Read my Guest Post At Reason Being!

John Richards of the blog Reason Being has published a guest post of mine on his blog. If you remember, he has also been a guest poster here as well, and he was gracious enough to not only write his post, Good Without God for my blog, but he also linked to it on reddit's r/atheism sub forum, bringing me hundreds on new views to the blog.

He really is a great guy, and runs a very well written blog.

Check out my guest post, Looking Back At My Home Schooling Past, and make sure to read more of his posts, he is a great writer.

I do welcome guest posts on my blog, I accept proposed guest post at my blog e-mail account, ramblingsofsheldon@gmail.com.

A few things to keep in mind:

I prefer guest posts from the non-religious, whether you be atheist, agnostic, deist, or even believe in a god, but rejected organized religion.

Proposed guest posts from people more liberal religious groups like liberal Christians, Unitarians, etc, will be accepted on a case by case basis, and will depend on the proposed post and topic.

Proposed guest posts from fundamentalists will be autocratically rejected, as well as spam posts attempting to promote a business, take the spam somewhere else (and yes, I have gotten these spam proposals before).

If you want to mention your blog, and/or your social media pages, that's fine, but if I'm not familiar with you, I will check out those pages, and their content first.

I will contact anyone back who sends in a legitimate guest post proposal, I really enjoy interacting with guest posters, especially fellow bloggers, show me what you can write :)

Good Without God

The other day I had a Christian ask me “How can you be good without god?”  I asked him what he meant by the question.  His response was “Without god, what keeps you from going out on a killing spree?”  To be honest, I get questions of this nature often.  I get them on Twitter daily (@logicalbeing if you’re into that sort of thing).  More surprising to me is when I get them from friends and family.  

 I want to address questions of this nature without getting too much into the larger debate on the source of morality.  The reason I don’t want to discuss the origins of morality or the objective/subjective nature of morality is really quite simple.  I don’t think we need to do so to illustrate that they do not come from any divine being.

If it is belief in god that is supposedly keeping us from going on killing sprees, I think we can assume a few things.  We can assume that the person posing the question believes in the concepts of heaven and hell.  I think it fair to say that the idea of eternal reward and fear of eternal damnation plays a role in their morality.  

I say this because of the way the question is phrased, “how can you be good without god?”  This implies that it is the belief in god that is necessary for morality.  In order to be moral, one must believe that god exists, that this god has decreed what is moral and immoral, and is keeping tabs on what humans are doing.  The last part is important.  If god is not keeping tabs, when why would he be a factor in what a believer does?  If there is no reward or consequence, then what does it matter what god thinks of our actions?

Celebrating The Blog's Great Success Recently

It constantly amazes me how the blog keeps growing, it's something I would have never excepted back in August when I started it as just a way to get my opinions out there, I didn't expect many people to read it (if any), and that I would still be blogging now, it was just an experiment for me.

Now, here I am in the last few weeks looking at how fast it's grown. In the last 3 weeks I have went from a 400 reader a week average, to now breaking the 1,000 mark this weekend.


My blog has gotten recognition from some popular people in the atheist/skeptic blogging world, starting about 3 weeks ago

First, the blog went from 400 to 700 readers a week after a guest post at the blog Confessions of a Heretic Husband, then the biggest spikes in readership come after some honors the blog received this week:

Jack Vance added me to the blogroll at his hugely popular blog Atheist Revolution, which has lead to a sustained increase of people stopping by.

Blogger Reason Being wrote a blog post where linked to a blog post of mine, saying he agreed with it and expanded his thoughts on the topic further.

Andrew Hall of Laughing in Purgatory invited me to take part in a campaign to boycott the Boy Scouts, a list of all the blogs that participated was posted on many of the over two dozen blogs that joined in, bringing readers and other great bloggers over to Ramblings of Sheldon. That wasn't all, he also gave me the opportunity to write a guest post for his blog.

I'm grateful for the honors that I have received from other bloggers, and if you are a new reader here, I welcome you, please stay around and keep reading. If you are a fellow atheist/skeptic blogger, let me know, and I'll check out your blog, I'll be open to the possibility of writing a guest post for your blog, or you writing for this blog.

Thanks to all who are reading this blog, and to those who have helped make it a success!