Reading Time: 7 minutes John W. Loftus has just endorsed my forthcoming book on the Resurrection in the following manner: Hitchens’s Razor, not Bayes’s Theorem, is the proper tool to use against the “absolute baselessness” of the resurrection belief (per David F. Strauss, as quoted in this book). There’s no objective evidence for it. The testimonial evidence is abysmally […]
John Loftus
Posted inBooks, The Secular
John Loftus and the Whole Kit and Caboodle
Reading Time: 4 minutes I have to thank John Loftus (author, ex-minister and owner of the great Debunking Christianity blog) for giving me a leg up in the blogging world when, running a tiny independent version of the A Tippling Philosopher blog as I was, he allowed me to write for him there. From there, I was offered to help found the Skeptic Ink […]
Posted inUncategorized
The Resurrection: What We Do and Don’t Have
Reading Time: 4 minutes John Loftus’s The Case Against Miracles (UK) is looking like it should be a cracker of a book as an anthology of chapters from different authors presenting a very strong case against the notion of miracles. I am loving his own chapter on the Resurrection (“The Resurrection of Jesus Never Took Place”), for obvious reasons (many of […]
Posted inGeneral
The Case Against Miracles
Reading Time: 2 minutes I have a lot to thank John Loftus for. Not only did I used to blog at his Debunking Christianity site, but he also commissioned me to write a chapter in two of his books (I wrote one on morality and one on free will). John recently sent me his latest book and I hope […]
Posted inReligion
On the Argument from Divine Miscommunication
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Argument from Divine Miscommunication, as set out by people like John Loftus (for example, in Chapter 7 of The Christian Delusion, titled “The Problem of Divine Miscommunication”), is a glaringly obvious one. There is so much confusion between theists on what God is, what God means, and what God has communicated, that either God […]
Posted inPolitics
Christianity Is Fundamentally Opposed to Freedom of Speech
Reading Time: 4 minutes I thought I’d resurrect this one from a few years back. In reading Richard Carrier’s excellent chapter in John Loftus’ superb Christianity is not Great in which I have a chapter myself, there is much to glean concerning matters of democracy and the American Constitution in the context of the Bible and religion. It is funny […]
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Problem of Evil: Suffering as Necessary for Good
Reading Time: 2 minutes The Problem of Evil (why is there so much suffering in the world given an OmniGod?) is sometimes answered by theists that suffering has to exist so that people have a working knowledge of what bad or evil is in order to know what good is, or indeed that pleasure cannot exist without pain. This is […]
Posted inThe Secular
Real Deconversion Story #14 – Anthony Toohey
Reading Time: 13 minutes Here is another account in my series of real-life deconversion stories. They are often painful, psychological affairs, as you can see from the various accounts. Anthony Toohey contacted me through facebook and ended up writing this account. Please check out my book of deconversion accounts, edited with Tristan Vick, which can be bought from the […]
Posted inReligion
Satan’s Incomprehensibility
Reading Time: 2 minutes Many people, particularly fundamentalists, still believe in a real and actual Satan. Of course, to everyone else, this is completely incomprehensible. And here’s one reason for why, as John Loftus sets out in his book The End of Christianity (p. 100): That the highest created being, known as Satan or the Devil, led an angelic rebellion against […]
Posted inUncategorized
God as an Abstraction
Reading Time: 4 minutes Some time ago, I finished John Loftus’ The Outsider Test for Faith. There is much to talk about within the pages, not least some of the excellent quotes he has gathered from other writers which he uses to defend his own positions on various topics. For the purposes of this post, I want to just think […]