Fish in Space

I don't often talk about my personal life here for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, recent life events brought an issue to the forefront that I feel deserve a few words. Namely, marriage and relationships. For some background I was married before while I was living in Australia but that didn't work out. I left my wife and two children behind to find work back in my native United States, and she decided not to follow. She sent me divorce papers and forced me to move on with my life so I did. Shortly after, I accepted a friend's invitation to join his game and there met the woman who would ultimately become my second wife. We've been together nearly ten years and look forward to the next ten years with great eagerness. She is in all matters my partner and my best friend, an achievement that I hoped for in my first marriage but never accomplished. How did we do it? How did we succeed this time when I failed before? That's the rub. At our wedding my best man (and one...

For forty years it's been an article of faith that low voter turnout favors Republican candidates. It's one of the reasons why people attribute more electoral victories for Republicans in mid-term election seasons than for Democrats. The truth is that low voter participation favors extremism and further polarizes our politics, but that's neither here nor there. For at least the past twenty years Republicans have been working to discourage voter participation under the guise of voter fraud. By the most amazing of coincidences, the voter ID laws being passed by Republican state majorities tend to discourage minorities and the poor more than anything else. Of course, conservatives are quick to argue that these laws aren't racist at all, that people disenfranchised by these laws are too lazy. But the fact is that these laws are responsible for lower voter participation among Democratic-voting citizens. The fact that it also tends to target voters who are minorities i...

One of the fundamental flaws I often criticize about religious belief is when believers want their cake and eat it too. Specifically, I refer to when their arguments rely too heavily on special pleading. And no, adding caveats to the definition of a god does not bypass special pleading. I can redefine chocolate as the essential first cause of the universe, but that doesn't make the definition valid. But other examples of special pleading include arguments like this: god is mysterious, unfathomable and uknowable but somehow believers are granted special knowledge of who this god is, what it is and what it demands. Believers typically justify this via "special revelation," that they or their religious founders have been granted special knowledge by that god to carry out the divine will. Each religion and sect claiming special revelation typically considers the special revelation other religions and sects as heresy or at least attributed to human error. But since there are ...

The Democrats have a problem in the US. Liberals have been the media's favorite punching bag for quite some time, and a lot of Democrats have been running away from it for that reason. That leaves at least a quarter of the nation with little to no representation as the Democratic Party pushes farther to their right in a bid to poach the moderates edged out by right-wing extremists in the Republican party. Enter The Third Way, a think tank with corporate ties looking to support the Democratic Party's move toward the center. They're distinctly against populist rhetoric and they want us to play nice with Wall Street and other corporate giants who have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of interest in playing nice with anyone else. They're closely aligned with the Clintons in the aftermath of Bill's administration and have dominated the conversation among Democrats ever since. An attitude that I find infuriating in American politics is the notion that whatever's good...

There's a stereotype about atheists and atheism, that we're nihilists and that our world is cold and lonely. The thing is, atheism is neither inherently meaningless nor is it inherently lonely. As an atheist I don't see meaning the same way believers do because I don't believe in a god to impose that meaning. As for being lonely, that's a consequence of embracing a minority position. Atheists in largely secular communities aren't lonely because they're not being constantly pressured to conform to religious values. Do you think Christians in communities dominated by Islam don't feel lonely? Do you think Hindus in communities dominated by Christians don't feel like outsiders? A common question asked by new atheists is "what now?" They've finally taken that last step and they've abandoned belief. They've rejected what they were taught to embrace for so long, and they might still be hiding it to avoid social backlash or they mig...

It's only the second day since Craig Stephen Hicks and a lot of atheists are already tired of hearing about it. Although the police have been careful to avoid accusing Hicks of a hate crime, everyone else has been quick to leap to that judgment. Of course, rather than blame anti-Muslim sentiment everyone assumes that atheism itself acted as motivation for Hicks' crime. We've been saying it for a while but it needs repeating: atheism doesn't inform our actions any more than not believing in unicorns informs yours. That doesn't mean religion can't be a factor in an atheist's behavior, it means that our non-belief isn't justification for action. Religion can still motivate us to react, to speak up or act in response to something that believers are doing. It can make us fear for our safety, and fearful people are more likely to lash out. History shows us several examples of this. In 1793 French revolutionaries passed a law outlawing religion and reli...

I've been slogging through a post taking another look at Pope Francis I as he enters his third year as the Supreme Pontiff, but the murder of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill demands a response. I disavow this act of bigotry. Violence is not justified by atheism or even anti-theism. I will happily do violence to your default assumptions about religion, but not to your body, your rights or your freedom. There is no justification for killing someone because of their religious beliefs. However, it seems that the primary motive in this case was just as petty: Police said in a statement Wednesday morning that a dispute about parking in the neighborhood of rented condominiums may have led to the incident. “Our preliminary investigation indicates that the crime was motivated by an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking. Hicks is cooperating with investigators,” Lt. Joshua Mecimore, a police spokesman, said. Do I really have to express just how stupid it is to end anyone's l...