Hello All --

I've only been lurking here for a couple of days, but I've been an atheist for many years now. My first experience with godlessness came when I needed to look up an article in a set of encyclopedias that I had had for years previous. In the 'P' book, I came across an article entitled 'Problem of Evil.' Well, I had been a noncommitted Baptist for my entire life before that. But after reading that short (but effective) article, I actually began to question. Question everything.

My life since has really been a classic example of cultural evolution. I flirted very briefly with paganism, until I found out that they were as shrift with answers as Christians. Then I discovered Greek philosophy, and stoicism in particular (I still have a small library of books on stoicism that is probably one of the most comprehensive in the world). But even their arguments either failed (about god) or proved very thin (most everything else).

I have since been 'reborn' of a sense reading Richard Carrier's magisterial work, Sense and Goodness Without God. I am currently treating it as an outline to further philosphical inquiry, beginning, appropriately enough, with epistemology (and the evidentialist school in particular). I look forward to reading more of the minimalist theory of truth, physicalist ontology, etc. Philosophy buttressed by science.

I'm also beginning study of Lojban, which is a constructed language (five decades in the making) that is almost completely unambiguous and has a grammar built upon the precepts of predicate logic. If interested, you can find out more @ www.lojban.org.

I wish to implore to my fellow atheists here and across the globe to not only avow their atheism, but to strengthen it with furthering education. And to EVOLVE -- discard everything irrational born out of a primitive past. For me this includes natural language. Who would have thought that a language spoken by savage tribes such as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes would one day be the most widely spoken in the world, and the language with which we try so awkwardly to manifest our precious precepts of reason?

Learn Lojban with me.

Glad to be part of the community (finally!) ...

krinu