RIC Links

Internet Infidels- The Secular Web  The granddaddy of internet skeptical web sites, includes a wealth of information.  The only problem is its not organized all that well IMO at least when it comes to finding essays from the library on specific subject categories. 

The Skeptic's Annotated Bible An excellent and extremely comprehensive resource for the skeptic.  It is the King James Bible, laid out by book, with the most controversial, embarrassing, and highly criticized passages annotated/highlighted along with skeptical commentary.  It is organized into the following categories: injustice, absurdity, cruelty & violence, intolerance, contradictions, family values, women, science and history, interpretation, good stuff, prophecy, sex, language, and homosexuality.  My only criticism of this site is that it is TOO comprehensive. In trying to include every possible Bible problem, it includes the more dubious ones, such as in the cruelty & violence section- it lists bad deeds committed by people in the Bible even when the deed is explicitly condemned by the Bible.

Ebon Musings I think this is probably the most excellent skeptical site out there.  It is divided into two categories, The Evolution Pages and The Atheism Pages. The latter is a collection of essays seeking to refute theistic belief, justify atheism from the ground up, and lay out the foundation for an atheistic worldview, mainly in the areas of naturalist philosophy and includes some Bible criticisms.  I am blown away by the quality of Ebon's essays and his positive justification for a naturalist philosophy and optimistic outlook on life.

The Skeptical Review Online Farrell Till is a former Church of Christ pastor who is now a well-known skeptic.  He tackles head-on Christian apologists' claims of Biblical inerrancy.  For a number of years he published a printed version of The Skeptical Review, but now TSR is available only on-line.  TSR offers a wealth of quality articles/essays dealing with the issue of Biblical errancy, and also offers articles and rebuttals by Christian apologists.

Why Won't God Heal Amputees? Answering the common Christian's claims of answered prayers.  Yet why does God seem to only answer prayers and give healing when the sickness and cure are ambiguous?  People claim God cured their cancer even though they had surgery and chemotherapy and radiation, yet you never see God answering the prayer of an amputee by regrowing their limb?  This sentiment was expressed very well by  French writer Anatole France, when visiting Lourdes in the late nineteenth century and said, surveying all the discarded crutches, "What, what, no wooden legs???" (see here)

Agnostic Review of Christianity by Brad, a web site dedicated to examining and evaluating fundamentalist Christianity and the claims it makes about the Bible and the nature of the universe.

2think.org Christianity, Is the Bible God's Word or Man's Invention?

Christianity Capella's Guide to Atheism An Atheist’s Guide to Scripture and more. Bible atrocities and deviant behavior by key Bible figures.

Critical Thought and Religious Liberty from stephenjaygould.org

Losing My Religion the title of a great REM song made into a pretty good website with lots of quality essays

Ask Why Printed and digital titles regarding religious mythology, alternate translations of scriptures, and modern scientific thought.

Questioning An Examination of Christian Belief by former young-earth creationist Merle Hertzler.  Be sure to check out his irrefutable rebuttal to creationist's claims that the speed of light has slowed down.

Landover Baptist Church  A hilarious parody site of a holy-roller Baptist church.  Be sure to check out their Bible Quiz Page.

Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible a pretty good site from Joseph Francis Alward

Free Thought Firefighters Firefighter Bruce Monson has a pretty interesting perspective.  Be sure to read his signature essay A Firefighter Speaks Out.

Born Again Fundamentalist Christianity and the Bible- Hope or Hoax?

Sam Harris.org Website of noted atheist author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.  Has some good articles and debates, plus a forum.

The Rejection of Pascal/s Wager A skeptic's guide to Christianity

The Skeptic's Dictionary good skeptical resource "The Skeptic’s Dictionary is a lively, commonsense trove of detailed information on all things supernatural, paranormal, and pseudoscientific".

Richard Packham's Home Page has a few good essays

Wasteland of Wonders Atheism and theism section from Adrian Barnett's WebPage, contain some good essays

Atheist Divine Criticizing Christianity.  Check out his Ex-Christians Ribbon Campaign

The Wonderful World of WinAce Contains some good humorous essays, like Are There Really Any Contradictions in Star Trek? and Bible Prophecies Indicating Napoleon was the Messiah and Prophecy for Dummies  Note: sadly the young author Allan Glenn lost his long battle with cystic fibrosis and died in 2005.

SecularLife.org  "was formed as an online community dedicated to providing a few services that seemed to be fairly sparsely represented on the internet... here to help answer your questions about being secular..." Check out their nutwatch archive.

Tekton Apologetics Ministries This is probably the premier apologetics site, by James Patrick Holding, and is very comprehensive, not afraid to take on the most difficult issues.  I must say this guy is good.  If he were a lawyer and I were accused of a crime I would want him representing me.  He can definitely at times come across an arrogant jerk, and seems to think very highly of himself, often lobbing personal insults at those who disagree with him.  He has particular disdain and loathing for internet skeptics, and so has inspired a skeptic counter-site The Anointed One.   Though I have noticed that he can be more respectful to skeptics who are more respectful to him.  He is frequently criticized for not posting links to the skeptical essays that he is rebutting.  He says something to the effect that people can Google it, so he shouldn't have to scour the internet to look for views that oppose his.  Yeah, but when he's posting a rebuttal to a SPECIFIC essay, then why not give the link?  But then again whether he links to the skeptic's essay has more to do with whether or not he has a feud with that skeptic. He won't even state well-known skeptic Farrell Till's name at all, referring to him only as "skeptic X".  Though at times he can be funny in a smart-ass way.  I like his Over Three Hundred Disproofs of God’s Existence page.   

Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry site's description says "CARM is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization whose purpose is to equip Christians and refute error.  It is well documented.  Come here and learn about false teachings such as Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Islam, the New Age, etc., as well as provide counter arguments for evolution, atheism, relativism, abortion...and much more."

Christian Think Tank a very comprehensive site from Glenn Miller containing a good assortment of apologetics articles, see the subject index.  This guy is pretty good, but his articles can be extremely long-winded, seemingly with the tactic of wearing down the person asking the question by going on and on until they forget the question they asked in the first place!

Articles from Apologetics.com 

Rational Christianity has an extensive assortment of articles and objections answered

Reasons to Believe a comprehensive site by Dr. Hugh Ross' institute of old-earth creationists.

Answering the Atheist from Looking Unto Jesus, has an extensive list of answers to contradicitons

Ex-Atheist.com  "An atheist finds faith in God after twenty years of hardcore skepticism and debate. Find out how truth made itself known through paradox."  Whether this person was truly an atheist seems questionable to many skeptics, since her claims of her atheist experience seem to so well correspond to  what is the believer's stereotypical view of atheists, with statements like "rational thought replaced my compassion for others... What did it matter if these died?... People died every day. The end result would always be death for both the individuals and, eventually, the species... I tried several other atheist philosophers who tried to assign meaning to a life created by chance and I decided that they were all full of crap... If our life is the result of randomness and chance, it is meaningless, no matter how we try to convince ourselves otherwise...." see here for a skeptic's parody response to this site

Apologetics from josh.org

Answers for Atheists and Agnostics from God and Science

Answers to Tough Questions from Radio Bible Ministries

Apologetics Giving Answers for the Christian Faith from Let Us Reason Ministries

The Christian Courier 

Apologetics from John and Ursula, mostly links to off-site essays

Awesome Power of God featuring miracle news

Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance has a wide variety of information on various topics, from a pro-tolerance point of view, trying to to "objectively describe controversial topics from all points of view."

Institute for Biblical and Scientific Studies A pretty good site, from a liberal Christian point of view, fairly objective and balanced I think.

The Bible Gateway The premier resource for Bible studies, it is an online searchable Bible in multiple versions and languages.

The Holy Scriptures- the Tanakh Jewish translation of Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), interesting for comparison so you can see how translators without Christian presuppositions and biases (but with Jewish ones?!) have translated the words.

Questions About the Hebrews and Judaism 

The Bible and Interpretation offering the latest news and information in the field of biblical studies to a wide readership and to contact scholars for comment and analysis- this is more from a scholarly point of view, it is does not feature apologetics: "neither esoteric and improbable positions nor apologetic and dogmatic agendas will be accepted".

Bible Heritage Center  A very good and comprehensive site providing a wealth of information from a neutral/objective point of view

Early Christian Writings featuring the writings of the church fathers and others

From Jesus to Christ EXCELLENT series from PBS Frontline

The Hebrews, A Learning Module good resource from Washington State University

Reading the Old Testament  An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible by Barry L. Bandstra, an EXCELLENT resource!

The Jewish Virtual Library good resource on things Jewish

The Catholic Encyclopedia Good resource from the Catholic Church, very comprehensive.  Says "proposes to give its readers full and authoritative information on the entire cycle of Catholic interests, action and doctrine. What the Church teaches and has taught".  Its pretty outdated though, being from 1917.

The Jewish Encyclopedia  This website contains the complete contents of the 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia, which was originally published between 1901-1906. 

Bible Topics Index from A to Z  What the Bible says about..., seems to be a list of topics from a Christian point of view

Encyclopedia Mythica information on mythology, folklore, and religion

Epic of Gilgamesh and Code of Hammurabi translations of Mesopotamia writings

Resource Pages for Biblical Studies "These pages are intended as a resource for serious, scholarly studies of the early Christian writings and their social world".

Ancient Sumer History in Mesopotamia 

Internet Jewish History Sourcebook a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use- editor Paul Halsall, Fordham University Internet History Sourcebooks Project

The Skeptic's Annotated Book of Mormon Included as a sub-site of the Skeptics Annotated Bible, this site uses the same methodology with the Book of Mormon, highlighting its most embarrassing and highly criticized passages to show that it is not divinely inspired.

The Hundredth Sheep good skeptical Mormon and Christian iformation from a former Mormon 

Exmormon.org Recovery from Mormonism, a web site for former members and those questioning their faith in the organization.

Mormonism Research Ministry Challenging the Mormon: Anti-Mormon, evangelical Christian site that states "Mormonism Research Ministry is a missionary/apologetics organization that was organized to propagate the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to critically evaluate the differences between Mormonism and biblical Christianity".

Foundation for Apologetic Information Research  A group of Mormon apologists stating "FAIR is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing well-documented answers to criticisms of LDS doctrine, belief and practice".

SHIELDS Responses to issues raised by critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Skeptic's Annotated Quran  Included as a sub-site of the Skeptics Annotated Bible, this site uses the same methodology with the Quran, highlighting its most embarrassing and highly criticized passages to show that it is not divinely inspired.

Faith Freedom International  Ali Sina leads a grassroots group of ex-Muslims in denouncing Islam.

Freethought Mecca Islam. an infidel devil's guide

Why I am Not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq

Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society

Muslim Answers Muslim apologetics

faithfreedom.com, an Islamic site seeking to refute Faith Freedom International and taking advantage of those who mistakenly type the wrong web address.