The Logical Atheist

Would Abraham's religious liberty have been violated if someone had tried to stop him from killing his son Isaac as Yahweh had ordered?

Advocates of freethought should be unsurprised to find in their midst people who see a great deal of nonsense in what goes by the name woke , for example, with regard to race and sex. On the contrary, freethinkers ought to welcome reasoned disagreement with their deepest beliefs as the best guard against dogma. That was John Stuart Mill's point in On Liberty . To be concrete, it is entirely in the spirit of freethought to see James Damore and Zac Kriegman , two men fired for their well-documented views from Google and Reuters respectively, as admirable truth-seekers rather than as bigoted evil-doers. We need more like them.

Yahweh is Trump on steroids.

Why does Yahweh act like a psychopath on virtually every page of the Old Testament?

The Supreme Court has ruled, by a 6-3 vote, that if states provide school-tuition assistance to parents, the parents must be free to use that money to send their kids to religious schools that are otherwise academically accredited. As far as I can tell, the atheist community is appalled by the ruling, which has been called an assault on the separation of church and state, the First Amendment. But I think the ruling is correct, given the alternatives available to the Court. See my argument in "Parents Should Govern Their Kids' Education."

What do you infer from the supposed fact that that a just God ought to be prayed to in support of a just cause? Does that mean that this just God would let a just cause fail if no one properly asked him to lend a hand?

The more closely I read the Tanakh (the Pentateuch, Hebrew Bible, or Five Books of Moses), the more clearly I see the power agenda behind it. (Let's remember that these books are the foundation of the three Abrahamic religions.) Without this perspective, it is hard to understand what these books are really about; the catalog of stories, divine punishments, and commandments simply makes no sense. Why would a perfect, all-powerful, and benevolent deity do such horrible things while making such unreasonable demands on a group of "chosen" people? In fact, why is there a chosen people at all? Why is the message, whatever it is, not intended for a universal audience? We can arrive at a better answer if we think of the Israelites as a cult in which most people are subservient and from which a minority, an elite or priestly class, benefits. Cults are always vulnerable to defection and disintegration as members of the subservient majority, especially in a rising generation, begin ...