What’s with the title?
Intractable is an adjective describing something as difficult to control or manipulate. It can also mean an individual doing the opposite of what’s he’s told. I think it’s a good descriptor of the atheist movement in the U.S. today. We believe or disbelieve according to reason and logic, regardless of what any religious majority tells us.
Atheos is Greek for atheist, although the original word did not mean what it does today. Socrates, although by no means an atheist in the modern sense, faced criminal charges which led to his execution. One of these was impiety, or disbelief in the gods recognized by the state, and that disbelief in accepted deities is the connotation of the original Greek word [1].
Now nobody is being forced to drink hemlock as a criminal punishment for their atheism today, although I’m sure there are Christian extremists out there who are secretly (wait, no, publicly) pining for such measures, but we can certainly regard Socrates a hero for refusing to abandon his principles of reason and logic in the face of death.
What about the goofy logo? Don’t you know how use capital letters?
Anybody from the online atheist community will recognize the scarlet letter A. For everybody else, it was borrowed from Nathaniel Hawthorn as a badge of shame and stigma and repurposed as a badge of pride.
The strange capitalization is a nod to my information technology background, and I may occasionally post links to humorous IT-related stories. In my opinion, the freedom to dissent is among the most important in a civilized society, and that freedom is largely facilitated by the mad geniuses who brought about the internet. To that end, you’ll find that I’m a rabid supporter of net neutrality, even though the topic isn’t directly related to atheism.
Disclaimer: I will not endorse any operating systems, platforms, programming languages, etc as superior to any other. This is not a Linux vs. Windows forum, and I’ll delete comments in that vein. If that’s what you here for, go away.
Atheos is Greek for atheist, although the original word did not mean what it does today. Socrates, although by no means an atheist in the modern sense, faced criminal charges which led to his execution. One of these was impiety, or disbelief in the gods recognized by the state, and that disbelief in accepted deities is the connotation of the original Greek word [1].
Now nobody is being forced to drink hemlock as a criminal punishment for their atheism today, although I’m sure there are Christian extremists out there who are secretly (wait, no, publicly) pining for such measures, but we can certainly regard Socrates a hero for refusing to abandon his principles of reason and logic in the face of death.
What about the goofy logo? Don’t you know how use capital letters?
Anybody from the online atheist community will recognize the scarlet letter A. For everybody else, it was borrowed from Nathaniel Hawthorn as a badge of shame and stigma and repurposed as a badge of pride.
The strange capitalization is a nod to my information technology background, and I may occasionally post links to humorous IT-related stories. In my opinion, the freedom to dissent is among the most important in a civilized society, and that freedom is largely facilitated by the mad geniuses who brought about the internet. To that end, you’ll find that I’m a rabid supporter of net neutrality, even though the topic isn’t directly related to atheism.
Disclaimer: I will not endorse any operating systems, platforms, programming languages, etc as superior to any other. This is not a Linux vs. Windows forum, and I’ll delete comments in that vein. If that’s what you here for, go away.
1. Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece
No comments:
Post a Comment