Becky Garrison Interviewed by The Friendly Atheist

Becky Garrison is the author of the just-released The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail: The Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith . She is also Senior Contributing Editor for The Wittenburg Door, a Christian satirical magazine which I used to read every month for a few years. Becky had requested a review copy of my book so I struck up a conversation with her on My Space. She's intelligent. Hemant Mehta, the friendly atheist who "Sold His Soul on Ebay," interviewed her recently. See what you think.

3 comments:

Steven Carr said...

Becky Garrison writes a book refuting atheists.

What is her best argument for the existence of a god in her book?

Steven Carr said...

I ask , because her web page says 'Garrison turns aside the atheists' assault without ignoring its real criticisms, namely, the church's inadequate response to war, evolution, medical ethics, social justice, and other important issues in the post-9/11 world.'

So the 'real' criticisms of atheists are about medical ethics, and all that stuff about there being no evidence for god doesn't even count as a 'real' criticism of religion.

Huh?

Harry H. McCall said...

Becky Garrison is the typical “Fence Sitting” liberal Christian and yes, I said “Christian”. She should also know that by “Fence Sitting” she will be shot by both sides and in the end fade form sight.

Since her reading on major issues of Biblical scholarship is almost none existent, she is a shallow writer who must rely on a blend of humor and satire to create some type of pseudo knowledge for the general reader.

As I have discussed in an email with Sam Harris, the attack on Christianity is on two fronts: the text or the Biblical story itself and the use of modern philosophical logic as used by Harris, Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchen.

Since Garrison is a liberal Christian, the authors she is in dialogue with are N.T. Wright, Jürgen Moltmann, and Walter Brueggeman who are also in her camp of liberal Christianity.

I n the Biblical, area she would have done well to note the major problems which such objective historians such as John Van Seters (“In Search of History : Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History”, 1983 for which he won two awards and Abraham in History and Tradition, 1975, which (along with T.L Thompson’s Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham 1974 (now re-released in 2002)) proved that such patricidal characters a Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are creation of the writers of the Tetrateuch (Genesis – Numbers).

Garrison’s lack of understanding (especially with the above major works which were published over thirty years ago) leaves her book flawed. In the final analysis, she will only be preaching to the liberal Christian choir and that for only a limited time.