CADRE Comments

In Honor of the Occassion The Gospel accounts of the resurrection were transmitted faithfully from the very beginning. How do we know this? The same way we know that any aspect of ancient world history is a probability: the documents are trustworthy. Now skeptics are probably spitting milk out their noses reading this, but its true.There are three areas of reliability, and two major misconceptions that have to be avoided. Let me start with the misconceptions: (1) The idea that "reliable" means "realistic." I'm sure many skeptics reading this are saying, How can they be reliable when they speak of miracles? . But reliable doesn't' necessarily mean "realistic." This doesn't mean they aren't hard to believe, or that they don't require an assumption about metaphysics; reliable doesn't' mean true. What it does mean I'll get to in a minute. big misconception number two: (2) Faithful transmission of history would have to mean t...

A number of recent studies have confirmed the links found by a number of previous studies that religious commitment -- in most cases Christian commitment measured by church attendance -- has substantial social benefits for America’s youth. In this post I will focus on three studies that I have recently reviewed. All three studies find significant benefits of religious commitment for America's youth, with two studies focusing exclusively on the beneficial affects of religious commitment on disadvantaged youth. I have linked to PDFS of each study. The Role of Religious and Social Organization in the Lives of Disadvantaged Youth The first study is “The Role of Religious and Social Organization in the Lives of Disadvantaged Youth,” submitted at the NBER Conference, April 13-14, 2007, hosted by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, by Rajeev Dehejia, Thomas DeLeiere, and John Mitchell (August 2007). This study focused on the buffering effect religion had on a number of ou...

This relates to my Want a Good Marriage? and Want to be a Charitable Person? posts, which were prompted by a commentor who argued that Christianity offered nothing based on his dubious representations of social science data, including the erroneous claim that Christians had the same divorce rate as everyone else. That is not the case, as Christians have lower divorce rates than the national average and Christians who attend church regularly have dramatically lower divorce rates. Also, Christians -- especially those who attend church regularly -- are much more likely to give to charity and give significantly more than do the Nonreligious. Another social benefit of Christianity is that it promotes happiness. As Jonathan Haidt, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, notes , “surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier , healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people.” (emph...

Philosopher and author of C.S. Lewis' Dangerous Ideas offers some thoughts on why Christianity makes sense to him.

This relates to my Want a Good Marriage? post which was prompted by a commentor who argued that Christianity offered nothing based on his dubious representations of social science data, including the erroneous claim that Christians had the same divorce rate as everyone else. That is not the case, as Christians have lower divorce rates than the national average and Christians who attend church regularly have dramatically lower divorce rates. Another social benefit of Christianity is its promotion of charitable giving. As Jonathan Haidt, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, notes , “surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people .” (emphasis added). Dr. Haidt is an atheist. As he states in this November 2007 interview , ”I'm an atheist, I don't believe that gods actually exist, but I part company with the New Atheists...

Just today I came across a fascinating website: Clean Flicks is an online movie rental store that provides movies without any graphic sex, graphic violence or graphic language of any kind. Apparently they used to actually edit certain movies for content but they cannot do this anymore for straightforward legal reasons. Their movie catalog is predictably quite bland and heavily skewed towards movies made before about 1950. This is not the only example of attempts to restrict access to movies with 'questionable' content, of course. We have come a long way since the days of the Hays Code which regulated not just distribution and ratings but the production of movies itself, but we still frequently hear outcries against movies which supposedly lower moral standards by desensitizing people to extreme violence and foul language. There are any number of ratings websites (many but not all of them religious) that discriminate between movies based not on the depth of characterization, q...

I've been busy in recent months writing as an invited guest-author (on orthodox Christian universalism) over at the Evangelical Universalist forum ; so I haven't had much time (or energy {g}) to contribute new articles here. But my friend Professor Victor Reppert has been posting up new and previous articles on arguments from evil (especially the deductive kind), for his students and readers, at DangIdea recently (as he tends to do about twice a year); and this reminded me that I've been meaning for some time to post up a deductive variation of the anti-theistic argument from suffering that I myself came up with a while ago. (A set of anti-theistic deductive arguments from evil, linked to by Victor during the discussion, can also be found collected by Jeff Lowder at the Secular Web here. ) This is an expanded, detailed and amplified form of an argument my sometime-previous-sparring partner, Richard Carrier, was attempting to make a couple of years ago in the opening statem...

In the comments of a recent post, a discussion arose about Christian divorce rates. One of the commentors insisted that Christian divorce rates were no different than anyone else’s divorce rates. I pointed to the recent, extensive polling data developed by Gallup and Baylor University on the issue, as presented by one of the leading sociologists in the United States, Rodney Stark , in the book What Americans Really Believe . R. Stark does not provide data on divorce rates by belief, but he informs as to divorce rates correlated with attendance at religious services. “The average person is 50 percent less likely to be divorced or separated if he or she attends religious services at least twice a month.” Stark, Ch. 23, What Americans Really Believe . On the other hand, “[t]he divorce rate among those who never attend religious services is close to double that of weekly church-goers.” Id . I have heard others refer to a study by The Barna Group showing that "born again" C...

On a whim, I decided to run down some information about references to God in U.S. mottos and state songs. Sources include Wikipedia, secretary of state websites, and other sites listing lyrics. Here are the results: OFFICIAL MOTTOS For the U.S. and the states/territories that have state mottos which reference God, I provide the motto for the respective state. If the motto is in Latin, I provide an English translation. United States of America : In God We Trust American Samoa : Let God be First Arizona : Ditat Deus ("God Enriches") Colorado : Nil sine numine ("Nothing without God's will") Florida : In God We Trust Kentucky : Deo gratiam habeamus ("Let us be grateful to God") Ohio : With God, all things are possible South Dakota : Under God the People Rule STATE SONGS Below I include only the relevant excerpts from the lyrics. If there is more than one state song, then I also identify the song from which the lyrics are taken. Alabama : "...

If there's one charge that keeps getting leveled by atheists against Christians (and religious believers in general), it is that they are so darn stubborn. They cling tenaciously to their quaint superstitions, apparently in the teeth of evidence. They seem impervious to the 'devastating' rational challenges to their belief systems. What's more, in their delusion they do not realize that the best proof of the falsity of their own belief system is the existence of other belief systems with adherents equally as intelligent and equally devoted. The implicit criticism here is that a truly open-minded, critically thinking person should hold to something like Clifford's principle in deciding what to believe: one's beliefs should be strictly proportioned to the evidence for them. If there seem to be equally plausible arguments for and against a certain position, the only rational choice is agnosticism concerning that position. From this point of view it is not only cogn...