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.
above buying changed clever sold
We had sold it above $40, and thought we were very clever buying it back at $21, ... Then it went to $12. And nothing changed with the (stock's) story.
brazil companies
We think cellular companies in Brazil will go through consolidation.
along concerned extremely hand
On the one hand you're very concerned about what's going on, but on the other hand you're extremely optimistic, because these are things that don't come along very often.
kept painfully prices technology worse year
We kept painfully layering on more technology at the end of the year as prices got worse and worse,
broad coming looks run
It's only been a month, so I wouldn't run away with broad conclusions, but it looks like the world is not coming to an end.
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.