An Interesting Documentary on Northern-Irish Monarchism

R. C. Sproul (1939–2017) is a Presbyterian Philosopher whom I like to listen to.

He mentions the German word for: Enlightenment, which is: ‘Aufklärung’. I love this German word! It means, etymologically: ‘on-clearing’!

It is as though Christianity were a great confusion and befuddlement—which it is!—and then the Enlightenment came along, and some clarity returned to Western thinking.

I also like the word: ‘deconversion’. Eymologically, a ‘conversion’ is an ‘intense twisting’ or an ‘intense turning’. A deconversion is a reversal of this process. Christianity twisted your wits. Now, thanks to your deconversion, your wits have been untwisted.

Sproul talks about Montesquieu’s (1689–1755) ideas about monarchy. Monarchy requires honour. Queen Elizabeth II had honour. Does King Charles III have the same level of honour, though, as that possessed by Elizabeth II?

The Queen and Us is a BBC Not documentary from 1997concerning monarchism in Northern Ireland.

The Reverend Ian Paisley (1926–2014) has misgivings about Charles’s divorce and upcoming remarriage to a divorcée, Camilla Parker Bowles.

The Orange Order—a Protestant fraternity— doesn’t like the idea that Bowles is married to a Catholic. They don't like the idea of a divorced-and-remarried monarch on the throne of England. Robert Saulters, who was the Grand Master of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, from (1996–2010), wanted the crown to pass to William.

But, here is the thing: William is rumored to be a crypto-atheist!

And so, from a Protestant point of view, the British monarchs are only getting worse. Elizabeth was a true believer in Christianity. Charles seems to believe in some sort of generic deistic god, and William, it seems, doesn’t believe in God, at all!

At present, England and Scotland are Protestant theocracies. Both have established Protestant Churches. The most senior English Anglican Bishops sit in the House of Lords, and are termed ‘The Lords Spiritual’. As a secularist, I favour disestablishment.

Disestablishment is a Presbyterian idea. In Presbyterianism, there is the idea of the Church giving a ‘prophetic critique’ of the government. The Church can only prophetically critique the State if Church and State remain separate.

Whereas the King is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, he is merely a member of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The King becomes a Presbyterian, when north of the border. Down south he finds himself an Anglican, again.

John Knox (c. 1514–1572) could not have thundered against Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587) if he was ultimately employed by Queen Mary. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Secularism is not State Atheism. I would be equally opposed to State Atheism as I currently am opposed to theocracy and established churches.

I recommend Bruce Gore’s, an American Presbyterian’s, lecture series on the Presbyterian Roots of the American Revolution.

In the below documentary, The Queen and Us (1997), there is a Presbyterian minister, Reverend David Mongomery, who also calls for the disestablishment of the Churches of Scotland and England. I like Presbyterians. They are natural freethinkers. Indeed, the problem seems to be in Ireland that too many Presbyterians are freely thinking their way out of Christianity altogether. A couple of weeks ago, I attended an Ulster-Scots—what Americans would term: ‘Scots Irish’—heritage night in an old derelict Presbyterian Meeting House that was slowly being renovated. Both of the Presbyterian ministers, present, spoke of decline in the Irish Presbyterian Church. There are some counties in Ireland without a Presbyterian Congregation at all. Cork, a massive county, both in terms of area and population, only has two Presbyterian congregations left. However, becoming a non-theist does not actually necessitate giving up Presbyterianism altogether, as there is a Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church in Ireland that is affiliated with the Unitarian Universalists. In Ireland, it is possible to be both a Non Theist and a Presbyterian, and, in my estimation, if Presbyterianism has a future in Ireland, then surely this is it.

Figure 1: The pulpit from Cahan’s Presbyterian Meeting house that I attended for an Ulster Scots’ heritage night.

Video 1: An interesting series of talks concerning Presbyterian and the American Revolution.

Prince William’s Doubt: It’s Normal—It’s Impossible to Be Certain Whether There Is a God

Video 2: An interesting talk by R.C. Sproul concerning the Enlightenment.

Video 3: An interesting documentary produced by BBC Northern Ireland on Northern-Irish monarchism.

Ciarán Aodh Mac Ardghail (Ciarán Mc Ardle) is a digital creator from Ireland. Here is his linktree. Here is his YouTube Channel. Here is his LinkedIn. Here is his Instagram.

Precise Reasons Why Prayer Is a Fantasy Exercise

No matter how much the devout want it to be real 

It is not commonly grasped that Christianity is soundly falsified by a few verses in Acts 1 that describe Jesus’ ascension to heaven:
 
“…as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’”  (vv. 9-11)
 

Based on our knowledge of the Cosmos—in stark contrast to what the Bible authors believed—we know that this cannot possibly have happened. Above the earth’s atmosphere, there is the cold, radiation-
filled void that we know as outer space. The Bible authors had no clue that earth was one planet among many that orbit our sun. The blunt truth is that Jesus disappearing this way from the earth is a cover-up: the New Testament lies about what happened to Jesus at the end. His resurrected body cannot have escaped the planet, so either he’s still

walking around—or he died again. We are entitled to ask what happened to Lazarus: how long was it before he died again? (See John 11) And what happened to all the dead people in their tombs who came alive at moment Jesus died on the cross—then toured Jerusalem on Eastern morning? (see Matthew 27:51-52) Did they just head back to their tombs, to resume being dead?

Here's An Earlier Paper On the Evil God Challenge

It was published by Steven M. Cahn, “Cacodaemony,” in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, ed. Steven M. Cahn and David Shatz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 20–24. This paper was previously published in 1977. Cahn shares the parallels between an omnibenevolent God and an omnimalevolent Demon. Then he compares John Hick's "Soul Making" theodicy with a "Soul Breaking" theodicy. I couldn't find the text but here is a reading of it. I found it better to turn off the sound and read it myself, but see for yourselves.

An Enlightening Conversation between Richard Carrier PhD and Godless Granny

This is an extremely enlightening conversation that occurred on a livestream between Richard Carrier and Godless Granny.  “The Historical Jesus” has been ‘quest[ed]’ for—to borrow an expression from Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965)—since the days of Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768). This quest hasn’t turned up much… if indeed anything! I think that it is high time that we call this failed quest off, as it is beginning to appear as futile as a wild goose chase.

Richard Carrier explains that the documentary evidence that we would expect—were Reimarus’s historical Jesus a reality—really isn’t there. Carrier goes on to hint that perhaps certain documents from the ancient past were either doctored or destroyed, because the lack of Jesus’s being mentioned in these same documents could not easily have been explained. Documents that most likely would have mentioned a historical Jesus—if such a personage actually existed—have, quite conveniently, not come down to us. Documents that would have mentioned a historical Jesus, if such a person actually existed, are, extremely conveniently, no longer extant.

To reiterate: I personally am not a Mythicist. However, paradoxically, I do not believe that much—if indeed anything—can be known historically about the Jesus character presented to us in the New Testament. My position is a tad paradoxical: a historical Jesus, in all likelihood, existed, however we are unable to know much, if anything, about him historically. To me there is enough that we can distill from the fictional writings of the New Testament such that a historical Jesus becomes more likely than not… however, from these same fictional writings we are not able to distill any history concerning the doings of this same Jesus character.

Ciarán Aodh Mac Ardghail (Ciarán Mc Ardle) is a digital creator from Ireland. Here is his linktree. Here is his YouTube Channel. Here is his LinkedIn. Here is his Instagram.

An Atheist Grief Observed by Tim Callahan

Tim Callahan looks at C.S. Lewis's grief and his own. Skeptic religion editor Tim Callahan reflects on the loss of his home in the Altadena fires and the subsequent suicidal death of his daughter. LINK.

A Mixture of Magic Folklore, Superstition, and Cult Expectations

An honest sermon about the gospel of Mark: Chapter 3

Helping parishioners understand this chapter must be a real challenge for the clergy—especially those parishioners who have a grasp of how the world functions, and thus have little patience with ancient superstitions. The clergy are—more or less—obligated to promote the belief that the gospels were divinely inspired, despite the obvious evidence that this cannot possibly be true. There are just too many flaws and contradictions in the gospels. 
 
Thus a basic rule for reading the gospels, with any intent of truly understanding what’s going on with these documents, is this: admit that their authors were promoting the cult of their holy hero, Jesus. Championing Jesus theology was their goal, and there is little evidence that they knew what it meant to write history. Over and over again, contemporary readers must ask: how did the gospel author know this or that event actually happened? How did he know this or that Jesus-script was authentic? They fail as historians because they never cite their sources. This is alarmingly obvious because Matthew and Luke copied most of Mark’s gospel without admitting they’d done so. It was plagiarism off the charts.

The Evil God Challenge, Part One: Introduction

John W. Loftus asked me to write about Steven Law’s Evil God challenge (Wikipedia link). The topic turns out to be rather large, and it ramifies into several related topics that should be familiar to readers of this blog.

The Evil God challenge spawned a sizable literature, with articles that expand on it, and articles from theists that attempt to rebut it or nullify it. To keep the subject manageable, I’ll split my coverage across several articles. This article introduces the subject and provides references and a video.

• Wikipedia articles:
  • Steven Law
  • Evil God challenge (Wikipedia link)
• Steven Law’s blog pages:
  • The Evil God Challenge, February 12, 2010, announcing his original paper:
    • Law, Stephen. “The evil-god challenge.” Religious Studies 46, no. 3 (2010): 353-373.
    • PDF link to the paper
  • God, Evil, and Theodicies - Evil God and Mirror Theodicies, January 10, 2016
• Scholarly links:
  • The Evil God Challenge, Google Scholar entries
  • The Evil God Challenge, Google Scholar search result (original paper plus responses)
• And on Debuking Christianity:
  • What is the Likelihood That a Trickster or Evil God Exists?, 1/22/2010

Now that AI is here, check out my brief chat with Google Gemini on the Evil God challenge. Here is Gemini’s initial response:

Steven Law’s “Evil God challenge” is a philosophical thought experiment that questions the traditional concept of an all-good, all-powerful God. Here’s a summary of its core ideas:

• The Challenge:
  • Law presents the challenge of explaining why believing in an all-good God is more reasonable than believing in an all-evil God.
  • He argues that many arguments for God’s existence don’t inherently prove God’s goodness, and could equally support the existence of an evil deity.
• The Symmetry Thesis:
  • A key component is the “symmetry thesis,” which suggests that if the existence of good in the world is used to argue against an all-evil God, then the existence of evil should similarly argue against an all-good God.
  • Essentially, he questions why the “problem of evil” is considered a strong argument against a good God, but the “problem of good” isn’t considered an equally strong argument against an evil God.
• The Goal:
  • The challenge aims to provoke deeper consideration of the attributes ascribed to God, and to examine the logical consistency of theistic arguments.
  • It also forces examination of why we define good and evil in the way that we do.
• Responses:
  • There have been many responses to Laws challenge, including arguments that good is a positive reality, and evil is a privation of good, therefore not symmetrical. Also there are arguments that an all evil god, would not allow any good to exist.

In essence, Law’s challenge forces us to consider why we prioritize belief in a good God over an evil one, and to scrutinize the reasoning behind our theological assumptions.

Gemini’s summary is pretty good, but could do better at framing the Evil God challenge as a tool for showing how weak the standard theodicies are. (A theodicy is an attempt by a Christian apologist to solve the Problem of Evil, i.e. to explain how there can be so much evil in a world supposedly created by an omni-God.) Steven Law says that for many of the standard Christian responses to the Problem of Evil, there is a “mirror theodicy” that equally well (or poorly) tries to explain how there can be so much good in a world created by an omni-malevolent God. If the theist views the theodicy as a valid justification for the omni-God, why then isn’t the mirror theodicy an equally valid justification for the Evil God?

Alert readers will recognize similarities to parody religions and Street Epistemology, topics I’ll address in following articles. To very briefly summarize, both of those things aim to stimulate critical reflection by showing a person how the arguments they give to support their own religious claims work equally well, mutatis mutandis, to support a wide variety of other claims, such as the claims of other religions, or of parody religions.

This notion of analyzing the form of an argument, and plugging different terms into it, to see if the argument form still seems to work, is central to critical thinking. Around 2400 years ago, Ancient Greek thinkers began to analyze arguments this way. Presumably people had been making arguments for as long as they had language (which might have been for as long as people had anatomically modern vocal organs). Critical thinking began when people realized that arguments aren’t just things you assert when you want to make some specific point, but things that have forms you can analyze. The Evil God challenge is a clever case study in this kind of critical thinking.

Here’s a video to finish off this short introduction to the Evil God Challenge. Enjoy!

Critical Thinking: the Weakest Skill in the Christian Toolkit

Hardly a surprise, since the clergy urge, “Just take it on faith”

Quite a few years ago I knew a devout Catholic woman who bragged that she never read books—not even in college. She managed to get passing grades by taking careful notes in class. Nor did she have any interest in discussing religion, because she didn’t want to risk damaging here faith. Her primary goal in being deeply Catholic was to be able to see her mother again in heaven. She represents a case of extreme piety, but I have met other devout Christians who decline to engage with me on religious issues; they are determined to hold tight to their beliefs, reluctant to weaken them in any way. I suspect they’ve experienced too many moments of scary doubt.

Everything You Need to Know About Prayer

But May Not Want to Admit

I am pleased to announce that my new book on prayer is now available on Amazon, both paperback and Kindle. My collaborator on this work was my publisher at Insighting Growth Publications, Tim Sledge, whose many books are listed on his Amazon page. 

 

My first book, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief, was published in 2016, but I transferred the manuscript to Tim when my original publisher gave up the business. Tim suggested dividing the book into several easily accessible volumes, which we are now in the process of doing. This book on prayer is the third volume in the new series. 

 

Volume 1: Guessing About God

Volume 2: Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught

 

I hope readers will find my careful analysis of prayer helpful. 

 

 

 

David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University.

Visit My Page at The Secular Web!

You should already know of my 13 critically acclaimed books as I described them here. Avid readers will pardon me for reminding others of my page at The Secular Web. I've published on some key issues there. They cover the major faith responses to those of us who value reason and science. My next paper will probably be something to do with an atheist morality without a God, gods, or goddesses. In no particular order:

Is Atheism a Religious Faith? A Definitive Answer:

What is faith, atheism, and agnosticism? How should these words be understood? Why is this debate important? Who is right, and why does it matter? In this essay John Loftus tackles these issues, offering insights that are sure to enlighten us all.

Hail Mary: Was Virgin Mary Truly the Mother of God’s Son?:

In this essay John Loftus explores the most important questions regarding the belief that the 'Virgin Mary' truly was the mother of God's son. In short, he argues that no virgin ever gave birth to a son of God, citing sources for those who want an even longer argument. The argument begins by exploring a noteworthy Christian sect that questions whether, in fact, Mary was indeed a virgin, and whether God had a body through which conception could be achieved. The questions and issues that he goes on to explore should challenge what Christians believe about God, Mary, the Gospels, and their entire faith.

With So Many Flat Tires, How Does Christianity Keep On Going?

Apologists specialize in claiming the tires aren’t flat at all

I can think of at least six Christian tires that have been totally, permanently destroyed. They will be flat forever.  
 
(1)  God is good, loving, and all powerful. Horrendous human and animal suffering—ongoing for millennia—provide abundant evidence that this claim is feeble, indeed ridiculous.
 
(2)  The resurrection of Jesus, that is, god raised Jesus from the dead, thereby rescuing humans—those who believe in it—from eternal punishment. Yet the accounts of Easter morning in the gospels are contradictory and confusing. There are no reports of anyone actually seeing the resurrection happen.
 
(3)  We can be guided and inspired by the god portrayed in the Bible. Anyone who has read the Bible cover-to-cover can see that his claim is baseless. The god described in both the Old and New Testaments is cruel, bad-tempered, vindictive. Apologists deflect attention from this painful truth by quoting feel-good texts…and most churchgoers are none the wiser.

Bernie Sanders Offered An Exceptional Response to Trump's Congressional Address!

Actual Pain vs. Remembered Pain - A Crucial Difference for the Problem of Evil

You might wonder what this article has to do with zebras. Spoiler: they teach us how pain is not necessary for soul building, even if we allow for the baseless metaphysical projection of souls from the merely physical psychology of learning. Unlike Bruce Springsteen, Zebras are literally born to run.

In his blog post entitled My Paper on Morality without God is finished of March 1, 2025, John W. Loftus mentions his visit to Notre Dame University to meet James Sterba. A photo accompanying his post shows a reprint of Sterba’s article An Ethics without God That Is Compatible with Darwinian Evolution (Religions 2024, 15(7), 781; doi.org/10.3390/rel15070781). Religions is an Open Access journal, so Sterba’s paper is free to read online. (Read it now! I’ll wait.) The paper overlaps considerably with Sterba’s recent book:

Could a Good God Permit So Much Suffering?: A Debate by James Sterba, Richard Swinburne, OUP Oxford | 2024 | ISBN: 9780192664693, 0192664697 | Page count: 160.

Publisher’s blurb:

My Paper on Morality without God is finished.

It's finished, and I'm ready to send my response to Dr. James Sterba's essay on an ethics without God. He had invited me to write a response. It's ready to go. I also visited him at Notre Dame University and enjoyed the tour and our conversations. He's a great guy! pics below: