Joining Skeptic Freethought!

As of today I'm officially a contributor at Skeptic Freethought, a group blog focused on the atheist, agnostic, freethinking, humanist, secular, and skeptic (AAFHSS) community and on student groups in particular.

I've got my own author page and everything!  Yes, I know I need a better photo, but the shot of me enjoying a pint of Magners in a London pub will have to do for now.

I'll be making my first-ever post there by the coming weekend.  For now, anyone interested should feel free to take a look at what the other contributors have written.

No honor among thieves, no credulity among atheists?

Even setting aside the incessant hair-splitting between professed atheists and professed agnostics, nontheism is far from being anything close to a coherent ideology. To be united by unbelief is a fragile alliance at best, and many of us are as skeptical of one another as we are of religion.

Take a look at some of the other atheist blogs I link to on my sidebar - Pharyngula, Friendly Atheist, BlagHag, Secular Right, The Intersection - and you'll see that we're scattered widely across every layer of the ideological map excepting theology. We don't just differ on politics and economics, but also on how to relate to religious people and even how atheists ought to live their lives.

Those of us who feel inclined to blog tend to be opinionated and outspoken individuals. It comes as no surprise, then, that when one notorious atheist blogger makes a post disagreeing with other notorious atheist bloggers, my RSS feeds are flooded with diatribe and discord.  Here are a few examples from this year alone:

Knowledge vs. Belief: Open Letter to Agnostics

The postcard to the right was among the Sunday Secrets on Postsecret this week.  It may be a secret for the person who sent it in, but it's a sentiment many self-labeled agnostics openly express toward atheism.


I personally think that splitting hairs over such labels is pointless; the bottom line is that people who call themselves atheists and people who call themselves agnostics are all not theists, period.  They don't believe in the personal gods or metaphysical forces of the various religions.  The agnostics intent on distinguishing themselves from atheists focus their argument on the ideas that 1) Postulating that no gods exist is a belief, and 2) It is impossible to know that there is no higher power, especially if you make its definition sufficiently vague.