By Michael Vito Tosto (Ben Love) ~ P RO-LIFER: Abortion is wrong. PRO-CHOICER: Why? PL: Because it’s murder. PC: You get to kill someone if they’re in your house and you don’t want them there. But you shouldn’t be allowed to terminate an unwanted life-form in your own body? PL: People who break into your house took a risk knowing that death could be the result. A baby in your womb didn’t ask to be there. It shouldn’t be punished. PC: Maybe I didn’t ask the baby to be there, either. Maybe I was raped. PL: That’s unfortunate… but you’re still stuck with that child. PC: Since it’s something happening within a person’s own body, that person should have a say in what happens. I don’t have the right to tell someone else what they can and cannot do to their own body. PL: That’s like saying pedophiles should be let off the hook because you can’t decide for them that their actions are wrong. It’s the same thing. PC: No, no, a pedophile is performing an act upon another sen...

By Ben Love ~ I t has been almost four years now since I’ve become an atheist. I wrote a lot about my experiences and my intellectual stances during the first few years, but it occurred to me recently that I’ve not written any sort of atheistic essay since then. Thinking that perhaps it was about time to do so, I began to wonder what, if anything, I needed to add to my arsenal of acerbic ramblings on this topic. That led me to revisit some of the old theology that I used to subscribe to… back when I was still lost and tangled up in the hopeless religion that is Christianity. When you’ve been removed from that cesspool of absurdity for long enough, you begin to look at your prior beliefs with a different lens than you did when you first left the religion, assuming you came to atheism from Christianity, as many do. So it was with me. I spent a few days pondering the nature of the God I used to believe in, and some new insights occurred to me, insights I intend to share now. Perhaps...

By Ben Love ~ I ’ve been an  atheist for only a short time compared to how long I spent crawling in the bowels of Christianity , and thus, echoes of my former biblical thoughts still tend to resonate within my brain from time to time. That’s why, when I woke up this morning, I was thinking about the story in Genesis, chapter 2, where God  instructs Adam  to keep away from the Tree of Knowledge. The text actually refers to it as “the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” which might therefore be interpreted as “knowledge of right and wrong,” or perhaps even “knowledge of reality .” God informs Adam  that eating from this tree will cause his death. This, however, strictly speaking, is not true, for Adam  and Eve both lived for a very long time after eating from this tree. Christians will say that God was speaking of “spiritual death,” but they are adding to the context that which is not there. In any case, the implication here, it seems to me, is that igno...

By Ben Love ~ I want to address an issue that seems to be cropping up now and then in my ongoing dialogues with Christians. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I will encounter those Christians who use the atrocities committed in 1930s and 1940s by Nazi Germany  as evidence that an atheist government, devoid of belief in God , will run wildly evil and will, well…  fuck  everything up for everyone. The record on this matter, however, might not be as clear as these Christians want it to be. Indeed, any brief student of Nazi Germany’s history can, without much effort, discover several pieces of evidence that not only connect both the Lutheran Protestant Church and the Roman Catholic Church  to the doings of Hitler ’s Third Reich, but that also indicate indisputably that Adolf Hitler  believed that the  Christian  God specifically was on his side and that he, Hitler , was actually doing the work of this God. Consider the foll...

By Ben Love ~ J esus is a character known just as much for what he said as what he did. And he said some pretty interesting things. Some of it, I must admit, is pretty good, though none of it was original to him (indeed, the Buddha said nearly all of the same things in a different way 500 years before Jesus was even a thought). Some of it, however, is patently ridiculous. That children, for instance, needed to leave parents and husbands needed to leave wives in order to live the kind of life God wants for them. Or that no one should work to obtain food and provisions. But for me, there is one thing he said that resonates as possibly the stupidest, most absurd utterance of all. It is found in Matthew, chapter 18, verse 3: “And he said: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’” The Christians will argue that this is among the sagest wisdom in the New Testament. “The faith of a child,” they will say, “is a...

By Ben Love ~ I ’m pretty much obsessed with truth. In fact, I would go so far as to say that my obsession with truth has driven most of what I’ve become as an adult. I spend just as much time pondering how “truth” should be defined as I do grappling with what it is. I’ve expressed lengthy rants on this topic elsewhere, but I think, in the end, truth is best defined simply as “that which just is.” This answer might fall below the lofty standards expected of an intellectual writer, but I really do think this is the best way to define the term. Somewhere at the heart of reality is to be found some sort of  ultimate actuality , something that just  is —and this we call “truth.” Whatever that truth happens to be is exactly what I’ve spent much of my life attempting to ascertain. Whatever the truth is, I want to know it. But not everyone feels that way. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, a...

By Ben Love ~ S tretch your imagination with me. Let us suppose that somehow the Christian God (Yahweh, the God of the Bible, the “Father” of the Jesus Christ) has not only been located but that he has been charged with “atrocities” and “crimes against humanity.” Imagine the courtroom atmosphere of such an event; the jury, the judge, the witnesses, and the lawyers… Imagine God sitting on the witness stand (just for fun, let us assume he looks a bit like Morgan Freeman, who played God in two films). So yeah, imagine a Morgan Freeman dude who represents the Christian God sitting in the witness stand. Let us enter that courtroom as a fly on the wall and take the scene from there… ------------------------------- PROSECUTING ATTORNEY: “State your name for the record, please?” DEFENDANT: “Uh, God. Well, Yahweh.” PA: “And where is your place of residence?” DEFENDANT: “Heaven.” PA: “And where is that, exactly?” DEFENDANT: “It’s sort of everywhere, but it als...