Friday, August 22, 2008

Just Finished the rough draft of All is Well

Now, I started this idea a while back and the initial plans for it to be a web comic have been put on hold until I find the motivation to acquire a new artist. (If anyone *wants* to be a web comic artists and deal with sticky Mormon issues, they may feel free to contact me. The only real requirement is that you must be able to draw better than I can. This is not hard.)

But, as I hated to lose all the work that had been put into it, I decided to do a novelization of the story line that had already been worked on. I do not know if there will be any interest in it, and the work is far from perfect in its current form, but if any of my readers would like to read it, they need only to ask me for it via e-mail and I will send them an archived version of the rough draft. This also coincides with an earlier promise to make it available in some form.

The book, which I am calling All is Well is far from pleasant and it is far harder on the church than I intended it to be, but I felt the stories of people often ignored by the church or worse, actively encouraged to change into something other than what they are needed to be told.

Oh yeah, it'll also tell you something about Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, but the book just happens to take place there. It's not really going to be all that useful to someone with a different interest in the place that bills itself as the state's only town.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

"It Takes a Lot of Faith to be an Athiest"

I've seen this quote elsewhere. While the religious statement often implies that it takes more faith not to believe in God than it does to believe in him, the typical atheist response I've seen seems to not understand the meaning of the word faith.

Now, I'm not saying atheists are religious, although some do follow their lack of religion devoutly. Saying that it does not take faith to be an atheist or insisting that definitions are being redefined to make that statement is a falsehood. While Creationists often make huge scientific errors in describing the problems of evolution, it seems that the athiest writers of today rely on their own redefinition of terms to make their cases.

It takes no more faith to believe in God than it does not to believe him, but either position is a matter of faith. Both are taking a definite position on a religious viewpoint and declaring a position about something that is at the current time unknowable. Agnosticism is the position that takes no faith. (I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but not being sure that God exists is not making a definitive statement about him.)

Atheists need to not be so afraid of terms normally associated with religion being used to describe their viewpoint, nor get up in arms about it. Having faith that God does not exist is not necessarily a bad thing.