I am reposting this in response to the terror attacks in France last night, resulting in the deaths of over one hundred people. As ever, the internet is awash with right-wing shouts to “kill all Muslims” and refugees, to the left-wing shouts that it is the Imperial West to blame and not Islam or Muslims. Neither of these positions are correct. It is obviously thoroughly complex, indeed involving international politics. However, to deny the Qu’ran, Muhammad and the Hadith causal responsibility in these atrocities is to deny the self-determination of those very terrorists who claim that they are doing these actions in the name of Islam and their god.
The Atonement is one of those funny things in Christianity. It is the central tenet, the main raison d’etre of the whole shebang. Jesus existed as God incarnate in order to be sacrificed and die in order to pay for our sins, past, present and future.
Only it makes absolutely no sense.
In very simplistic terms, I see it like this:
You can’t beat it when such incisive atheology is delivered in such a trivial and comedic way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPriOQkKd6k Well…
Franz Kiekeben studied (University of South Florida) and taught (Ohio State University) philosophy, having written for the SKEPTIC magazine and published academic articles on determinism and time travel. He recently sent me a book he has written called The Truth About God to review.
Yes, you heard me, tomatoes.
I am devastated. My harvest of about three hundred tomatoes has been decimated. Tomato blight. Gutted. The yield would have been my best ever, and they were very healthy looking.
This is so important an article (and paper it is derived from) that I had to share it. The final few paragraphs are powerful. Climate skeptics who claim to be the “real scientists” are so very wrong. It’s about time climate scientists fought back! From the Guardian:
Those who reject the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming often invoke Galileo as an example of when the scientific minority overturned the majority view. In reality, climate contrarians have almost nothing in common with Galileo, whose conclusions were based on empirical scientific evidence, supported by many scientific contemporaries, and persecuted by the religious-political establishment. Nevertheless, there’s a slim chance that the 2–3% minority is correct and the 97% climate consensus is wrong.
My new ebook is available now on Kindle, Nook and Kobo. James A. Lindsay (Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly) kindly wrote a foreword to support the project.
The great comedy character for Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe has a field day with philosophy:
These are truly beautiful words from Robert G Ingersoll, as taken from the superb site which has a fine selection…
This is a really good excerpt from the political discourse programme “This Week” on the BBC:
I have a number of talks organised covering a range of topics for the remaining months of the year, one…
This article comes from Think Progress and details some work carried out by Adam Lankford on mass shootings, released four days…
This article is from the National Geographic and should put paid to some Creationists claims that we cannot see evolution in action:
Evolution has been caught in the act, according to scientists who are decoding how a species of Australian lizard is abandoning egg-laying in favor of live birth.
In Jonathan’s post titled, “Inter-Testamental Moral Relativism,” a hypothetical exchange between an atheist and an Xian highlights the morally relativistic nature of a fundamentalist worldview that defends the idea that executing a man for picking up sticks on a Saturday is obligatory at time T, but morally impermissible at T+1. In the exchange, the snarky hypothetical atheist wants to know exactly when T occurred in order to know exactly when people became morally obliged to refrain from executing Sabbath breakers.
Apologist Matthew Flannagan has criticised my points made on the recent post “Inter-Testamental Moral Relativism” which can also be expressed as “Covenantal Moral Relativism” as Justin Schieber has stated it. In this post I declared that the moral obligations being different between the Old Testament (OT) and the New Testament (NT) amounted to moral relativism (MR). Here is what Flannagan had to say:
“I have been the biggest hypocrite ever,” Josh Duggar wrote, in a confessional statement he later took down. Indeed, it has been a tough summer for the former reality TV star and executive director of the Family Research Council’s lobbying arm, now exposed as a former child molester, porn addict, and Ashley Madison-using adulterer.
Evan T made this incisive comment: I wonder when the UN is going to get off their collective asses and…
Further to my post yesterday on Inter-Testamental Moral Relativism, I would like to make a few more points (which I have mentioned before here) on morality concerning God. Divine Command Theory (DCT) is the Christian/theistic ethical system whereby whatever God commands is rendered morally good and right on account of God commanding it. As Franz Kiekeben states in The Truth About God (pp. 133-134):
Theists hate moral relativism. They often accuse atheists and secularists of having it. For them, only the pseudo-moral absolutism of…
The archaeologist who looked after ancient ruins of Palmyra in Syria for 40 years is reported to have been killed by Islamic State (IS) militants.
Khaled al-Asaad had been held for about a month by the group, which seized the Unesco World Heritage site in May.
This post is one of my most popular pieces on this blog, and I am revising it slightly to make it even tighter, reacting to previous comments on the last version of this piece. I have tried to be detailed enough for it to be fairly comprehensive, though it could be more detailed; then again, it could be shorter and more digestible. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.