Better Than Faith is a resource for anyone questioning faith. Whether you are doubting your own faith or you just want to shine a light on religion and expose some of its dirty little secrets, you should find something here to help you.
We feel that where there are proselytizers trying to convert people to their religion, there should be a voice of reason to help those people make an informed and rational choice instead of potentially caving under the confusing mind games and bullying that many preachers use.
If you would like to join us, we would be glad to have you. If you want to start your own group, we wish you the best of luck, and we hope that our materials will help.
This will be our second month at the First Friday art walk in downtown Phoenix. The first one was a little disorganized because most of us hadn’t been there before or hadn’t been there in a long time, but it turned out pretty well anyway.
It was nice to see Anonymous out there sticking it to Scientology, and we are happy to do what we can to support them, but since they already Scientology fairly well covered, our main focus continues to be on the Evangelical Christian street preachers, and maybe the obnoxious “Christian Rock” band that apparently plans to return.
Still, that’s at least three different groups who need some attention, so anyone who joins us should not be short on things to do.
Just as we were reexamining and improving our methods when 2008 began, we will usher in 2009 the same way. Overall this has been a successful year for us, but some of us are beginning to look for better methods to not only maintain our strengths, but also to find and eliminate our weaknesses so that we can be more effective in meeting any goals we set for ourselves.
One of the best ways to identify our weaknesses is to get feedback from new people who aren’t already used to being out there with us. New people can provide insights into things that we are unlikely to see on our own. So even if you don’t think that you want to participate, but you still want to help, you can do it by giving us some constructive criticism.
This is a video from FactVsReligion, she’s a vlogger from YouTUBE who has her own varied takes on atheism and religiosity. New, but friendly, and trying to make a place for herself in the confines. I think that in between the straight argument videos, I want to include some of visible people instead of the images/text documented speech variety.
In this 5 minute video, Dr. William Lane Craig attempts to refute the argument made by Richard Dawkins that using a god to explain where the universe came from leads to an infinite regress of even more complicated gods. This argument can be found in Chapter 4 of The God Delusion, but it is introduced at the very end of Chapter 3.
The basis of Craig’s refutation is that “In order to recognize that an explanation is the best, you don’t have to be able to explain the explanation.”
It is true that explaining one thing doesn’t necessarily require explaining its precursor. For example evolution is perfectly acceptable even if we are entirely wrong about the origins of the universe.
Boxing Day is an interesting holiday, widely observed across what was once the British Empire. Generally held on December 26th, it is a day when the wealthy would traditionally give gifts to their employees or to people of lower social classes. More interestingly, the wealthy would often trade places with their household servants for a day.
What better way to observe this holiday than to trade places with the boss of all bosses? Let’s take a little time to just imagine trading places with God.
We’ll use the most common Christian view of God as omniscient (knowing everything), omnipotent (being able to do anything), and omnipresent (being everywhere at the same time).
When I was a child, I (like most children of Christian parents) was told that Jesus was born on December 25th in 0 or 1 A.D. This remains a common belief even among adults, but what reason do we have to believe it?
The first and most easily dismissed claim is that Jesus was born on December 25th, because there is simply no evidence for it. Even the Bible doesn’t give a birth day for him, and we know that December 25th was chosen by the Catholic church more than 300 years after the time Jesus was believed to have been born. The date seems to have been chosen in an attempt to replace the pagan Saturnalia and Solstice celebrations which were already set on or around that date.
There has been speculation from many different people about potential birth dates of Jesus, so much in fact that depending on who you ask it could be in any month of the year, but the truth is that we just don’t have very good evidence to place it at any specific time.
What is much more difficult to figure out is the year…
DonExodus2 is a evolutionary biology student and Christian who makes posts on YouTUBE about evolution and Creationist propaganda. Like others, he discovered gross inaccuracies, dishonesty, and outright lies in the Way of the Master videos by Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron.
I would like to encourage all of our readers in Phoenix to pick up a New Times this week. It’s got great pictures and an overall good story, but I would also like to give a little bit of a response and clarification on a few issues.
I do understand that they took a particular interest in Omar. He is an interesting, well spoken and good looking guy with a good story to tell, so the fact that the rest of us are a bit buried in the article is alright. What I don’t like is the Secular Free Thought Society (and me in particular) being painted as the villains and unwanted hangers-on who followed Omar down to Mill like lost puppies.
As Omar knows, but apparently Niki forgot, the Mill Avenue Resistance started when I started visiting Mill on a regular basis and arguing with preachers by myself. I believe it was the first night of doing that when I met a former street preacher named Emmanuel who was also having one on one discussions with preachers, and the initial group was formed.
Much of the gay community and many others are upset by Barack Obama’s choice of evangelical pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation (prayer) at Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony, but perhaps this is the wrong issue to complain about?
Not only is there to be a prayer by a controversial pastor, but there will also be a benediction (blessing) by Joseph Lowery, a less divisive choice, but still a Christian reverend who will bring little diversity. If we do include religious activities, why not Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims or others?
Some religious zealots feel that not only is it unquestionably right to have their (supposedly America’s) religion exclusively represented in government events, but that the only question we should be asking is whether or not what we’re doing will be good enough for God.
A few of the Resistance had already appeared by the time that Kazz showed up with his speaker and microphone. When he started up, Jim was on the mic for the evangelicals (this is Valerie’s Jim) and he stepped down an instant later. To which there was a quip from Kazz, “Yeah, he’s afraid of me.”
Almost instantly a woman with straight, lank dark hair stepped up and started talking to Kazz. Her name, I would learn during my later interview of her, is Diana. I missed a lot of the conversation between her and Kazz, but I think that they discussed some of the ordinary first-day evangelical sound bite memes. (See Agents for Christ section.)
I actually got asked, “So, whose side are you on?” by some of the onlookers who had been drawn into the crosstalk between the Resistance and the evangelicals. With an amused wit, I replied that I’m on the people’s side, really, since I like people.
