Meaning

What is the meaning of the color yellow?

What is necessary to give meaning to yellow? Me. It's my favorite color. Because of this, it has meaning to me. Perhaps your favorite color is red. I'm happy for you.

What is the meaning of life?

What is necessary to give meaning to life? Me. It's my favorite form of existence. Because of this, it has meaning to me. Perhaps your favorite form of existence is mineralhood. I'm happy for you. Okay, maybe not.

Weird thoughts at 2:30 in the morning.

No True Scotsman

They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.

1 John 2:19 ESV

In my discussions with believers, both in person and online, I have often been subtly accused (or at least the person "wondered") if I ever was actually a Christian in the first place. How frustrating to convince a former "brother in the faith" that I actually was what I said I was! That I wasn't "living a lie," but was actually a member of that faith. One of the big problems for me in trying to convince them of this are Scripture passages like the one above. The No True Scotsman fallacy is present, right here in Scripture.

I think the video I've posted below from TheraminTrees kills two birds with one stone. It exposes the faulty thinking in 1 John 2:19, and it also explains another concept I've tried to elaborate on in my conversations - that nobody actually has faith in Jesus himself. It all boils down to faith in people.

So who do we believe?

Easter Ghosts

Is it just me, or are people more into Easter this year?

I have a crummy memory sometimes, but I don't remember last year's Facebook scroll being this full of Vernal cheer and jeer. Most of my friends are full of cheer - expressing joy and gratitude to Christ for his sacrifice. A tiny number are full of jeer - posting cartoons of Zombie Jesus.

I don't feel cheer or jeer. I think about the present in its relation to the past and the future.



A year ago, I was finishing up my relationship with religion. It was a long break-up. Our Facebook status would have been "it's complicated" for about a year and a half.

Two years ago, I was having very serious doubts - questioning my Evangelical and Protestant understanding of the Christian god. I knew who the Bible purported him to be. I knew other Christians' testimonies regarding this being. I even recalled my own "experiences of the Divine." Yet these three refused to jive with reality.

Three years ago, I was a "liberalish" Evangelical Christian. By "liberalish" I mean that I didn't think homosexuality was a sin and nodded in agreement to the idea that evolution best explained the diversity of life. By Evangelical Christian, I mean that In Christ Alone was one of my favorite songs and aptly described my belief regarding Easter.



This year, I have mixed feelings. Happiness at where I am in life. Gratitude to my wife for putting up with the last three years of transition. Sadness at the pain I've caused people. Frustration at the sway mythology holds in the lives of people I love. Hope for the future.



Hope for the future. A different hope than the one I once had. That hope of the past was based on a belief in the possibility and inevitability of Resurrection.

The hope I now have is not as compelling, I'll admit. It's a lot less boisterous. More careful. Non-committal. I recognize that the things I hope for may never happen. But I hope anyway. And instead of "bursting forth in glorious day," this new hope pokes its young shoots warily out of the snow and smiles, thinking it might be Spring.

Critical Thinking is Important!

Tom Hail

I borrowed this form Pharyngula because it resonates with me:

Why I am an atheist – Tom Hail

 March 14, 2012 at 6:44 am  PZ Myers

This is a letter I wrote my aunt in 2007 after she asked why I wanted to take her faith away from her.

Why I am godless.

I don’t understand how perfectly rational, intelligent, kind, and responsible people can believe in a God. It baffles me totally. And I think about it a lot, not like I feel like I am missing anything myself but in wonder at how this belief can be corrected. You know, I wouldn’t trade our family for any other family, I enjoy and love them all and the fact that most have faith saddens me somewhat.

I do not see any god anywhere I look. From the maelstrom of quantum mechanics in particle physics, to the busy chemistry of each living cell, to the beautiful physics of aerodynamics, to the majestic geology of our earth, to the titanic forces in our solar system, to the stupendous forces driving our galaxy and universe… it is all so awesome and beautiful that to attribute any of it to God’s creation is, to me, insufficient. That there are questions and problems with what we understand only makes discovery all that more meaningful. It is all so hugely complex in total, but it all builds upon many simpler things. Evolution is perfect simplicity which builds very slowly into the complex beauty of life we have today. I feel that beauty in my heart much better than I can express in words. Even without the controversies of life and evolution, the complexities of the universe are so much beyond a god, needs no explanation with a god. God is so unnecessary.

