CADRE Comments

  I have a great message board community, Doxa forums. It's a totally unique community becuase we no trolls, we have no BS yammering, no bickering. I just don't allow trolls. We do have free speech, we have good serious discussion. We are all friends. We have intelligent atheists (Yes! I told it was rare) and intelligent Christians. Now input is welcome. It's gotten down the same few people and need new ideas and new voices. We will welcome atheists as well as Chrsitians or anyone else. Please come and see: Doxa forums.

  Perhaps nothing scares atheists like feelings. They scared to death of religious experience arguments. Nothing raises their hatred like talking about religious experiences. Daren Brown is some sort of British stage magician who has a new stage act supposedly inducing religious experiences. Atheists waste no time in arguing that this is proof that such experiences are just accidents that mean nothing. He states "I examined the Placebo effect and proved just how powerful fear and faith can be." Of course he assumes that because there is a psychological process that produces faith that then there's no object of faith beyond that process that has any real bearing on life. This is really no different than the one's who claim to stimulate parts of the brain to induce religoius experiences. In calling it "placebo" he's trying to set up the suggestion that it's unreal, it's unnecessary, God is the great cosmic sugar pill. Then ...

Bill's topic from a few days ago is something that Christians (and other theists of all stripes) have been chewing over for thousands of years. It might seem like the answer is a simple yes or no; but there are concepts which supernaturalistic theists are (in principle) committed to, which introduce difficulties. I spent several hundred pages in Sword to the Heart ( which can be found for free in some different formats, including first here on the Cadre Journal ) slowly and carefully working up those concepts, but I'll summarize them below in a progressing topical order relevant to the question of God's responsibility. ( Click here on the jump to proceed. )

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the drive-through ATM to get some cash so that my daughter and I could get some lunch.  After waiting a few minutes for the woman in the car ahead of me to complete her transaction, I finally pulled up by the machine. The ATM screen read, “Do you want another transaction?” Another transaction? Uh oh, the woman in front of me had failed to make certain that she had completed the banking process (including making sure she was logged out) before leaving the ATM. (Surprisingly, this same thing happened to me the previous week also. So twice in two weeks, I had other people leave their bank accounts wide open to me as I arrived at the ATM.) What should I do? Since she left her bank account wide open for me, it would have been very easy to access whatever monies she had in the account. It was like leaving all of her money sitting on a park bench for whoever wanted it. Naturally, I hit the button that indicated that the transaction was completed. Stil...

It's that time of year again, when I post a link to back to my 2008 Cadre article on the philosophically unique connection between trinitarian theism and freedom. 2009's repost picked up some interesting and polite discussion on the Resurrection of Jesus (between myself and counter-Christian apologist Spencer Lo), and those can be found here -- but they aren't comments about the article per se. God’s hope to all our readers, around the world, this holiday season!