Rant of the Exiles

If atheism were a religion like Christianity, what would be its theological tenets?  My friend Eric suggested our poetry writing group and book club read How to Have Impossible Conversations by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay as a way to have meaningful conversations in a polarized and divided culture. Since Eric is an atheist, our group likes to be upfront about the religious content of a book recommendation. To my surprise before I started reading, Eric sent an email apologizing for the evangelistic nature of the book.  His email piqued my interest and I finished the book in a couple days. Reading Impossible Conversations through the lens of atheist evangelism was fascinating. This book offers helpful insights to anyone committed to promoting dialogue. And yet as I made my way through Impossible Conversations, I realized it was intended to help atheists convert believers, primarily Christians, to non-believers. Boghossian already wrote A Manual for Creating A...

The writers of The Book of Mormon musical answer the question: “What does the world think of Christians?” Their response is a melodic, witty, and uproarious put-down. Note: This post contains spoilers.  I watched The Book of Mormon on Broadway with my two teenage sons. My second son picked the show and I thought it would be stupid. Who wants to watch a musical satirizing Mormonism? It doesn’t seem very entertaining. Full disclosure: I also thought Alexander Hamilton’s life was a stupid musical idea. However, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Robert Lopez (hereafter abbreviated as PSL), are comedic geniuses. Their collaboration is incredible. It is a pop culture masterpiece -  ruthlessly satirical, hilarious, and wondrous. In short, my boys and I loved it.  I was interested in how I would respond to a work that attacks faith, in particular Mormonism but in general, all religious faiths. And make no mistake: Mormonism is the writers’ primary target but their cr...

An atheist is someone who denies the existence of God. This is different from an agnostic - someone who is unsure or undecided about the existence of God. And my point is the average atheist is smarter than the average Christian. And its mainly because you have to be intelligent and well-educated to qualify for atheism. There’s a couple different reasons for this. First statistically, let’s say the U.S. has around five to six million atheists whereas there are at least a hundred million professed Christians in this country. So when you're talking about atheists, its a pretty small sample size relative to the number of Christians. Its also hard to identify atheists because they don’t usually have some short of regular gathering. What I’m saying is there are probably ten times as many smart Christians as there are smart atheists but there’s just so many other Christians who are not smart and they bring the curve down. But most of all, its because atheism is an intellectual lux...