CADRE Comments

In recent months, Christian apologists have been forced to respond to claims that because Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed 91 people in Norway last month, claimed to be a Christian on his facebook page that he somehow represented some seedy underbelly of the Christian belief. It was nonsense, of course, since it is apparent to anyone with even the most sketchy knowledge of Christianity that Jesus did not teach his followers to kill their enemies as Anders Behring Breivik did. He taught Christians to love their enemies and to pray for those who persecute them. (Matt. 5:44) Of course, it is hard to see in any way how the children and teenagers he murdered in cold blood could in any way be seen as Breivik's enemies, so his actions seem even less sane. But regardless of how Breivik designated these children as his enemies (or, at least, a tool to bring about some change that would help in the fight against his enemies), it is apparent that someone would hav...

Carl Sagan I have a page dealing with this concept on Doxa, but it's not very good. This is a better version. I will combine the two eventually. The New Version is on my New Sight: The Religious A priori Carl Sagan made this statement popular in its current form, it was originally used by Hume, Laplace and other early theorists, but atheists have sense taken it as a major slogan for their decision-making paradigm. Marcelo Truzzi tells us: In his famous 1748 essay Of Miracles, the great skeptic David Hume asserted that "A wise man...proportions his belief to the evidence,"and he said of testimony for extraordinary claims that "the evidence, resulting from the testimony, admits of a diminution, greater or less, in proportion as the fact is more unusual." A similar statement was made by Laplace, and many other later writers. I turned it into the now popular phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" (which Carl Sag...

Realization of God and The Depth of Being My approach now days is not to prove the existence of God, and to be continent with merely a rational warrant for belief, but go around the problem of proof and demonstrate a way that the inquirer after truth can become a believer by tapping into our place in being as humans. If we learn how to make the link between God and being we can realize that God is being itself and our place in being is as contingent creatures of God. Making this realization will be true heart felt belief. To get we have to clear away the clutter and part of that clutter is created by materialism, reductionism, scinentism and atheism. Clearing all of this away is a matter of understanding the nature of Being. Those aforementioned minions of doubt view being as surface only, it's just empirical and it's just a matter of the surface fact of existence. This is why the atheists clamour for empircal proof and harp on their mantra "there's not a shred of pro...

This is a controversial ploy. It's really baiting the atheists on CARM into showing their true attitudes toward their own sense of privileged position and their bigotry against religious people. I am playing the peranoid here. I am talking them litterally when I know they probalby wouldn't really mean what it sounds like they are saying. I don't seriously think any of them are Nazis or sympathize with Nazis or that they planing any kind violence. I think the fact that they wont come out and say "we don't accept hurting people" is important. They clearly have no sense of protecting the rights of others, and no understanding of that means for their own rights. I think this speaks volumes about where we are in our society today. I would be scared to death to try this egging fundies on to saying things. If you think this is all Total BS and I'm just more harm then good then I'll take it down. I think it shows something important about the bigotry i...

Yesterday I had a discussion with atheist on theodicy problem. That's the problem of pain and evil. Why does God allow it. There are two questions there but I think the answers to both are related. My classic answer is my own version of the "Free Will defense." The thing that makes my version different is the twist I put on internalizing the values of the good. This my version from Doxa and here's how it plays out. I call it "Soteriological Drama." Soteriology means the study of salvation. I am saying there's a drama, not entertainment but the kind of real drama one finds in life, concerning the pursuit of salvation. God has designed a serach into the process because it is only by searching that we learn to internalize the values of the good. Basic assumptions There are three basic assumptions that are hidden, or perhaps not so oblivious, but nevertheless must be dealt with here. (1) The assumption that God wants a "moral univ...

The Bible is a unique book. In addition to being a spiritual revelation, it is also a book that chronicles the history of a particular people: the Israelites. Thus, unlike some (maybe all) other spiritual books, it invites people to review the history as a means of confirming the truth of the Biblical claims. This, in turn, raises two different types of objections. First, some individuals (including archaeologists) require higher scrutiny of the factual claims of the Bible because the more accurate the Bible is historically the more believable it is spiritually. Second, some archaeologists and Biblical doubters simply deny that the accuracy of history in the Bible in any way reflects the truth of the spiritual claims in the Bible. Side note: in the comments to the Victor Reppert blog entry linked below, one sloppy-thinking atheist reflected this latter view when he commented, "Roswell, New Mexico, is an actual city too. Is this by itself evidence of the existence of aliens?...