Dan Barker
Dan Barker
Daniel Edwin "Dan" Barkeris an American atheist activist who served as a Christian preacher and musician for 19 years but left Christianity in 1984. Barker, along with his wife Annie Laurie Gaylor, is the current co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He has written numerous articles for Freethought Today, an American freethought newspaper. He is the author of several books including Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist...
believe differences atheism
Basic atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. There is a difference between believing there is no god and not believing there is a god - both are atheistic, though popular usage has ignored the latter.
faith believe intelligent
It's not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why many intelligent people continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown.
atheist book believe
You believe in a book that has sticks turning into snakes, and you say we are the ones that need help?
atheist prayer believe
Isn't atheism just another religion?' No, it isn't. Atheism has no creeds, rituals, holy book, absolute moral code, origin myth, sacred spaces or shrines. It has no sin, divine judgment, forbidden words, prayer, worship, prophecy, group privileges, or anointed 'holy' leaders. Atheists don't believe in a transcendent world or supernatural afterlife. Most important, there is no orthodoxy in atheism.
real believe insanity
Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.
atheist two people
People are invariably surprised to hear me say I am both an atheist and an agnostic, as if this somehow weakens my certainty. I usually reply with a question like, “Well, are you a Republican or an American?” The two words serve different concepts and are not mutually exclusive. Agnosticism addresses knowledge; atheism addresses belief. The agnostic says, “I don't have a knowledge that God exists.” The atheist says, “I don't have a belief that God exists.” You can say both things at the same time. Some agnostics are atheistic and some are theistic.
religion needs respectable
Freethought is respectable. Freethought is crucial. Freethought needs to be publicized.
running religious common-threads
Even if it is true that all cultures share a common morality, why does this prove a supreme intelligence? After all, don't we humanists sometimes claim that there is a common thread of humanistic values running through history across cultural and religious lines?
atheist taken intelligence
Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy.
brother blood forever
We were blood brothers, pals forever. He was my very best friend. Nobody else could see him. I now know he was just pretend.
dogma clean please
Please clean up after your dogma.
prayer thinking government
It is wrong for a secular government to promote prayer. We think the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. What if the president declared a National Day of Cursing God because He failed us on September 11? Americans would say, "You've overstepped your authority." That's how we feel when he promotes prayer.
atheist character suffering
Atheists are suffering from bad PR. What if Sesame Street had an atheist character?
demand doe belief
Truth does not demand belief...