My name is James Onen, co-founding member of Freethought Kampala.
I created this blog because I want to express certain views I have with regards to atheism, skepticism, freethought, rationality – not from an advocacy view point (as I do on the Freethought Kampala blog), but from the perspective a person observing what has come to be known as the online atheist-skeptic community.
Recent events have indicated to me that atheists do in fact have their fair share of dogmas. As Luke Muehlhauser of Common Sense Atheism duly observed in his article “Atheism and Dogmatism” on August 1, 2010:
Denying the gods does not allow one to escape rampant human bias. Theism is merely one symptom of our mostly non-rational and irrational primate brains – there are many other symptoms that atheists rarely escape. We, too, are often dogmatic. We, too, abandon reason and evidence to support opinions that just “feel right” to us.
he continued:
Attack an atheist’s dogma – especially about a complicated subject like morality and feminism – and count the number of respondents who show a serious interest in arguments and evidence over emotion and dogma-defending.
Freethought Kampala has a very specific focus, and I am not keen to saddle it with discussions of the internal politics of the online atheist community.
This blog will focus on discussions of what I think are some of the dogmas that plague the minds of many atheists.
Insta-subscribed! 🙂
(Spotted your new blog as a ping-back from your original Elevatorgate post on FT-Kampala, and scrambled to subscribe as quick as my browser menus could pop up. I had previously left the comment on the EG post under my usual pseudonym, ‘Wonderist’. Incidentally, I also recently started getting the urge to start my own not-just-activist-advocacy blog — great minds, as they say. 😉 )
Thanks Wonderist. So its you 😀
More essays are in the works. Stay tuned.