Reading Time: 8 minutes This is a guest post by Lex Lata (prompted by Jonathan MS Pearce’s video, Biblical Contradictions: Demons and Gadara vs Gerasa). In the matter of proper names, the Greek copies are often incorrect, and in the Gospels one might be misled by their authority. The transaction about the swine, which were driven down a steep place by […]
Refuting Religion
Posted inPhilosophy
Obliterating the Kalam Cosmological Argument
Reading Time: 4 minutes I love me a bit of the Kalam. Well, more accurately, a bit of criticism of the Kalam. What am I talking about? What is this Kalam? Well, the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) is a short, three-lined syllogism that supposedly shows that the universe required a cause for its existence, and with some mental gerrymandering, […]
Posted inReligion
Christians weaponizing scholars’ quotes: Sherwin-White, Russell, and Vilenkin
Reading Time: 4 minutes Christians citing experts badly: this time, it’s a historian, a philosopher, and a cosmologist (3 of 3).
Posted inReligion
Gambling on prayer: Getting addicted to blind hope
Reading Time: 7 minutes I’ve made it clear that prayer does not change God’s mind. It can’t. God is immutable, and his predictions or knowledge about the universe (and his own actions) are set in stone from causally before the creation of the universe. It’s all down to his infallible foreknowledge. So prayer isn’t about changing God’s mind. But […]
Posted inReligion
The prima facie problems with prayer
Reading Time: 3 minutes There are obvious—prima facie—problems with prayer. Prime problems that hit you in the face like a divinely unstopped tsunami. But what is really evocative of the bind that religious believers find themselves in is the idea that they are praying in the first place. Okay, let’s back it up a little. No, a little bit […]
Posted inReligion
Christian apologetics and defending Matthew’s guards
Reading Time: 17 minutes There’s something meta going on when a Christian apologist takes aim at a biblical account of mine with some typical apologetics, claiming I am making stuff up out of whole cloth when I myself accused the Gospel writers (or apologists) of making stuff up out of whole cloth to defend themselves against Jewish accusations 2,000 […]
Posted inReligion
Why Matthew’s guards at Jesus’ tomb are so important
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’ve written before on why the guards at the tomb of Jesus, included only in the Gospel of Matthew, are almost certainly invented by the author of that Gospel. Today I will tell you how they fit into a larger narrative construction of the Jesus story, and that their invention tells us an awful lot […]
Posted inReligion
Jesus’ family were asylum-seeking political refugees
Reading Time: 2 minutes Making America great again was largely about building a wall. Indeed, we have all seen footage of Trump rallies with large contingents of white conservative Christians shouting, “Build the wall!” Those with would be one side and those without the other (political refugees included). And that wall – impossible pipedream as it was – would […]