CADRE Comments

Andrew Brown, Marxist critic who works for the Guardian, major left wing newspaper. New atheism is a political movement and not an Intellectual one: Brown's blog on the Guardian site In part this is difficult because the new atheism is largely a political and social rather than an intellectual movement. In some ways it can be understood as the canary in the coalmine of American power and exceptionalism. this guy is an expert in ideology. This guy knows ideology when he sees it. He distills an idea for New Atheism (which proves one of my major assertions). His method for piecing together the ideology is to find the communality in the works of the major leaders of their movement, the major New Atheist writers. The ideas I claim are distinctive of the new atheists have been collected from Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Jerry Coyne, the American physicist Robert L. Park, and a couple of blogging biologists, P Z Myers and Larry Mor...

On carm just before Christmas an atheist called "1337" argues: I contend that the theistic version of god doesn't exist. Why do I say this? Because the assertion that there is a personal god seems to be baseless. In fact, it is christian apologists that eroded my faith away. They continue to make qualifications about why it seems that god does nothing, until eventually the view that god exists is no different from the view that he doesn't exist. People assert that god makes a difference in their lives. My question to you is, what would the world look like if that god didn't exist? What differences would we notice? (NOTE: If anyone responds by saying "without god the world couldn't exist at all" I'll just ignore it, that's not the point of the discussion) In the discussion that ensued this turned into a reverse design argument. Its' reversal because he's saying basically that Chrsitians can...

So many atheist attacks on the Christian faith proceed from the standpoint of litterlizing their negative image of God, which is based upon the OT version of God, that I used to always been telling them "you are making God into the big man in the sky ." Now Atheists on CARM have started telling me that I'm making God into the Big man in the sky when I assume that God is conscious or that he loves us. The fact is that many of them assume that even slightest hint of consciousnesses in God and it's anthropomorphizing. They just have hold of the wrong end of the stick. God is not modeled after big man in sky just by being assumed conscious, but when we assume attitudes and behaviors caught up in the same assumptions that men make. My thesis here today is that it's only the big man in sky when it echos the personality hangups of big man. The nature of consciousness is such that this in and of itself need not be taken as anthropomorphic. The Christian conce...

For the two of you who may be awaiting the third part of my series responding to the question of why God would create an atheist knowing that he would be sent to hell, I apologize. I had a series of other projects that have come up that have taken priority. I will be posting the third part (hopefully shortly), but in the meantime, a friend reminded me of an article that I thought would be of interest to those of the Apologetics bent, like me. He initially directed my attention to the video called the Star of Bethlehem  that makes the case as to what the Star of Bethlehem may have been. He stated that he had doubts about the video because it required that Jesus be born after 4 B.C., and he noted (correctly) that the present historical consensus is that Herod the Great died in 4 B.C. This reminded me that I had seen an article a while ago that made a very strong case that Herod had to have died later than 4 B.C. In fact, the article makes the case that Herod had to die in 1...

In part 1 , I noted that a Rumplestiltskin phoned a radio station asking the following question: Hey, Jim, I can prove that God doesn’t exist. God’s omniscient, right? Well I’m an atheist and that means that God knew when he created me that I would be going to hell, right? Having laid the groundwork, it is first important to understand that Rumplestiltskin’s question has a lot of hidden premises. These premises, if spelled out, might read as follows: Premise 1 : Christianity teaches that God is a loving and good God. Premise 2 : Christianity teaches that God is omniscient. Premise 3 : Christianity teaches that people who are not Christians go to hell. Premise 4 : If God is omniscient, he knows which people will become Christians at least as early as the time that they are created. Conclusion 1 : God knew at the time that I was created that I would not be a Christian and would be going to hell. Premise 5 : A loving and good God would not create people knowing that th...

Two Major issues I'm going to address here: (1) Was Jesus wrong (in the Olivet discourse) in that he predicted the end of the age and his return with an army of angels in the sky within the life time of some listening to him in that day?  (2) Is it the case that all modern scholars agree with this?  As an extension of the no 2 I will also take up the issue about method, is it valid ethological procedure to speculate about the nature of the text's development without textual evidence to back it up? ....... A friend ask me about this passage:"If I demonstrate to your satisfaction that the historical Jesus believed in the end of the world within the lifetimes of his followers, what will that do to your faith?" It wouldn't do anything to it because I have accepted that he could be wrong about he said he didn't know!  I think this is clearly the issue for most atheists becuase they are looking for a slam dunck victory over all of Christianity. What b...

The so called olivet discourse (from mount of olives) is held up by atheists as an example of a Jesus prophesy that did not come true. In it Jesus seems to say that the current living generation wont pass away until the son of man returns with angels in the sky to end the world. He also says this will occur at the same time as the destruction of he temple. A thread where the CARM atheists argue Jesus was wrong (a false prophest in fact becasuse his prophesy of the end times didn't come true). They quotes form five schoalrs to alleged "prove" this and none of them offer any real proof. All they offer is opinion. Only a couple of them are Chrsitains. Jesus of Nazareth had expected to see the Temple destroyed, the Kingdom come, and the new Temple established in 30, at or as the climax of his own mission, and Mark’s community preserved the memory of Jesus’ proclamation of this belief. --Paula Fredriksen. From Jesus to Christ, Second Edition (New Haven: Y...

In my time debating the truth of Christianity, I have observed some skeptics (not all) ask questions for the same end to which Rumpelstiltskin asked people to guess his name. They ask questions not expecting an answer, but rather to watch the people asked squirm; i.e., they ask questions with unwarranted confidence that the people asked will not have the answer. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that the questions they ask aren’t worth asking. Rather, the motivation is false; the questions are being asked not to get information to make an honest evaluation of the facts, but rather they ask because they want to hear the Christians stumble about trying to answer. I heard one such Rumpelstiltskin call in to a talk radio program a few days ago. His words were something to the effect of:   Hey, Jim, I can prove that God doesn’t exist. God’s omniscient, right? Well I’m an atheist and that means that God knew when he created me that I would be going to hell, right? I have a question:...