An atheist whose attitude on religion I appreciate
You gotta like Phil Plait. He makes no apologies about being an atheist. He’s honest about it, clear about it, and doesn’t squirm on his position. On the other hand, unlike some other well-known atheist bloggers, he’s able to recognize that people who are religious are capable of being rational, reasonable, thinking people.
Here is a post of his where he expresses this. And, by the way, I really like the video he’s embedded, and I agree with it fully. Creationism is bad science– well, it’s not science at all, but it’s in conflict with science. That much is bloody obvious. But it’s also really clear to me that creationism is bad religion, that it’s bad for Christianity, for all of the reasons described by the video Phil embeds. Check it out.
March 27th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Do you read Slacktivist? He’s a liberal evangelical, an excellent writer who devotes about 50% of his blog to explaining exactly why fundamentalism is damaging to Christianity (with a popular weekly feature on why the Left Behind books are particularly poisonous).
The rest of it is mostly devoted to “What your newspaper would look like if it weren’t run by millionaires” — drawing attention to stories that are of interest to people who work for a living and don’t have much safety margin.
Anyway, he recently wrote a great post on this subject.
‘But it’s really hard, even in the hermetic and hermetically sealed world of Bob Jones University, to avoid encountering some incontrovertible piece of evidence that the earth and the universe is far, far older than young-earth creationism allows. When they encounter this evidence, they may be able to cling to some desperate form of last-Thursday-ism (the world is 6,000 years old, but was made to seem older) which may provide them with a temporary patch until they get better at living with very high levels of cognitive dissonance and barely veiled self-deception. But just as often, the whole edifice collapses. Hard. They wind up rejecting everything they ever believed.” … “This scenario is not hypothetical and it is not rare. And it’s not something I forgive easily. The proponents of young-earth creationism are responsible for this very scene playing out a thousand times over.’
And that’s just one of his reasons for not liking creationism.
Everything he posts is pretty much worth reading but that post in particular is very relevant to what you’re talking about here.