In which I explain myself
An open letter to my former church, in which valuable advice on how to retain members is humbly offered.
The biggest problem facing the Seventh-day Adventist Church is arguably how easily they lose church members. They constantly praise one another for each new baptism, but chronically ignore established members who no longer attend.
Continue Reading How To Keep Members From Leaving Your Church
Religion is a gateway drug. Well, drug, in the metaphorical sense, as in an anesthetic for critical, rational, logical, skeptical thinking. But it is a gateway also, in the sense that when you assent to the claims of a religion, you thereby make it much easier to assent to other dubious claims. Claims against which, if you hadn’t tied up your critical thinking and thrown it down in the basement, you would have had some defenses.
Continue Reading CredulityWhat if you ran a cult, and needed to cut off your followers from the constant flow of information from the outside world?
Sam Harris in Moral Landscape said:
“Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven’t done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “antirealism,” “emotivism,” etc., directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. My goal, both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing this book, is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful. Few things would make this goal harder to achieve than for me to speak and write like an academic philosopher. Of course, some discussion of philosophy will be unavoidable, but my approach is to generally make an end run around many of the views and conceptual distinctions that make academic discussions of human values so inaccessible. While this is guaranteed to annoy a few people, the professional philosophers I’ve consulted seem to understand and support what I am doing.” (Note 1, Chapter 1; emphasis mine)
Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape
I stood up and applauded when I read that. Well, mentally, anyway; I read most of the book in the break rooms at my job while I ate lunch, which means a literal standing ovation-of-one would’ve been awkward.
Continue Reading Philosophy and Theology WAR! What Is It Good For?“Every [Christian] sect is a certificate that God has not plainly revealed His will to man. To each reader the Bible conveys a different meaning.”
-Robert G. Ingersoll quoted in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (p. 182).
In at least three ways it fulfills standard cult definitions.
First: Despite official denials, one person dominated the founding years, in the same way Joseph Smith dominated the formation of the Mormon church. Ellen G. White’s career as the SDA (Seventh-day Adventist) prophet from her teen years in the 1840s to her death in 1915 shaped a major portion of early SDA history. She and her husband (and in later years, her large entourage of secretaries and servants) crisscrossed the territory of the growing church, molding the thinking of every willing follower after her own.
Continue Reading Twenty-five Years in the Adventist ChurchSingle Payer Government Run Healthcare Q&A: Some interesting questions arose when I asked my Facebook friends if they were as ready for a single payer system as I am. I decided to answer them here, on my blog, so a potentially wider readership could chime in, too…
Power
is a lot like a drug.
We all have a deep-seated need
to control our lives, to achieve goals,
to accomplish and succeed; that is a healthy
and normal human need. But needs can be corrupted
into unhealthy obsessions. When the power need corrupts
a person, it corrupts them absolutely, overriding common sense
and morality, just like the abuse of alcohol or drugs does. It maximizes
selfishness.
Christians think that morality is impossible outside of religion. I used to believe this, but it is not, in fact, true. Continue Reading Logic Demands Change My Mind
I used to teach Bible classes to middle & high school students in the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) school system. Now, I’m a secular humanist and an atheist. In this series, I review the major ideas I used to teach, in contrast with how I would teach them now.
Continue Reading Mr. Miles’ Bible Class Lesson 2
