Reading Time: 5 minutes Public shaming is as Christian as crosses symbolizing the crucifixion. So Christians condemning public shaming in other contexts is hypocrisy.
Faith
Posted inReligion, The Secular
Ross Douthat offers this dubious tip for finding faith: Stop thinking rationally
Reading Time: 5 minutes New York Times conservative pundit Ross Douthat believes that if you believe hard enough in the divine, even without evidence, it becomes real.
Posted inPhilosophy, Science, The Secular
Why are philosophy, empiricism falsely joined at hip? No good reason.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Empiricism and philosophy are schizoid opposites. Why do the definitions of both conjoin them in dreamy philosophy? I haven’t a clue.
Posted inPolitics
Four ways Tim Keller’s gospel falls flat
Reading Time: 11 minutes In the penultimate chapter of his Reason for God, Tim Keller attempts to pull together all the loose threads strewn about this apologetic work, weaving them together into a coherent vision for the world. He offers his belief system as a superior alternative to the one the rest of the world wants you to accept, […]
Posted inReligion
Why everything you do is wrong
Reading Time: 5 minutes Two-thirds of the way through a book entitled The Reason for God, Tim Keller confesses he doesn’t intend to provide you with evidence that God exists. Why not? He says it’s because you already know that God exists…all of you, atheists included. He’s just trying to make you see that you already do. Then as if […]
Posted inReligion
Changing gods midstream
Reading Time: 7 minutes “You can’t ride two horses with one a**, sugarbean.” —Earl Smooter, Sweet Home Alabama Halfway through his book The Reason for God, Tim Keller pauses for an intermission in which he pivots from his previous discussion of “the seven biggest objections…people in our culture have about the Christian faith” to lay the groundwork for part two […]
Posted inReligion
What’s wrong with asking for a miracle?
Reading Time: 6 minutes When people ask me why I left my faith, I always find myself spending the first part of the conversation discounting assumptions they bring about why this keeps happening to people they know. They usually reach for one of several non-rational causes: Somebody hurt you once You went to the wrong church You just want […]
Posted inScience
Believing in evolution, but not too much
Reading Time: 10 minutes Moving on to Chapter 6 in his The Reason for God, Tim Keller takes on Richard Dawkins, who argues in The God Delusion that scientific literacy and religious belief are inversely related. The more a person understands modern science, Dawkins suggests, the less inclined he will be to accept the supernatural claims of any religion. To back this up, […]
Posted inGeneral
Straw skepticism and The Reason for God
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 […]
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 […]