Reading Time: 6 minutes It’s difficult for me to take a book seriously when it misrepresents my own views as consistently as does Tim Keller‘s The Reason for God. I am only on chapter three and already I’ve encountered enough straw men and red herrings to make me want to quit reading. The next chapter is the one that […]
Neil Carter
Neil Carter is a high school teacher, a father of four, and a skeptic living in the Bible Belt. A former church elder with a seminary education, Neil now writes mostly about the struggles of former evangelicals living in the midst of a highly religious subculture. Follow him @godlessindixie
Posted inReligion
The problem of evil in The Reason for God
Reading Time: 12 minutes Christian theology has wrestled since its inception with the problem of evil. Generally speaking, they believe that God is a being who is completely good, who is everywhere present all the time, who has all power, and who knows everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will. In other words he is omniscient, […]
Posted inGeneral
Revisiting Tim Keller’s The Reason for God
Reading Time: 7 minutes I don’t really care for apologetics books. It’s a tedious chore to make it all the way through them, and interacting with them is exhausting because for every single word it takes to put forth a bad argument it takes ten to properly debunk it. But in every decade there seems to be a favorite […]
Posted inPolitics
You don’t belong on that cross
Reading Time: 7 minutes The American Church has been feeling the loss of their cultural relevance, and they’re not taking it very well. It offends them deeply. The last thing they needed was to lose the social privilege they’ve enjoyed for so many generations they have become convinced it’s just the way things are supposed to be. As they […]
Posted inReligion
What’s so good about Good Friday?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Yesterday was “Good Friday,” and this time around I was struck with how Orwellian that sounds to someone on the outside of the Christian faith looking in. Strictly speaking, there never has been only one faith by that name, although when the weather is fair they do play nice enough to get along. But despite […]
Posted inParenting & Family, Religion
What Kind of Parent Would Your Faith Make?
Reading Time: 6 minutes We are not fallen angels but emerging beings. —Bishop Spong I’ve been trying for a while to boil down my chief objections to the faith of my youth, and I think I’ve settled on the metaphor that best sums it up. I’ve decided my greatest problem with the Christian faith isn’t its avoidance of responsibility […]
Posted inCulture, Religion
God Is Not to Blame for This
Reading Time: 8 minutes A younger friend recently told me she knows a number of guy friends who don’t care much for female artists. “Any female artists?” I asked her. “Any,” she replied, as if there’s something fundamental to being female that makes one less capable of making good art. I found this difficult to absorb. How could anyone […]
Posted inReligion
C.S. Lewis and the art of holy deception
Reading Time: 10 minutes It only recently occurred to me that I am now older than C.S. Lewis was when he first delivered the Broadcast Talks for BBC Radio upon which his later book Mere Christianity was based. Like him, I have been a teacher for decades; but unlike him, I have also spent decades parenting several children and […]
Posted inCritical thinking, Philosophy
C.S. Lewis and the Argument from Wishing
Reading Time: 10 minutes Yesterday I posted the first of what I plan to become a series of chapter reviews of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I know I’m late to this game—others have already dissected this work many times over—but I’ve never written out my own thoughts for those who would want to know them. It’s long overdue. […]
Posted inCritical thinking
C.S. Lewis and the Law of Nature
Reading Time: 6 minutes For years now, I’ve been putting off writing a review of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, but the time has finally come for me to take the plunge. One of my daughters asked for my thoughts about the book recently, and given that unpacking my deconversion for my girls was the reason I started blogging […]