Video: Calvinism and the Problem of Evil:
I did a livestream reaction-video today on the problem of evil. There are some sound issues with this video, but my sound seems to have been mostly recorded, it is just quiet. The reason for its quietness is that there was a lot of background noise: cars passing, heavy rain, renovations—or, in the American dialect: remodelling—and so I had to have the gain on my cardioid Blue Yeti mic down really low, so as to exclude most of this background noise. The heat and the humidity, here in Ireland—as I am sure that my friend from North of the Border, Ignorant Amos, might confirm—is quite severe today, and so I had to have my windows open despite all of the background noise going on. However, I did not stand close enough to the microphone, and so the sound of my voice is really low. It was my first stream using OBS, and I think that it was ok for a first attempt.
Sound issues aside, one of the points that I keep returning to is that I consider Systematic Theology to be a System of Lies. In my view, “Systematic Theology” is merely an attempt by theologians to force the Biblical Text into its being univocal … when it is anything but.
I refer to Captain Cassidy McGillicudy, quite a lot, as I particularly like her style of counterapologetic. I don’t think that Captain Cassidy has much of a presence on YouTube which is why I particularly like to discuss her ideas on YouTube. I have binge-read most of what she has written over a period of more than a decade. Captain Cassidy, as I read her, is much more interested in persuading her readers that Christianity is harmful, rather than persuading her readers that Christianity is false. That Christianity is false, really should be a given, in this day and age. A religion invented to swindle mostly illiterate Mediterranean peasants, 2,000 years ago, really should not be swindling and fooling people today, in the age of the internet and Artificial Intelligence. As John Loftus puts it:
‘2,000 years is enough!’
. Pondering, though, the ways in which Christianity may be harmful, to my lights, is a much more interesting discussion, than pondering the myriad ways in which Christianity is false. Cassidy excels at this. To this end, allow me to recommend 24 Reasons to Abandon Christianity () by Charles Bufe. From what I remember from this book, and I read it but recently, Bufe mostly argues from Christianity’s being harmful rather than arguing from Christianity’s being false.
As John Loftus writes in a chapter in one of his anthologies—I just looked up my Kindle edition of God and Horrendous Suffering (), and it does not appear to be this one—the harm caused by Christianity is itself an argument from evil against the existence of an all-powerful, all-seeing and omnibenevolent god. Another humorous quip of Loftus’s is:
‘God’s hiring practices are abysmal!’
