CADRE Comments

Atheists are always coming up with little gimmicks. Anytime you trump them with real knowledge they get up set and find a gimmick. The Jesus myth theory was such a gimmick. Jesus was such a compelling figure and there is some decent evidence he rose from the dead, so to counter that they just pretend he never existed, and give it a little name and make up some pseudo intelligent sounding crap pertaining to it. The "default" and the "extraordinary evidence credo" these are all gimmicks atheists made up and they are passed off as pseudo official sounding quasi logical tactics that in actuality mean nothing. The latest is the Courtier's reply. This is it: I recently referred to the "Courtier's Reply" , a term invented by PZ Myers to rebut the claims of believers who insist that their superstitious beliefs are ever so much more sophisticated than the simple version that Dawkins attacks. PZ's response deserves much more publicity because ...

Today an estimated sixteen percent of Americans—or about 49 million American men, women, and children—live without religious affiliation. * As a group, religiously unaffiliated Americans are more numerous than any single religious denomination except Roman Catholics. They are more numerous than Hispanic Americans or African Americans ... more numerous than the estimated gay and lesbian population … more than seven times as numerous as American Jews … more than fifteen times as numerous as religiously active American Jews. Not all of the religiously unaffiliated would describe themselves as atheists or agnostics, but recent studies suggest that the actively nonreligious make up about two-thirds of this population, with spiritual seekers and persons between church affiliations making up the rest. How do we know these things? Recent—and authoritative—data comes from the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) and from surveys conducted in association with the P...

My Actual Score (that block thing at the right is my score, it's off scale) I've seen it two ways, Know the Bible better or know "religion" better; both are misleading. example: tpix "Atheists Know the Bible Better than Christians? " How much do you know about religion? In a recent survey by the PEW Forum on Religion and Public Life, most Americans scored 50 percent or less on a quiz measuring knowledge of the Bible , world religions and what the Constitution says about religion in public life. The survey surprisingly found it's not evangelicals or Catholics who did the best - it's atheists and agnostics. It's not Bible -belt Southerners who scored highest - they where at the bottom of the survey. What a sad state of affairs when atheists and agnostics know more about the Bible than Christians. Last week the net was abuzz with talk of a Pew study that said atheists know the Bible better than Christians do. I found about 14 blogs referring ...

This was originally posted atheistwatch. also I linked to it on carm. The carm guys never read it. They read the first line then said "he expalined that hd didn't mean it." The article is not saying that the guy really wants to kill anyone. My point is lot more subtle than that. Read the whole thing please. Its' so typical of Dawkies not to read the article then insist they know all about it. This was first reported on the Tea Party blog "Blaze." It's here listed form the right wing source RS Red State . It's validated well enough because it's being reported on a hundred other blogs of all stripes. It's been admitted to and damaage control done by Stefanelli himself. Posted by The Rat ( Profile ) Friday, September 16th at 10:11AM EDT Our pals at American Atheists are in the news again; surprise, surprise. The hateful bigots just can’t seem to avoid controversy, although truth be told, I’m sure they know e...

So here's an argument based upon arguments atheists make a lot. (1) Empirical science has produced knowledge, technology, medicine, etc., etc. It's awesome. (2) Abstract philosophy has produced nothing at all; it appears to be mere navel gazing. (3) Therefore, we should base all of our beliefs on empirical science, not abstract philosophy. (4) The arguments for God are abstract philosophy of exactly the kind that has proven so worthless. (5) Therefore, we should reject all of the arguments for God. To me, this seems to be a powerful argument for non belief. It doesn't prove that there's no God, but it does provide a potential reason not to believe in God, which is the same thing for all practical purposes. The theist has two ways out, maybe. The first would be to muddy the distinction between philosophy and science. I think that this is probably doable to some extent, but I'm not sure how doable it actually is. The second would be to attack (4), a...

The Jesus Project was started in 2007 as a forum for skeptical biblical scholars, both professional and amateur, to conduct a 'scientific' investigation of the historicity of the Jesus traditions in the New Testament. Their sessions resulted in an edited volume, Sources of the Jesus Tradition , published last year. In this post I want to take a closer look at an essay by classicist Justin Meggitt called 'Popular Mythology in the Early Empire and the Multiplicity of Jesus Traditions', which provides an alternative, skeptical model of the transmission of Jesus traditions in early Christianity. As Meggitt puts it: When the popular cultural contexts within which stories about Jesus were first told or retold are taken into account, it becomes apparent that they are likely to be characterized by far more creativity, improvisation, idiosyncrasy, and inconsistency than has hitherto been assumed by most New Testament scholars. Far from being careful and cautious in their hand...

I know that some Bible-believing Christians who read this blog are strong believers in evolution. When I have spoken with these individuals they explain that they believe that God created the universe, but they are willing to accept what science teaches on the Theory of Evolution. The way they make these two views work together is to adopt a type of Theistic Evolution, i.e., theistic creation via evolution. There is something to be said for adopting Theistic Evolution: it really does away with the conflict (to the extent it is scientific) between the Theory of Evolution and the Biblical account of Creation. It does so by saying that God is wise enough and all-powerful enough that he could create the initial conditions of the universe in a way the would ultimately lead to the rise of life -- including human life. Thus, whenever a new scientific discovery speculates about how life arose or how it came to be what it is, a person who adopts Theistic Evolution can say, "No problem beca...

This past week, I received my e-mail edition of World Science . I enjoy reading this popularizer of science stories, and if you could go back and search my blog entries you would find that many of my posts about science arose from something that I found on this website. But as a popularizer of science, I find that the website falls victim to the same problem other science popularizers such as Carl Sagan have fallen victim: making unsupportable claims when the evidence does not fully support (or may even counter) my world view. In World Science, I regularly find stories making assertions as if they are supported scientific findings that are either unsupported or inadequately demonstrated to be supported. In fact, in many cases the claims seem to be not only unsupported but incapable of being supported. Take, as an example, a very interesting story entitled Facial expressions reported to develop before birth . As a person who supports the right to life of the unborn, I am always interest...

Reading through my notifications, I came across an article from the Morning Sun (Serving Central Michigan) that caught my attention by the outrageous title. It was Atheists are not monsters by Eric Baerren. After commencing his piece by admitting he is an atheist (much to what I am sure must have been the stunned shock and surprise of many), he reports: There will soon be a billboard in the Grand Rapids area advising motorists that atheists exist and aren't horrible monsters, as they are often assumed to be by many of the Christian majority. I don't know about you, but this absolutely floored me. Not that atheists are not monsters. That's a given. But that atheists are "often assumed to be [monsters] by the Christian majority." Really? That's odd because as a member of the "Christian majority" I don't know a single Christian who thinks atheists are monsters. But I guess my little slice of Christian America doesn't count because apparently th...