Shawn McClure

A mule deer buck with an impressive rack munches on an elm tree near my office building earlier today... He's clearly well-known by some agency, perhaps the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, because he's tagged and wears a radio collar.

(Canon PowerShot SX60HS)

Your "spirituality" is nothing more than your own considered perception of your neural activity—a recursive, self-referential, and purely material apprehension of your own cognition. Quit imbuing it with a "supernatural specialness" that is nothing more than a wishful illusion.

"Good" and "evil" are not absolute concepts with objective definitions that magically exist as forces or standards in the real world—they're ideas created by humans relative to various, inherently subjective sets of judgements about what humans want, or don't want, to happen.

If when asked for evidence to defend your belief in God you start quoting Bible verses, describing your personal "spiritual experience", asking "How could it be otherwise?", or pointing out that many others also believe, then you haven't understood the assignment in the least.

Claiming something is "immaterial" or "supernatural" does not magically absolve one of the burden of explaining it.

At their logical best, Cosmological Arguments can only be used to conclude that an unknowable force somehow “caused” the universe to have existence by virtue of unknowable methods, a result that falls far short of demonstrating either a pantheistic "god" OR the Abrahamic "God".

Dear theists: That you have a right to practice your religion does not simultaneously afford you the right to impose it upon anyone else, including your children. Nor does it mean that I DON'T have a right to openly mock it. Keep your shitty ideology to yourself.

Let's please not attempt the experiment again.

The idea that purely physical patterns and interactions of neuro-chemical activity within the wetware of your brain can somehow give rise to an *immaterial* mind seems to reverse the concept of "something from nothing" into the equally absurd-sounding "nothing from something".

Strange Cellular Entity Challenges Very Definition of Life Itself Within a tiny plankton, an even smaller cell has been found living an unexpectedly virus-like existence, challenging what it means to be alive.

"Within a plankton, an even smaller cell has been found living an unexpectedly virus-like existence, challenging what it means to be alive. This extreme specialization challenges our fundamental understanding of the minimal requirements for cellular life."
www.sciencealert.com/strange-cell...

I don't try to de-convert people from theism because that's almost always futile. I simply seek to demonstrate that supernatural beliefs are illogical to the point of absurdity and that such beliefs as expressed through Christianity, Judaism, and Islam can be extremely harmful.

Ten Commandments of Skepticism:

Ignore the idiots
Reveal the posers
Be slow to believe
Refute the illogical
Defuse the adamant
Expose the fallacious
Unmask the deceitful
Deflate the blowhards
Question the consensus
Challenge the authorities

There are around 85 billion neurons in an adult brain and each neuron makes about 10,000 connections to other neurons, meaning that there are as many intra-neural connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as their are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

For the credulous and the ignorant, the bar for believing in the absurdities of "God" and "soul" is abysmally low because fear of an imagined hell, desire for acceptance, discomfort with the unknown, irrational hope of an afterlife, and childhood indoctrination are all so high.

Because most Christians believed in God before they knew or understood the details of their own Bible, their preexisting belief gives them retroactive affirmation that the Bible must be true, so their arguments for it become as convoluted as needed to support that affirmation.

If you can rationalize these, you might be a Christian:

Drowning all creation (Gen 6:17)
Murdering all the firstborn (Ex 12:29)
Beating the slaves (Ex 21:20-21)
Raping all the virgins (Num 31:18)
Killing all non-Israelites (Deut 28:53)
Slaughtering all the infants (1 Sam 15:3)

"The spider hunts with a scientist’s precision, her curiosity carving a path through the wild, a silent partner in the world’s great order."
—Annie Dillard

They have such cute, inquisitive faces. A tiny jumping spider eyes me curiously as I take his portrait...

(Canon 6DMk2, EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro)

Given the fact that the gospel accounts of Christ's resurrection were written many decades after the supposed crucifixion by unverified authors who were clearly not eyewitnesses of Christ let alone of any resurrection, they fall firmly into the category of anachronistic hearsay.

"The Earth is what we all have in common. It is a garden of infinite variety, yielding to those who tend it a harvest of both sustenance and wonder."
—Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace

They're getting to the traffic light stage...

(Canon 6DMk2, EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro Lens)

😆🏅

"The hawk, in its solitary flight, carries the sky on its wings, a hunter whose vision carves the world into moments of eternal pursuit."
—John James Audubon

A redtail hawk grasps the remnants of breakfast in one talon while keeping a close eye out for lunch...

(Canon SX60HS)

"The sky lowers, and the wind begins to moan, a restless spirit weaving through the trees, heralding a storm that is both a terror and a strange, fierce loveliness."
—Charlotte Brontë

Grass blows in the wind as a storm approaches over the plains of Colorado at sunset...

(Canon Powershot SX40HS)

"The conflict between science and the Bible is nowhere more evident than in the account of life's origins. The theory of evolution, supported by an overwhelming body of evidence, renders a literal reading of Genesis untenable."
—Sam Harris

Falsehood is never perfectly harmless. Even if your own personal theistic faith and expression of it causes no harm and/or actively causes good, you are nonetheless a carrier of a mind virus that has infected and sickened the entire world, often with tragic and violent results.

If you sincerely call to God, believe Him to be a living Force, focus on your hope for His presence, search deep within your heart for His quiet words, and expect with all your Heart to hear His voice, you may very well feel something real. But it won't be God - it will be you.

"The rabbit’s life is a fleeting shadow across the meadow, yet in its fleetingness lies a kind of eternal dance."
—Kenneth Grahame

A baby bunny sunning himself in my backyard... It was one of his first forays out into the wider world from his nest under the deck.

(Canon Powershot SX60HS)

A tiny Thrips in the beard of a purple bearded iris

If you look close (and can zoom in far enough on your device), you can see the beady eyes of a tiny little Thrips on the beard of the iris. :)

A macro (closeup) photograph of a purple bearded iris

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
―Marcel Proust

The inner sanctum of a purple iris...

(Canon 6DMk2, EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro Lens)

Whoever it is has me blocked. 😆

"Nature's first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold. / Her early leaf's a flower; / But only so an hour."
―Robert Frost, from Nothing Gold Can Stay

An early blossom on a crabapple tree in my backyard earlier this spring...

(Canon 6DMk2, EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro Lens)