jewel December 16th, 2011
Christopher Hitchens has died. We’ve lost a wonderfully eloquent man who was fearless and bold. He will be missed greatly.
I had the honor of hearing him speak once at a conference in DC a few years back and I’m sad that I won’t have that opportunity again. Suddenly the world seems a little too quiet.
jewel July 13th, 2008
Jewelisms has been added to The Atheist Blogroll. You can see the blogroll in my sidebar. The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.
jewel July 5th, 2008
Every now and again I get asked why I decided to become an atheist. Hopefully this post will answer that question.
First, and foremost, I didn’t “decide” to become an atheist. That implies waking up one morning and saying “starting right now I no longer believe in god.” And it wasn’t like that at all. Religion of any kind just never really took. I did try a couple different “spiritual paths” for a few years in my teens and early 20′s thinking the problem was the religion itself, but the “feel good” factor wasn’t enough for me and I didn’t see anything that convinced me that it, any more than the religion in which I was raised, was anything more than wishful thinking. Giving up religion wasn’t at all traumatic for me like it is for some people. I probably made the whole process a bit harder than it needed to be, but I wasn’t left feeling sad or empty or without purpose. I actually felt liberated. Like I was seeing the world for the first time and everything just made a whole lot more sense. Continue Reading »
jewel March 3rd, 2008
This post is a bit of a continuation of A question of faith. That post, like this one, was written to answer an assumption made by an acquaintance regarding atheists. The assumption that this post deals with is the myth that there are no atheists in foxholes. Here I’m not just referring to atheists in the military, but rather a more broad foxhole; that of rough times in ones life. Continue Reading »
jewel February 24th, 2008
I’m not sure how I managed to miss this, but apparently during the primaries, Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists urged atheists to not vote in the general election this November! I find that absolutely astounding! Continue Reading »
jewel January 25th, 2008
A while back I got into an interesting conversation on religion with an acquaintance (he brought it up, not me). Well, it started out as a conversation anyway. He got louder and louder as it went on, as if being loud made him right. He went on about how faith is a virtue (an assertion I disagreed with). Anyway, during the course of this conversation he made many assumptions about me and about atheists in general. One of them is that we couldn’t possibly understand faith or even know what it really was. This assumes that people who are atheists have never been religious, which for most atheists I’ve met simply isn’t the case. Continue Reading »
jewel September 30th, 2007
We just got back from the AAI convention in Arlington. It was really an amazing 2 days. The guest speakers included Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Julia Sweeney, Eugenie Scott, Matthew Chapman, Edward Tabash, Pastor Deacon Fred, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and many others. The lineup was really quite spectacular.
Security was tight. There was a bomb sniffing dog and everyone that was able to get into the main ballroom was scanned by metal detectors. More on this later. Continue Reading »
jewel July 31st, 2007
I recently read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. He is one of my favorite authors, so reading his latest book was just natural.
Just as I have come to expect from Dr. Dawkins, The God Delusion is a well reasoned treatise. He systematically dismantles the supposed needs for belief in God and pretty much any argument one could have for retaining belief. He mainly goes after the three Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judiasim and Islam – but his arguments apply equally well to any other religion, past or present. Continue Reading »
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