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Where May You Use my Writing?

by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

Atheists are not "bad people". We are not evil, immoral, nor absent of beliefs. It's true, we all have beliefs, even though the nature of those beliefs is not necessarily religious. Even the belief that atheists don't have beliefs is an example of a belief, even though atheists may not believe "in" something. Those are facts, and only the beginning of how we get misrepresented to the naive who will believe anything they get told about "other kinds" of people, Nature, the universe, and God. The very same people who complain about our mild treatment of them would quickly sue us if we would ever resort to copying their tactics to use in returning the fire.

Still, we need to defend ourselves. We will not accomplish much by working alone, but need to pool our immense talent resources into a common wall of defense or we will be taken down one by one in whatever manner they can wield against us. This website, and my books, are my bricks toward building that wall. Make use of it, but don't steal it.

Here is what you need to know:

Being of sound but imperfect mind, I can make mistakes and need correction and appreciate those with the chutzpah to attempt that, and the wisdom to know what it takes to show me what is true so that I, too, can understand it. Religious people show up on my doorstep as though on some kind of schedule, to rehash the same old arguments with me. Lacking that wisdom, they leave red-faced, jaws set, their stride stiff and rigid.

You can be sure plenty of people have made that endeavor with me, and that this site is written from the results of their successes and failures. If that be the case, then much of what is written here ought to be a pretty good echo of the atheist, nonreligious, concerned secular mind.

Therefore:

You will find a copyright notice at the bottom of almost every page on this site. That notice proclaims all rights as reserved. These are my hard-won words, offered freely to the public for whatever edification they can convey. Here and there you may find bits of witty wisdom that have popped into the mind of a seventy year old man, something us old folks are supposed to have going for us.

You have my permission to copy these pages to post or print elsewhere, but only when properly attributed and with links to the original. That applies the same to partial pages and whole. Let us spread some seeds around and see if we can stand against the onslaught of writhing  memeplexes fighting to dominate the only world, and the only life, we will ever get. You can find more than 250 web pages (that will print out to more than a thousand paper pages) that, somewhere among them, express those words you need. To find them, look here.

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"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —