skip to main |
skip to sidebar
The Christian Delusion is new book by a hack village atheist editor (and contributor) who has rounded up a number of other hack villages atheists to form a literary village of hack village atheists. On top of that, the hack village atheist editor has also rounded up some additional hack village atheists to write glowing blurbs for a book by, to, and for hack village atheists.
This is a truly monumental breakthrough in the history of hack village atheist publications. Link
22 comments:
For the link to the website of The Christian Delusion click here.
BTW: I was banned from Triablogue more than a year ago for responding to their fire with fire. They talk about angry atheists all the time but there is some real rage over at Triablogue from angry Christians. Why can't these Calvinists simply relax and let God do his thing? Hypocrisy is what it is!
John,
It's quite apparent that the goons at Triablogue are sociopaths. Calvinism seems to be a benign burka for these guys to hide within, as otherwise they would likely be in prison.
Book pre-ordered. Thanks.
I prefer this Steve Hayes. ;-)
Stephen K. Hayes
Regarding Triablogue, I can really feel the Christian love. They link to good old Dan Marvin's infantile Debunking Atheists site too, that says volumes.
Steve's posts are almost continually hostile, even towards other Christians (Catholics and "Arminians" take quite a beating there).
Steve and Jason are as relentless and severe in their critiques of other Christians as they are against atheists. Their tone is generally derisive and condescending at best.
Galatians 5:22-23 "But the fruit of the Spirit is hostility, moodiness, impatience, intolerance, rancor, severity and derision. Against such things there is no law."
(I guess that's the new version.)
Oh, oh! Can I be a hack atheist, too?
The further I've ventured into Christianity as anything more than a benign cultural trope (something to do with my wife on a Sunday Morning), the more I meet guys who exhibit the same personality as this Hayes bozo. They usually are passive-aggressive little geeks whose adherence to authority has created nuclear level resentments. They also seem to be unsuccessfully trying to beat up the bullies who once beat them up. They don't get that being ostracized as a kid for loving Dungeons & Dragons doesn't get redeemed by arguing the literal inevitability of apocalyptic literature. It would be nice if these guys just got into a real fist-fight, let the rage out and become men. But, alas, they will always be geeky little boys looking to seize status by kissing the ass of authority figures and imagining intangible powers. Sad.
What I like is how Triablogue calls other folk hacks, yet allows posts like this
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2008/08/complex-sleight-of-hand.html
in which the author shows absolutely zero understanding of the topic at hand (information theory), and gets virtually every point they make completely wrong. If anyone wanted a textbook example of a hack at work, the above link would be ideal.
or you could look at such sterling defences of the doctrine of Jesus as all man/all God at the same time in the sense by a former contributor to their website with the wonderful 'peanut butter and jelly sandwich' argument described in this post
http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2009/07/does-logic-presuppose-christian-god_06.html
There are plenty examples of Hays' own endorsements of hackery as well, given that he seems to think cranks like Rupert Sheldrake are actually doing something worthwhile,and it's just the ideology of the 'establishment' that can't see their value (never mind that there are actually credible universities that do study the same/similar phenomena to Sheldrake)
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2009/10/monkeys-uncle.html
"His [Sheldrake's] theory may be wacky (would you say the same thing about memes?), but he investigates natural phenomena which many ideologically straightjacketed scientists simply ignore because it doesn't fit into their paradigm."
I believe this line of thinking ticks quite a few boxes on the crackpot index
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
I think Steve should take something for that cough.
Steve's love and understanding of fellow Christians like Vic Reppert is also apparent at Triablogue.
Hi John,
Welcome aboard: http://biblioblogtop50.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/original-jewish-lyles-debunking/
"They talk about angry atheists all the time but there is some real rage over at Triablogue from angry Christians."
But John, Christians are *righteously* angry at atheists and atheists have no rational basis for anger at all. Duh. Not to be confused with a license to be as immature as they want to be.
:p
Ben
I sympathize with all who have had run-ins with angry people who call themselves Christians.
With the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity, perhaps it is to be expected that a Calvinist would act... well....
(Total Depravity - a key doctrine of Calvinism. It means man's nature is completely evil.)
Most Calvinists reject evolution for calling man essentially an ape.
Yet they call themselves totally depraved.
At least an ape has a little bit more self-respect.
Is it any wonder why the Calvinist is angry at others and himself? He believes himself a sinner by nature, in the hands of an angry god.
It is for these and other reasons that Orthodox Christians rejected Calvinism at the Council of Jerusalem, 1672. The Council stated: "they are manifestly heretics, and the chiefest of heretics.... propounders of new and silly dogmas (if it is allowable to call what are really only fables dogmas)...."
We do not have the same God as the Calvinists do.
It is pagan Neoplatonic philosophy via Plotinos through Augustine through Aquinas, that made Calvinism possible.
The Calvinist has a Neoplatonic Augustinian god of divine simplicity such that will = = energy = essence. Because the divine will equals the divine essence, God's foreknowledge is the same as His will is the same as His nature which necessitates predestination, and thus sola fide becomes possible. Along with sola fide are the Calvinist distinctives, such as the idea that God does it all and thus God saves some people while leaving others to suffer eternal damnation.
The Calvinist Neoplatonic god is transcendent and thus grace is a created effect rather than an uncreated energy of God. Created grace for the Calvinist is the earned righteousness of Jesus at the Cross, the merits of which are transferred to his account.
