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Is the Number of Atheists Really as Large as Atheists Claim?

In a post I authored on Valentine's Day in 2009 entitled " Atheism by the Numbers: Going Nowhere Fast ," I questioned the claim by atheists that their numbers were rising. I pointed out the following: What do the polls tells us? Stark offers the numbers from leading polling organizations since 1944, for those who do not believe in God: 4% -- 1944 (Gallup) 6% -- 1947 (Gallup) 3% -- 1964 (American Piety) 3% -- 1994 (GSS) 4% -- 2005 (Baylor/Gallup) 4% -- 2007 (Baylor/Gallup) The number of atheists in the United States appears to be unchanged for at least 63 years, despite advances in science and secularization.  Since that time in 2012, the Pew Research Religion and Public Life Project published a poll that suggested that the numbers of atheists were actually rising. According to Ecumenical News , In October 2012, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a report finding that the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans under the age of 30 ha

Does God want us to be Dumb? A look at Joyce Meyer's Quote on Confusion and Reasoning.

"I once asked the Lord why so many people are confused, and He said to me, 'Tell them to stop trying to figure everything out and they will stop being confused.' I have found it to be absolutely true, reasoning and confusion go together." ~ Joyce Meyer Last Friday, I came across a YouTube video by someone calling himself the "Quiet Atheist" in which he criticized Joyce Meyer for her statement quoted above (hereinafter, the "Confusion Quote"). In his video entitled "Christian Joyce Meyer: "Reasoning And Confusion Go Together,'" this particular atheist opines that she is telling all Christians to be "dumb." Specifically, he says that Ms. Meyer is telling people: According to her, we should all, as I said, remain dumb. We should stop asking questions. We should stop being curious about everything there is out there on this planet or in the universe. We are just going to be confused. ... Questioning isn't good.

Does the Pope's Statement regarding the Big Bang End the God Debate?

Today's USA Today ran an article entitled " Pope says evolution, Big Bang are real " in which he seemed to give a pretty strong statement of support to Theistic Evolution. The Pope reportedly said: "When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so," Francis said. "He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment." I am certain that there are some who will witness this as a caving in of the Vatican to the arms of scientific naturalism. They will note that the Pope, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, acknowledged that the Biblical account of creation found in Genesis 1 and 2 has been proven wrong by science. Of course, that view is short cited. It assumes that there are only two ways of understanding the evidence for the universe. The first is a straight

Why I don't buy Carrier's "why I don't buy the Resurrection"

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   I'm going against advice and deal with arguments by carm atheists because I think it's important to remember that certain things have been answered. Dealing with an old article by Richard Carrier that was sighted recently on CARM. Even though it's old these guys are rallying around it like its new and the same bunck is being noised about by atheists all the time. Carrier's article is here: http://infidels.org/library/modern/r...n/lecture.html this is prompted by Fleetmouse's statement that: "You have no answers to Carrier's essay. " He seems the most worked up over the idea that since carrier proves the superstitious nature of the folks of Jesus day, like he never considered that. That's something I knew about as a kid. I used it in highschool to justify my own atheism (1973).  I can't imagine anyone being impressed by it. Be that as it may that's not an argument so examine it.   Carrier My fi

The Heart of Freedom (2014)

This week, the United States will celebrate our annual Independence Day (July 4th -- the day in 1776 we declared, a bit preemptorily, our independence from Great Britain). Freedom and independence are words with great political and cultural meaning for us; and not only for us, but for the numerous nations who (more-or-less following our lead) also declared their independence from sovereign rulers whom they believed were oppressing them, both socially and not-infrequently religiously. Sad to say, Christianity was just-as-not-infrequently the religious oppression the people were revolting against. To some extent this is even true of the United States: even though our own national revolution was grounded on a mixture of orthodox Christianity and nominal deism (such as Franklin’s and Jefferson’s), the history of our country’s settlement in the centuries before the revolution was typically based on fleeing religious (as well as financial) oppression in Europe. And it can ha

Answering Austin Cline's "Argument from Religious Experience:Do We Experience God's Existence?"

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William James ( 1842–1910 ) Atheist pundit Austin  Cline can often be found pontificating about religion on about.com. He has an article around religious experience as a God argument, [1] his prejudicial dismissal of the argument is tailormade for my new book, The Trace of God: A Rational Warrant for Belief, by Joseph Hinman (paperback, soon to be e book available on Amazon ) to answer. First I want to clear the way by a knit pick. the phrase "Do we experience God's existence?" is an awkward and odd phrase. It's redundant because the only way we could actually experience God as a reality is if God is real, what we call "existing," thus even though this is a misuse of the term on his part according to Paul Tillich's theology [2] to experience God is to say that God is real and thus the idea that we are experiencing God's existence is just redundant. If we experience God as a reality then God must be real or we are not truly e