I have a saying that has gelled in my mind over the last year or so… Atheism: Natural Morals, Real Meaning, Credible Truth.

Our morals come naturally, someone writing them down and calling them the word of God seems like plagiarism to me. And I think they added in the rules to help control the masses better, or at least to control the women better. It looks to me that our natural morals come from our need to survive, we can’t survive if we are killing each other, we are wired for survival and propagation of the population. Stoning women for adultery seems wrong and it is, it isn’t a natural moral, but the writers of the “messiah’s” words seem to have another motive, valid at the time maybe, probably to help control the population to their benefit. The need to survive and procreate is very simple but a lot of things derive naturally from it. Helping others, kindness to your children, education, it just builds and builds on it. To me it boils down to “relieve and prevent suffering, give pleasure.” If I am doing that in any way, I am being true to my morals.

Real meaning in life also comes from the need to survive and procreate, to do so means we must discover how our world works, adapt, learn, overcome problems, coexist with the individuals of our species, coexist with our world. This is real meaning to me. To worship a deity hoping for a good result when I die doesn’t provide any meaning. The discovery of our world may be the most important and leads us into our future. If we stop, we will stagnate and suffer. I think our species made a mistake creating religions, it is a dead end that we have to back out of to progress on, but maybe it was a lesson we had to learn.

Credible truth, the biggest being that this is it. This is heaven, hell, whatever you make of it. This is your one life. You are only borrowing the atoms you consist of for your sort life time and then they are recycled into the universe to be used again. I am ok with that. It doesn’t scare me. I wish it weren’t so but that is the way of the universe. We are such a small mote in just our galaxy which is a small object in an immense universe. But the meaning of life is to be all that you can be to your family and friends, community, and world. That is a real truth that I can believe in.

Why is this important to me? I see thousands dying monthly, sometimes daily in fighting to the death over what are to me fairy tales. Fighting over essentially worthless land, fighting for what boils down to power. Much of it in the name of their religion. It makes me angry. The war in Iraq has many religious overtones that disturb me. The trillions of dollars this is going to cost us is going to hurt.

I didn’t mean to write this on a Sunday, it just turned out that way, I’ve been busy and I had to compose it some in my mind first. I had a great day yesterday with flying passengers for the 99’s scholarship fundraiser. Allena came over and helped out the ladies. It was one of those things I do that gives real meaning to my life, showing 10 people their world from above.

Tom Hail
United States

The Vacuum Cleaner and the Fish Tank

When I was a kid, I had a bunk bed. I remember sharing it with my little sister for a while, but at some point I got my own room and still had the bunk bed, which was awesome for forts and having friends over.

My room had a sloped, wooden ceiling, and if I carefully leaned out from the top bunk, I could just touch it.

One morning, my sister was in my room for some reason I’ve forgotten, and I was on the top bunk, because I had noticed something odd about the ceiling and wanted to get a closer look.

About six square inches of the ceiling was afflicted with hundreds of tiny holes. I couldn’t get close enough with my face to really get a good look at it, so I would have to rely on my sense of touch to explore this anomaly.

Of course, the second my finger touched the punctured ceiling, a significant portion of it crumbled to dust and fell to the floor. I couldn’t see it, but I imagined the resulting hole had hundreds of terrified termites clinging for dear life to its sides.

My sister made a remark about the trouble I would be in when Mom saw the hole and the mess on the floor, and I knew she was right.

But like any kid, I had a wonderful sense of self preservation, and hoped that by cleaning up the obvious mess on the floor, she would never think to look up. So I scrambled off the bed, ran downstairs, and lugged the machine back up to my room.

After sucking away all of the debris (and possibly a large population of termites), I bent to turn off what I hoped was a life-saving device, when out of the corner of my eye I saw my fish tank.

Here were Freddy, Angela, and Sputnik swimming peacefully in their sheltered ecosystem of bubbly water, brightly covered gravel, and (real!) seaweed.

Ah, curiosity! Lover of discovery and flattened noses!

“I wonder,” I said aloud.

“Wonder what?” said Em.

“What would happen if I did this,” I said, as I plunged the still-sucking vacuum nozzle into the fish tank.

The fact that I did this proves to me that children can be thoughtful and thoughtless simultaneously.

There’s a Calvin & Hobbes anthology entitled Scientific Progress Goes “Boink”. Not in this case.

