A donor who wishes to remain anonymous has commissioned on my behalf a print publication of a slightly updated version of my 2006 essay "Why I Am Not a Christian." All proceeds will go to me. He just wanted it to exist so he could hand it out to door knocking evangelists, and make other handy uses of it in his own atheist evangelism. At the donor's request (and generous payment) I made several minor additions and some changes, to get its content up to date. It is available in print and kindle.
For those unfamiliar with the original, it explains the four reasons I do not accept the Christian religion, describing four facts of the world that, had they been different, I would believe. Those four reasons are God's silence, God's inaction, the lack of evidence, and the way the universe looks exactly like a godless universe would, and not at all like a Christian universe would, even down to its very structure. I address all the "usual" replies to these claims, in ways you might not have heard before, relying on my wide experience in debating and studying these issues all over the world for more than fifteen years.
In this version I am brief, clear, and down to earth, covering the whole topic in under ninety pages of easy-to-read explanation. My donor is right, it does make a perfect book to introduce yourself, or your friends, to why fewer educated people are embracing Christianity than ever before, and is ideal for handing out to door-to-door missionaries. I don't expect everyone will want one (it's content isn't new), but for the above uses it's handy and cheap, and makes for an easy read. I'll be selling copies at all my upcoming venues.
I've been reading various books on the side, in odd places where I can't do anything else (like the eye doctor or local eatery). These are books fans have sent or bought for me, which can take my mind off the endless attention to all things Jesus. I appreciate that. I get to books that way that I'd never likely be able to read otherwise. Today I'm going to review two books together, because they have a similar aim yet entirely different background and approach.
I finally finished reading Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity by John Loftus and Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up by John Paulos. Both were released in 2008, although Loftus' book is a substantially revised and altered edition of his 2006 book Why I Rejected Christianity (with new chapters added, some removed, others improved, but some still the same).
I read Paolos all through, but I only read select sections of Loftus and skimmed the rest, because Paolos is brief, while Loftus is vast. The one is a renowned mathematician and atheist who finds religious belief simply illogical, and cuts right to the chase, with enjoyable humor and remarkable brevity, in dismissing twelve common arguments for God. The other is an ex-Evangelist (and William Lane Craig protege) who renounced his faith and now provides the complete guide to why, addressing almost every conceivable argument for Evangelical Christianity in extraordinary and sobering detail.
P1 = I do not need to believe in God. I only need (at the very most) to live up to my own expectations of others, being in myself what I would want from anyone else.
This premise is necessarily true, if the following premises are undeniable. And they are. The following premises consist of two kinds: those that are necessarily true (as logically necessary truths, they cannot be denied by any consistent person) and those that are very certainly true (since the evidence I have for them is overwhelming and thus beyond any reasonable denial). The latter will be printed in bold (blue if they are facts I know first-hand and green if they are public facts anyone can confirm). If these premises are as true for you as they are for me, then you must also agree that P1 is necessarily true.
I'm mentioned considerably in a recent article in the New York Times Magazine about Antony Flew's new book. Fans will want to know about this, and hear some of the backstory from me, filling in some of the blanks left by the article, which was good but inevitably brief for so complicated a story. So here you go.
Not only is my TV appearance on PAX now available on DVD (or so I'm told), but so are the two grandest debates I've participated in. Of the latter, the first, "Licona vs. Carrier: On the Resurrection of Jesus Christ," which took place before an audience of half a thousand at UCLA, has long been available but went out of stock for quite a while. It is now back in stock and will probably remain so. It can now be purchased via CreateSpace (but profits still go to the Secular Web and, indirectly, to me). It's probably the best debate on the resurrection you will ever see. Licona holds up his end as well as anyone in the Christian apologetics community, and I present more material than you're likely to hear in any other debate. But like all serious debates it is long and dry.