The Calvinist Augustinian god is also a dialectical god, the god of the Filioque, whereby the persons are mere relations of opposites as in Thomism and a person is confused with an attribute of all three persons. With the Filioque, the dialectic between a Father who demands infinite justice and who is satisfied by the torment of a completely innocent Son becomes possible.
Divine simplicity, created grace, and the filioque are all key components of the Roman Catholic Scholastic synthesis, and are key components of Calvinism as well.
Because the Calvinist confuses person and nature in the Trinity, the Calvinist also confuses the person and nature in Adam, and assumes that Adam's personal choice to sin rendered his nature sinful or evil or totally depraved.
These are all the results of the false Neoplatonic god of Augustinianism.
For more on this, see Dr. Joseph Farrell's essay "A Theological Introduction to the Mystagogy of Saint Photios."
The Eastern Orthodox Church rejected this view of God as the sum of all prior heresies and excommunicated the Roman Catholic Church because of it. The pagan doctrines of divine simplicity, created grace, and the filioque held by both Catholics and Protestants alike are not at all acceptable to the Orthodox. It is for this reason that we cannot accept them into communion as fellow members of the Body of Christ.
I just received your first book. Will now finally read it. It was quite a hassle to get it here in South Africa... I'd love to get the second one but only probably next year.
Thanks Biblioblog!
Mr. Loftus I do hope you and your family are well. I was wondering the factual dismissal of the Christian faith based on logic is one side of the coin. I would like to ask the other people whom are Atheist / Agnostics about the emotional effect of leaving the faith. It seems this could be quite painful.
I do not begrudge the Triablogue folks their belief but from my pov they do the Christian faith a disservice. I will admit I am terrified of becoming an Atheist / Agnostic or even EO / Catholic.
I wanted to re-post my comments from Triablogue, because most of them seem to be, at least to me, unreasonable. I doubt talking some sense into them would do the trick, since they would probably say I wasn't qualified to speak on anything related to what their eletist club "allowed" to be discussed by diktat of those most righteous. Probably one reason they banned poor John W. Loftus in the first place... zealots don't like other zealots... and they normally just like to get rid of them--one way or another.
Anyway, here's the post I left over at Triablogue, because I think it's pertinent I'm posting it again:
Most Christian apologists don't have advanced degrees in the fields they address either, interestingly enough, or not. On second thought, it's not at all surprising.
However, ad hominem criticisms for people with advanced degrees (of any kind) doesn't seem to help the theist argument any, especially if what you were intending to defend it with is arguments from people with advanced degrees who support your hypothesis-i.e. the aforementioned apologists for your particular faith.
It seems you are committing the error which Thomas Paine alluded to when he stated: "I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it." -- Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
In my opinion, the reason for this is obviously because of a preconceived bias, or as ex-Bishop Richard Holloway has stated:
"One of the things that bedevils religion, is that it develops official truth, which is antithetical to real truth. You close yourself off from the future... It makes you disrespectful to others who may see things from a different angle and may not be stupid people."
It's really hard to picture you as the village atheist. Or even a village atheist fullstop. What does it meant to be a village atheist exactly? Is it like being the token skeptic on a paranormal show where you're there just to pretend that there's an air of legitimacy to what would otherwise be unbridled faith? I don't know, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.
Almost seems like an act of ostracising rolled up in a well poisoning exercise.
Kel,
As I understand it the phrase "village atheist" is a play on "village idiot." Meaning from the standpoint of collectivistic tribal (or should we say triablogual) sensibilities, atheists are seen as that lone idiot in the village that they just have to put up with because there's just one in every crowd of normal people. Normal people in this case would be theists. (There are more theists than atheists in this world, so it's not a surprising portrayal for someone who is used to uncharitably disagreeing with our arguments). And the joke from Hays' standpoint is that a whole bunch of lone idiots from different towns got together to write a big idiotic atheist book.
It's as clever as they are wrong. Well, they may actually be more wrong than clever. They are pretty wrong. hehe
Ben
On the issue of Calvinism John wrote: Total Depravity - a key doctrine of Calvinism. It means man's nature is completely evil.
Actually Calvinists do not believe that man's nature is "totally evil," rather they believe that depravity has affected every aspect of a person's nature including their reasoning and will. This is the reason that many of them argue in favor of presuppositionalism. Since a person cannot depend on their own reasoning and logic (because of depravity) they have to trust that God exists and that the Bible is true. They then build their worldview on that foundation.
Anthony,
"We will act in sinful ways because our human nature is sinful."
- Donald K. McKim, "Introducing the Reformed Faith", p. 72.
Does this say that sin has merely affected every aspect of a person's nature (as, for example, yeast might be mixed with flour), or that a person's very nature itself is sinful?
My reading of Calvinism is the latter; you may disagree, and if so, you are certainly welcome to hold your views.
Anthony,
However, to be fair, it is true that some Calvinists have also said that they do not believe that man's nature is "utterly" depraved (that is, evil to the utmost), so perhaps my use of the word "completely" was a poor choice.
Nevertheless, they locate man's depravity in man's nature itself.
Man's very nature itself was altered, it became totally depraved or sinful after the fall of Adam, in their view.
That is what the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity teaches, as I understand it.
John: However, to be fair, it is true that some Calvinists have also said that they do not believe that man's nature is "utterly" depraved (that is, evil to the utmost), so perhaps my use of the word "completely" was a poor choice.
That was my only point.
Man's very nature itself was altered, it became totally depraved or sinful after the fall of Adam, in their view.
This is indeed the Calvinist view. I am not here defending Calvinism, so I hope no one gets that idea as I rejected it when I rejected Christianity.
Post a Comment