Reppert's "A Portrait of the North Carolina Killer"

This is my response to Victor Reppert's post linking the Craig Hicks murders with a supposed hateful atheist ideology.  He says:

Just put "a new dark age" in for "hell" and you can see why someone might use force on behalf of atheism.  The more atheists insist that they are immune from the kind of temptation that leads to religious violence, the more concern I have. If you really think atheism leaves you with "nothing to kill or die for," then all I can give you is the Strait answer.

The Epistemology of the Religious Experience

I was recently involved in an interesting discussion that focused on how we can make claims about what exists.  One of the things theists claim is that they have a certain cognitive facility apart from perception of sensory information that gives them knowledge about God.  This facility manifests itself as "religious experience", and is supposedly on a par with sensory experience as an epistemological mechanism.

An Awesome Sight: the Red Sunset

I was in a discussion once where a theist said that the beauty of the sunset was reason to believe in God.  I certainly don't deny that a sunset can be beautiful, and I feel the same sense of awe that he does when I see it.  But that sense of awe does not translate to "God made all this".  I marvel at nature.  Nature holds many wonders and secrets to be discovered.  And that's beautiful.