Atheism Resource

With the recent Supreme Court decision, it seems that Student loan forgiveness won't be coming to us in 2023. Since student loan payments are scheduled to resume at the in October, I spent several years working in student loan repayment, and folks with more education tend to be less religious, I think that a quick discussion about student loans and how to handle them will probably be helpful for a decent percentage of this readership. Before we dive in, please note that this only applies to people who got their loans from the federal government. If you got your loans from a private bank, unfortunately there's nothing that I can do for you. To start, I want to take a moment to provide a "glossary" so that we're all on the same page. Loan Programs: Direct loans: Direct loans are loans made by the U.S. Dept of Education. FFEL loans: FFEL loans are loans that were made by private banks, but were backed by the Dept of Ed, which allowed the Dept of Ed to regulate some o...

I have had a long-time interest in mythology, and one of my many personal favorites is the Garden of Eden myth. There's just so much going on in those couple of pages that lends itself to a deep dive into the lore. Folks who've followed our Facebook page  for a while may have noticed that I've made several rather lengthy posts about it over the past few years one of which was even converted to a blog post about 2 years ago. Well, today I've decided that there should be a proper home for my research into the story, complete with links to sources cited. Before we dive in, I want to acknowledge up front that I will largely be discussing the Garden of Eden story as it exists in Christian mythology. Bearing that in mind, I think it is important to note that this is originally a Jewish myth and so I will also be referencing some rabbinic literature, as I think that details about how the myth was understood by its original culture can be enlightening. However, my writings sho...

 Earlier this evening I stumbled upon this meme claiming that Ivermectin - the latest alleged "miracle drug" of the COVID-19 conspiracy theorists - causes low sperm counts in human males. I already knew that COVID-19 can cause Erectile Dysfunction , and frankly, the idea that these Anti-vax idiots might get COVID and then "treat" themselves with horse de-wormer, thereby giving themselves both ED and low sperm count, and making them two-time winners of the Darwin Awards for taking themselves out of the gene pool... it led to a good solid facepalm. Nevertheless, I didn't want to simply take this meme at face value. I wanted to see the study for myself. After a bit of poking around on Google, I was having surprising difficulty locating this article. There are several showing that Ivermectin causes infertility in rats and other animals, but this meme seems to be referencing human infertility. Noticing that the meme claims that this article was found on "Scholar...

We've just wrapped up a lengthy discussion on formal logic, so I think one of the next natural questions is "Is there an 'informal' logic? What's the difference?" If you read through the series on formal logic, you may remember clear back in Part 2, that I mentioned that formal logic is primarily concerned with the structure of the argument. For instance: 1. If Max is a Poodle, then Max is a Dog. 2. Max is a Poodle. 3. Therefore, Max is a dog. This argument has the basic structure: 1. If A then B 2. A 3. Therefore B Because the argument has a valid structure (in other words: It takes a valid "form") it is a valid argument. So formal logic concerns itself with the "form" of the argument. (It has nothing to do with whether or not your argument is wearing a bow tie.) That said, as was mentioned early on in the discussion of formal logic, formal logic does not concern itself with the truth of the premises. For purposes of formal logic, we simpl...

When using Identity symbolizations there are a handful of rules all of which (I would argue) are quite intuitive and in line with our normal understanding of the “=” sign. First, we have “Identity Reflexivity” (ID. Ref), which simply states “a=a” at any point in a proof we may introduce “a=a” (or “b=b”, etc.) and simply cite “ID. Ref.” as our justification. Secondly, we have “Identity Symmetry” (ID. Sym), which is a replacement rule stating that “a=b” is identical to “b=a”. Thirdly, “Identity Substitution” (ID. Sub) which is another replacement rule, and states that, from “Ab” and “b=c”, we may conclude “Ac”. Lastly, there is Identity Transitivity (ID. Trans), yet another replacement rule stating that from “a=b” and “b=c” we may conclude “a=c”. Those are the extent of our rules surrounding identity. Again, I expect that none of these rules should be particularly shocking or controversial, and they all fit well with our typical understanding of how the equal sign works. Identity and Ind...