Last summer, while hanging out with a few friends of a certain age, we began to discuss how much life had changed since we were kids. One thing led to another and eventually we arrived at a kind of mutual consensus that our parents had done a pretty poor job of preparing us for the realities of adult life. “I wish my parents had taught me something about finances. Even how to balance a checkbook would’ve been helpful,” one friend confessed. We all laughed in agreement. Sex, marriage, raising children, money, practically all the big topics had been given precious little attention. Furthermore, because we were born in an era where technological change was faster than it had ever been before, our parents wouldn't have been able to imagine the changes in store for their children.
One often hears the claim that the worldview of atheists is based on faith, so that we have no more reason for our beliefs than the religious have for theirs. (Though many who say such things strangely enough consider their own faith to be perfectly justified!) One of the common atheist beliefs criticized this way is materialism. Supposedly, materialists say there is nothing beyond the physical world simply because they prefer to believe this. But is that true?
Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell. Proverbs 23:13
As an elementary principal of a rural school in Maine, I witnessed a lot of family dysfunction. I often marveled that so many children could manage their little worlds in spite of their parents. Family turmoil was pretty much the norm, but sometimes abuse entered the picture as well and that's when things got trickier. That's when I was required by law to involve the Department of Human Services. For the department to step in, however, the abuse had to be proven. To do so can be tricky when you live in a culture that defends the beating of children as a parent's God-given duty. So the agencies were always grappling with whether or not a parent had crossed the line. When was hitting too much hitting? How hard was too hard? What implements were appropriate to use? When was a child too young or too old to hit? Which parts of the body were acceptable for hitting? What kinds of misdemeanors merited smacking, hitting, spanking or whipping? Obviously there was no easy answers, especially when a good number of people held the long cherished belief that by not beating your kid, you run the risk of losing the child to the devil which would naturally up the chances of eternal damnation.
The holy book needs a good sweeping…
When piety gurus come up with an idea and it takes tenacious hold in minds of the faithful—no matter how bad it is—it can endure for centuries. Relics are first class gimmicks; bad theology, but they’re good for business. I’m told that relics fall into three categories: body parts of a saint, something he or she owned—or even an item that has been touched by the saint. I suspect latent atheism lurks behind the fasciation with relics: Since God cannot be seen, a relic is something tangible. The adoration/veneration of relics gives the faithful something
to look at—a fragment of God right there in front of them…so he must be real.
Protestants have their own version of a relic, and it too is highly prized as evidence of God’s presence in the world, right there on paper: for Protestants the ultimate relic is the Bible. It has pride of place on altars, TV preachers wave it around, it’s a talisman for swearing oaths. The concept of canon—a body of works deemed holy, the very word of God—is magical thinking, i.e., a
thing provides a way to know God, with no evidence whatever to support the claim. In fact, there is a lot of evidence against it, especially
its inferior quality.
Apologetics is defending a preconceived conclusion without regard to the truth.
Apologetics is nothing more than special pleading.
More please.
Bigliest loser in Alabama: "Christian witness."
It is from the Bible that Christians learn many of the specific characteristics of their god. They may say that they believe in God as a result of some direct experience of him, but when it comes to the belief that this is specifically their “three for the price of one” deity, they rely on scripture. It is there that they learn, among other things, that he is both the Yahweh that picked the tribe of Israel as his favorite as well as the Jesus that gave the Sermon on the Mount.
But how likely is it, if there were an omnipotent, omniscient, changeless, eternal creator of the universe, that he would be the deity described in scripture?
