The following is a short summary of what this blog is about and what moved me to start voicing my opinion publicly. I hope you find what you've been looking for. If not: Please do feel free to ask.
About the Blog
It's about common sense, and sometimes about the lack of it. That's already all you need to know, really. I'm writing from a Humanist perspective: I that think the values of the european Enlightenment - equality, human rights, critical thought, open discourse - are a great step in the right direction. The Godless Humanist Blog is one of my humble efforts to promote them.
At the heart of this blog lies the Counterapologetics 101 series. Over the years I've spent discussing theology and ethics with believers, I've accrued a list of arguments and objections that are always brought up against mine and similar positions - I've also noticed that some answers to those arguments and objections work better than others, and that a good analogy is an invaluable help to getting a point across where strictly logical arguments fail to change minds. People who start speaking out against religion (or perhaps simply dare state their nonbelief in public) are too often nonplussed by questions they did not expect and do not know how to answer.
The first times I got confronted about my lack of religious belief, the question "What purpose is there to a life without god? Why don't you just kill yourself?" left me nonplussed. I didn't have a satisfactory answer, simply because the thought had never occured to me. Why would I want to kill myself? Why would I need a higher purpose in life to make it worth living? Needless to say, actually pronouncing those counter questions as way of an answer left everybody unsatisfied, myself even more than my opponent. By saying that I don't need a reason to live, I practically admitted that I didn't have one - not at all the impression I wanted to leave.
Now, some years later, I have found not just an answer I'm satisfied with, but one that leaves most believers stunned and lost for words, and I have found that a repertory of answers that can be adjusted to suit the needs of the moment is an incredibly helpful tool to have at one's disposal.
I'd like to spare others those years of trial-and-error to find appropriate answers to both the profound and the inane questions of the religious people they confront or are confronted by. With my Counterapologetics 101 series I am trying to create a resource I wish I had found five years ago.
About the Author
I'm an autodidact on most topics I write about here. I try to learn about everything that interests me, read a lot of non-fiction and science magazines, and study biology/biochemistry. Yes, that's right: I'm just a student. You have no reason to take me serious at all. I am no authority on any topic, and haven't achieved anything that would make my opinion exceptionally interesting. I hope that you'll find my thoughts worth considering anyhow.
I've always been a non-believer, as I was lucky enough not to be indoctrinated as a child. I was never particularly opposed to religion either, until I learned about some of the privileges that the churches enjoy here in Germany. One incident especially sparked my interest, when I noticed that the state had me listed as being member of the Roman Catholic Church by mistake, even though I have never been baptized. Today, I still don't know how that mistake came to be. When I asked the state official to change that listing, she told me she couldn't do that; My options were to leave it as it is or to officially defect from the Church, which would entail a processing fee of 30€ (~50 USD). I said that I wouldn't even consider paying money to quit a membership of a club that I had never been a member of in the first place, and started wondering about how this was legally possible.
Essentially, a church is a civil association of people, not different from a football club or the like. To quit membership shouldn't be more trouble than writing a letter to the club - how come that in case of the churches in germany one needs to show up in person at the local registration office and pay a processing fee? What does the state have to do with my membership in a civil club or lack thereof in the first place? I started researching, and found out more and more about the privileges of the church in the supposedly secular state of Germany. In the process I also learned quite a bit about the beliefs themselves, and had plenty of opportunity do discuss with believers of many denominations. The more I learned, the stronger my opposition to faith grew. By now I am pretty much convinced that organized religion is the worst thing that has happened to humanity so far.
I guess I ought to be somewhat thankful to religion: It was my unwillingness to pay those 30€, that church privilege of having its membership-administration done by the secular state, that sparked my interest in politics and the legal situation in Germany and elsewhere; It was my discussions with creationists that sparked my interest in the origin of life and in the details of evolutionary theory; It was my conversations with other freethinkers that sparked my interest in philosophy, astronomy and history, and it was my astonishment at how people can be brought to believe such obvious lies and untruths that got me interested in sociology, psychology, neuroscience and skepticism. In a way, I owe a lot of who I am to religion.
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