Introduction

Back in 2006 I had a conversation in Suriname with my Christian creationist brother and a creationist friend about Christianity and my reluctance to accept it. There was someone else present that day who did not partake in the conversation but overheard parts of it. He happens to be a Dutch sociologist (an academic graduate, then about to start his PhD trajectory) and he too is a creationist. He wrote down quite a lengthy document to initiate a conversation with me so we started an email conversation that lasted a couple of months. This blog site is a translation of that conversation as closely as I possibly could. The original Dutch versions are present as well.

The conversation happened during a time when I was still forming my ideas around some religious questions. Looking back, not a whole lot has changed since those days. I became a little more outspoken and militant around issues where I think that religion causes harm but my reasoning around the religious subjects have hardly changed. Also I no longer shy away from the label "atheist" when describing my religious views. Regarding the general concept I consider myself a "weak atheist" (I lack a belief in such a god) but regarding the Abrahamistic religions I consider myself a "strong atheist" (I believe in the non-existence of such a god).

Some of the mails are not contributing to the conversation but I leave them in to keep the flow of the mails as they were. Some mails contained a link to a web site which was functioning during the mail conversation but that may no longer be the case. Those links are left unchanged.

In a recent communication with my conversation partner he granted me to publish the text of the original mails. His real name has been modified to "Edward Roderick" which has the same initials as his real name but should sufficiently protect his anonymity.

The banner image of this web site is the logo of the "invisible pink unicorn", the goddess of a mock religion that emphasizes the internal inconsistency of the attributes of said goddess. A similar aspect was part of the communication.

This site lacks a commenting option. It might be available at a future date (if I've been able to verify the security of the commenting system I'd use). Until then you are welcome to react by sending an email to socioconversations@hamal.nl.

I have noticed a bug in Pelican, the program that I use to generate this web site, which fails to generate footnotes in the Dutch translation of the posts. I will try to fix that or have it fixed.