About Me

Welcome! To reward your interest, here’s a cartoon:

Hope you enjoyed this little xkcd-gem. But now on to the reason why you’re here: The following is a short summary of what this blog is about and what moved me to start voicing my opinion publicly. I hope you find what you’ve been looking for. If not: Please do feel free to ask.

 

About the Blog

It’s about common sense, and sometimes about the lack of it. That’s already all you need to know, really.
I’m writing from a secular Humanist perspective: I that think the values of the Enlightenment – equality, human rights, critical thought, open discourse – are a great step in the right direction. Just a Little Common Sense is one of my humble efforts to promote them.

 

About the Author
I’m an autodidact on most topics I write about here. I try to learn about everything that interests me, read a lot of non-fiction and science magazines, and study biology/biochemistry. Yes, that’s right: I’m just a student. You have no reason to take me serious at all. I am no authority on any topic, and haven’t achieved anything that would make my opinion exceptionally interesting.

I’ve always been a non-believer, as I was lucky enough not to be indoctrinated as a child. I was never particularly opposed to religion, either, until I learned about some of the privileges that the churches enjoy in Germany. One incident especially sparked my interest, when I noticed that the state had me listed as being member of the Roman Catholic church by mistake, even though I have never been baptized. Today, I still don’t know how that mistake happened. When I asked the state official to change that listing, she told me she couldn’t do that; My options were to leave it as it is or to officially defect from the Church, which would entail a processing fee of 30€ (~50 USD). I said that I wouldn’t even consider paying money to quit a membership of a club that I had never been a member of in the first place, and started wondering about how this was legally possible. Essentially, a church is a civil association of people, not different from a football club or the like. To quit membership shouldn’t be more trouble than writing a letter to the club – how come that in case of the churches in germany one needs to show up in person at the local registration office and pay a processing fee? What does the state have to do with my membership in a civil club or lack thereof in the first place? I started researching, and found out more and more about the privileges of the church in the supposedly secular state of Germany. In the process I learned more and more about the beliefs themselves, and had plenty of opportunity do discuss with believers of many denominations. The more I learned, the stronger my opposition to faith grew. By now I am pretty much convinced that organized religion is the worst thing that has happened to humanity so far.
I guess I ought to be somewhat thankful to religion: It was my unwillingness to pay those 30€, that church privilege of having its membership-administration done by the secular state, that sparked my interest in politics and the legal situation in Germany and elsewhere; It was my discussions with creationists that sparked my interest in the origin of life and in the details of evolutionary theory; It was my conversations with other freethinkers that sparked my interest in philosophy, astronomy and history, and it was my astonishment at how people can be brought to believe such obvious bullshit that got me interested in sociology, psychology, Neuroscience and skepticism.
In a way, I owe a lot of who I am to religion.