The slurping noise caused by this action was terrific. A little too terrific for my own good, I thought, and quickly jerked the hose from the tank and turned the power off. My lucky fish seemed none the wiser.

At this moment, my sister made a remark about my stupidity.

Still possessing a healthy sense of self preservation, I knew that I had better get that vacuum cleaner back to its closet downstairs as soon as possible, so I retracted the cord and began to haul it back downstairs.

While on the landing half way down, my sister looked over the banister from above and drew my attention to the puddle of black water forming at the vacuum’s back side.

Panicking, I raced down the stairs and put the vacuum away, hoping against all hope that somehow this situation would rectify itself before my mother discover any of my wrong-doing.

As with so many other crimes committed in my childhood, my hopes were not realized, and I was corrected by a mother who no doubt wished for me to find more positive outlets for burgeoning sense of curiosity.

My "Testimony" (Condensed Version)

My parents were very keen on their children being followers of Jesus. Dad often told me that he didn’t care what career I held, as long as I was following Jesus. I remember praying the “sinner’s prayer” at an early age. It seemed like the right thing to do.

It’s an interesting thing, growing up in a Christian home. On one hand, there’s the standard held up for all to follow - try to be like Jesus. Jesus doesn’t want you to hit your sister. Jesus wants you to try your best at school. On the other hand, I was a human child, and like every other kid I’ve met, I was pretty self-absorbed. Somehow I retained the Christian label for myself in my mind, while externally I expect I was pretty normal. I did hit my sister. I didn’t try my best at school.

At around 17, I realized my life felt empty and seemed to be going nowhere with myself in control. I also realized that if this Christianity thing was any good, it needed to be my faith in God, not my parents’ faith as a proxy. And so I gave my life over to Jesus, calling him Lord and Savior. I spent the next decade dedicating myself to serving God, and to learning to be more like him. This included 4 years studying the Bible at a Bible college, 2 years studying music at a different Bible college, and then 4 more years teaching at the first Bible college.

I enjoyed this time, for the most part. I don’t feel like I was ever “spiritually abused” like some of the “deconverted” have reported.

A turning point in a faith I considered strong and unshakeable was the friendship with strong Christian friends at the second Bible college who were theistic evolutionists. That this was even possible went against everything I had come to expect in a real Christianity, but I had to admit that they did not fit with my expectations. As far as I could tell, they had a strong faith in God through Jesus Christ, despite their rejection of a literal interpretation of Genesis. I decided to investigate for myself, and read a lot of literature on evolution and creationism, from both sides of the argument.

In the end, I had to admit that evolution was the best explanation for the diversity of life on Earth. Still considering myself an Evangelical Christian, I nonetheless wondered that if I had been so wrong on the subject of Creation, was it possible to be wrong in other areas as well? A host of all the skeptical questions from my past came flooding into memory. They were questions I had rationalized away. Or ignored. Now I wondered if it was time to sincerely address them.

I waffled for quite some time with this question, but finally decided that truth was important to me, and that if I were wrong in my beliefs, I wanted to know. And so I embarked on another quest - one that I hoped would strengthen my faith and make me a better follower of Christ, as well as an example to other Christians struggling with doubt. Once again I read a lot of literature - apologetics, books on atheism, etc. - from both sides of the argument.

At the end of this, I no longer had any faith (around May 2010). My life was shaken in several ways.

The place where I worked was very Evangelical, and I knew I could not continue to teach there in good conscience, so I resigned.

My wife and I had gotten married in part because of a mutual faith (that is, marrying a Christian was on both of our lists of “musts”). This loss of faith was a blow to me, but it was a very big blow to her as well. It felt as if all our dreams for the future had just blown away.

We have three kids. How now to raise them?

Almost every one of my friends is an Evangelical Christian. I had fellowship with these people. We would pray together. We would discuss topics within the Christian system. Now that I was an outsider, there was a shift in friendship. I never felt abandoned by my friends, but the friendships changed a little - through no fault of theirs.


I made several unsuccessful attempts to reclaim my faith (the quote “Why oh why didn't I take the blue pill?” comes to mind). It’s been a hard couple years, but I’ve adjusted. My wife has adjusted. My family has adjusted. I guess we’re all still adjusting, here and there.

Change happens. I suppose adjusting is part of what it means to be alive.