http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/07/proof-of-heaven-a-doctor-s-experience-with-the-afterlife.html

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As a…

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Hey guys! Hope you all had a great week! Radio Show stuff first and then we'll get to some links!

But first! I trickle out Sunday School links throughout the week on Google+. No reason to wait to read all the fascinating stuff! There's a great community of people I share the links and interact with. And on…

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Here we go again! First off, as always, I want to say thanks to everyone for your FB LIKE's, your +1's on Google+, your thumbs up on StumbleUpon, and your tweets on Twitter. So glad you all find Sunday School  valuable enough that you would want to share it with others. It makes the time spent on putting each edition together absolutely worth it! Thank you! Last week's edition was viewed almost 900 times thanks to all your help. Let's see if we can reach a thousand! Spread the word. The…

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I'm currently reading "The Mothman Prophesies" by John A. Keel. [I know... you can laugh at me]. I chose to read it because despite my being an atheist who is an extreme skeptic of anything supernatural... I haven't lost my taste for a good spooky tale. Being the thrill-chaser that I am, I enjoy all sorts of things that give a good scare... horror movies, rollar coasters, ghost stories, urban legends... and [as I apparently found out last Monday] scaling the side of a 15-foot [~4.6 m] rocky…

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My main approach to explaining atheism is not to deny God but, rather, to deny any knowledge about the supernatural -- and I think we can all agree that God is as supernatural as it gets.



A common response to the above assertion goes something like, "What IS the supernatural, anyway?", or "That depends on what you mean by supernatural".



So let's clearly delineate the difference between the natural and supernatural realms.



The natural realm is the entire universe… Continue

When I was a child I was a bit fanciful. I remember my mother on several occasions explaining the difference between 'real' and 'pretend/imagination'. And speculating about things was fine, playing was fine, but in reality I would not be able to fly off the roof with my umbrella like Mary Poppins and if I got hurt she would kill me.

I love to read. It comes with the whole librarian thing and I have been reading since I was 4. I do read a lot of non-fiction; history, medicine,…

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A miracle is "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent" (Hume, 123n). Theologians of the Abrahamic religions consider only God-willed contravention of the laws of nature to be true miracles. However, they admit others can do and have done things which contravene the laws of nature; such acts are attributed to diabolical… Continue

The collection of channels including the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Animal Planet, the History Channel, etc, are quite controversial for their programs. Torn between love and hate, critics criticize the programs on these channels for dumbing down scientific, naturalistic, and historical subjects to the point of absurdity.



My personal take is that they have their place. I am endlessly fascinated by shows such as "The Universe", "Planet Earth", "Life",… Continue

I started a blog last fall, Agnostic Innocence, which lately I have grown rather disenchanted with. To make a long story short, I started the blog specifically with the intent to better understand my own position on different topics; it was really an exercise in my own introspection that I published on the internet in order to force myself to adhere to the writing standards of the public sphere. At the time I began (and named) the blog, I was technically an atheist in that I did not… Continue

It is my contention that if one grew up without ever hearing of gods, religion, and the supernatural; that when one was presented with these concepts for the first time, one would laugh one's ass off!

Recently I had an incident in which God saved my neighbor's skull from being crushed. Or perhaps it wasn't divine intervention but visions of the future bestowed upon me by cosmic forces that my subconscious is attuned to and allowed me to save my neighbor from a trip to the emergency room or certain death. But it really drove home the many aspects of perception and the various ways human beings, the wholly irrational creatures that we are, interpret events in our lives. From the mundane to the… Continue

So the other day I got into a debate with one of my coworkers that was fairly interesting and left me kind of wondering myself. I make no attempt to hide my nonbelief, most people in my office know that I'm fiercely atheist. Even those that make every attempt to convert whoever they can tend to leave me alone bacause I'm also known as a fiercely effective debator. There have been a few situations where someone attempting to convert me wound up getting converted themselves. Most theists don't… Continue

It seems that people who believe in some kind of god, any kind of god, even ones they’ve created for themselves, are more acceptable than those that do not.



I was chatting with a lady I met last Sunday at Massimo Pigliucci’s presentation. She told me she held a belief in the supernatural, though not one that aligned with mainstream religion, and seemed offended by the idea that I didn’t believe in any sort of deity or supernatural hocus-pocus whatsoever.



You don’t believe… Continue