through Scientific American yesterday. Psychologists, writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that people keeping a weekly gratitude journal exercised an hour and a half longer per week than those who kept a complaining journal.

Basically, once a week for 10 weeks, people in the study would write down up to 5 things they were grateful for. It could be as simple as “waking up this morning”. By the end of the study, they were working out an hour and a half more per week than a group that wrote about life’s hassles, like “stupid people driving”.

Ironically, I’ve had trouble being motivated to exercise and keep a food journal since Thanksgiving, so I thought I’d give this a shot. Last night I wrote down 5 things I’m grateful for. It was pretty easy.

But that got me thinking. It smacks of “counting your blessings”, doesn’t it? I just wondered, if I’m not grateful to someone, how does that work?

Gratitude: noun - the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful.
Origin: 1400–50; late ME < ML grātitūdin- (s. of grātitūdō) thankfulness, equiv. to grāt(us) pleasing + -i- -i- + -tūdin- -tude

Ok, so I guess I can be grateful, and it doesn’t have to be to anyone in particular. I guess I was thinking it was more like the christian idea of counting your blessings and thanking god. Blech!

Being free of god, I wasn’t sure about how gratitude worked. I guess it’s just an acknowledgment of what is good in your life.

Anyway, I thought I’d share the study with you. Aren’t you lucky, you get my thoughts that go with it as an added bonus.

Have a great day! I’m grateful for you!

I found a refreshingly different article titled 10 Morals Atheism Gives Me a bit ago. While most atheists have been asked the typical religious question about how we can be moral without a god, this article dismisses the question as inherently flawed, and makes a statement instead.

In my experience, the bible goes on, especially in the old testament, about how to treat people who are different than you. It’s full of hate and cruelty, with some rules thrown in. Only a few of those rules are sensible. The rest are about control. From the little I know of the quran, it’s even worse.

I’m not going to pick the bible (or the quran) apart. It’s not worth my time and aggravation. If you believe that the bible is the divinely inspired word of god, you’re only going to skim this article, find a few points to attack me while you brew up a cup of moral and righteous indignation, and then try to shove your fundamentalism down my throat because you’re scared of people who think for themselves and don’t have blind faith in fairy tales from the Fertile Crescent like you do. You don’t listen anyway, you just find ammunition then viciously attack. What great role models you are. How very christ-like.

On the other hand, if you are truly interested in breaking free of the iron fist of god ruling your life and keeping you in ignorant fear, you can go to the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible and look around for yourself.

The atheists who read this probably have already read that awful book, because as a general rule, we need to be more educated on religious matters than those militant religious folks that try to tell us how we should believe.

So, onto the 10 reasons atheists are morally superior, in no particular order, and my personal opinion about each one: Read more…