Why I Don’t Believe in Gods

Please note the title of this post. In writing this, it is not my intention to convince anyone to “deconvert”. Though I do hope that what I say here might provoke readers to think more deeply about what they believe and why they believe it, my main goal is simply to outline my reasons for becoming an atheist so that people close to me who are interested might understand why.

Cutting Without a Cause: The Less Than Compelling Case for Routine Infant Circumcision

You may have heard something about circumcision in the news lately. This is because there have been active ballot initiatives to ban routine male circumcision, first in San Francisco and then Santa Monica (though it has since been dropped there due to association with charges of antisemitism). I looked into the arguments surrounding the issue, and I’ve come to the conclusion that routine circumcision should not be allowed to continue.

Note: Due to the nature of the topic, some of the links in this post include explicit images of male anatomy, though no images are embedded in the post itself.

Rethinking Choice: Human Personhood and the Abortion Debate

Update: It has come to my attention that the timeline I'm describing has an error by a week or two. I don't have time to fix it, but the underlying idea is sound.

One of the most politically important questions of our day is defining the bounds of a human life, and who has control over it. This is in large part because it is so divisive, a treacherous landscape governed mainly by religious and political motivations, rather than by empirical truths, and serves as a distraction from the truly critical issues facing our country. It is therefore imperative that we formulate and proactively support a definition of human life that accounts for both fetal development and the fact that the mother and fetus are a single, integrated system.

The World is Safe For Now: 2012, Harold Camping, and Why the Biblical End of the World Won’t Happen

How worlds ended in Star Wars.

Doomsday. It’s a frightening and captivating idea which has held firm in the imaginations of humans for as long as we’ve been telling each other stories. Indeed, one only needs to look to the big summer movies which routinely threaten humanity/the earth/the universe with every imaginable form of destruction.

Talk of the real end of the world has heightened in the last few years, first with the idea that the Maya supposedly predicted 2012 as the end, and most recently with Harold Camping’s extraordinarily well-publicized biblical ‘calculation’ that the rapture would occur this year. Both of these ideas were ludicrous, and I’ll briefly explain before discussing the biblical end of the world in general.

Free Energy of Salvation

This piece was inspired by a typo from a talk at the 11^th International Workshop on Radiation Damage to DNA in Atlanta last May which converted “solvation free energy” to “salvation free energy.” I couldn't resist bringing to life the imagery that phrase conjured.