I was very sick when I converted to Mormonism. I like to joke that I wasn’t getting enough oxygen to the brain, but the more mundane truth is that I was confronted with the reality of my mortality, and like many people, I panicked. I couldn’t really die, right? I’m…
Category: Atheism
Knowledge, Community, and Relationships
Over at the faithful Mormon blog Faith-Promoting Rumor is a discussion enticingly titled “Do Relationships Make the Church True and False?” This post is a short enough one that you should just go over there and read it, but I guess I will still highlight some points here…when I was…
MSP Exclusive: Russell M. Nelson disses atheists
http://newsroom.lds.org/blog/2010/06/apostle-talks-religious-freedom-to-boston-youth.html Note to Andrew S. et alia explaining this post: It looked as if the Newsroom Blog link to Nelson’s comments re atheists had gone dead and so I posted a screen grab of the post here. Since the link is live again, I’ve taken that down and left the…
atheism – the bane of Mormonism
I’m not exactly sure what is going on, but apparently the LDS Church is increasingly worried about this whole atheism thing. Russell M. Nelson just gave a talk to young adults in Massachusetts in which he railed against atheism. This combines with a talk from the October 2009 conference (I…
atheist v. Muslim – part 1
I play soccer on occasion during the lunch hour at my university. One of the other players (probably the best player) is an Iranian-American, “H”, who is also Muslim (he’s in IT). He asked me what I teach and when I told him Sociology of Religion, he became very interested….
things are bad for religion?
While some sociologists have been talking about the growing None population in the U.S. for a while now (see this report for an example), you know things have to be getting bad when researchers employed by the religions themselves are starting to worry about the health and vitality of religions…
Atheists and Traditions
Religion has a lot different facets that different people find appealing: identity/community transcendence/awe/altered states of consciousness rituals tradition/culture purpose/guidance belief in the supernatural And surely many others. It’s my impression that people tend to focus on a few of their favorites among these components and ignore the rest. It’s just…
a service only atheists & blasphemers can provide
Leave it to atheists to consider the pets post-rapture. Apparently a group of atheists have put together a service for “heaven-bound” Christians to care for their “Eternal Earth-Bound Pets” should the rapture occur. Maybe we should contact the owners of the domain to see if they have made any money…
What Should I ask?
What’s an interesting interview question to ask a bunch of Mormons? Here’s the background: As you know, I’m going to the Sunstone Symposium next week, and — since my panel topic is “Bridging Stereotypes through Blogging” — I thought it might be fun to bring some of my Mormon conference…
Motivations for altruism
Why act ethically if not out of (self-interested) thoughts of your own eternal reward? According to the LDS-Freemen (hat tip TBBB), you wouldn’t: Is it okay for me to admit that the reason I have faith and hope in an afterlife is because I am interested in myself? Is that…