Even longer and duller is "Does God Not Exist?" which was a team debate, three-to-four hours long, before an audience of a thousand (mostly Muslims) in Dearborn, Michigan, with Dan Barker and myself on the affirmative, and Muslim scholar Hassanain Rajabali and ambiguous cosmological creationist Michael Corey on the (double) negative. I say this is "dull" only because for most people it is. There isn't really any way to make this debate stuff exciting and serious at the same time. But if you can endure it, it is a pretty good debate, though there were aspects of it that pissed me off, as you will learn from my post-debate commentary: "The Big Debate: Comments on the Barker-Carrier vs. Corey-Rajabali Team Debate" (2004). Well, now you can see the entire debate yourself. A fairly decent DVD version is available for purchase through informal channels, while a very poor quality version is available for free on YouTube: broken up as Part I and Part II.
Most of you already know I appear in the movie The God Who Wasn't There, the DVD of which has an extended portion of my original interview in the special features. But not many of you know I debated William Lane Craig on national television. This was on Lee Strobel's now-defunct show Faith Under Fire, which used to air on the PAX network. I debated Craig by satellite feed for ten minutes or so. I taped two or three other episodes for this show, debating other guests on other topics, but those never aired.
Many have asked me where they can get a copy of my TV debate with Craig. Well, I now have an answer: you can't. It's (sort of) available on DVD as part of a Christian "teach-by-tape" curriculum (so to speak). 
Bits of my episode appear on Faith Under Fire 1: Faith & Jesus. It's hardly worth watching, since almost nothing of any real significance can be said in ten minutes even in the original broadcast, but worse than that, this DVD version cuts more than half the aired debate away, shows segments out of order, and concludes with a newly added segment in which Strobel lists a bunch of unrebutted arguments in favor of the resurrection not raised by Craig. This is the only occasion Craig has ever interacted with me in public (we've briefly corresponded in private on several occasions), so it's a shame the original video has essentially been destroyed.
I have joined the Atheist Blogroll, which is like a webring where you can locate authentic blogs maintained by atheists the world over. From now on you can find the scrolling alphabetical list of blogs (with a link to the list homesite), down my blog's right margin, under the label "Other Godless Blogs," just beneath my subject index. But I'll also put it here so you can jump right into the pool and start swimming...
Personally, I don't care all that much if nonbelievers prefer to call themselves agnostics rather than atheists. I think by now most everyone knows these are the same thing (after all, either way, you don't believe in God). And eventually the social stigma attached to the latter will float over and latch onto the former anyway, leaving no place left to hide. Well, okay, maybe the squeamish atheists will once again invent some new word to call themselves, so they can confuse a prejudiced society into not realizing they are (gasp!) really atheists. But that will just go the same way. In the end, the advantage will be lost, yet another word will have to be invented to hide behind, and 'round and 'round it goes. Good luck with that.
For me, this is all just a social game, semantic trickery, that is hard to have sympathy for, but I can't honestly criticize nonbelievers who want to avoid the social stigma falsely attached to a maligned word. Prejudice in this country, in some places and situations, is certainly real and harmful enough to justify a desire to dodge it. If black people could pretend to be white, I'm sure some of them would. This is frequently enough true for gays that they have a whole terminology of social disguise (like "in the closet" and "beard"). You can't condemn this until you've walked a mile in their shoes.
There is also a silly and heated debate (even so far as to cultivate outright rage) between atheists and agnostics as to who is really what. Of course, these terms don't even have a single meaning. Just as "atheist" can mean "denier" or "unbeliever" (generating the rather lame, confusing, and misleading terminological distinctions of "hard" and "soft" atheist or "positive" and "negative" atheist), so can agnostic mean "undecided" or "dunno!" The latter is more etymologically and historically correct, since agnosticism is supposed to be the formal position that one cannot know whether God exists or not (whether by definition or as a contingent fact of a particular agnostic's limited access to relevant evidence), but the former meaning is still very common in actual use, and both have crept into other contexts (so, for example, you can be an "agnostic" now, in either sense of the term, as to whether Robin Hood actually existed).
