This was a lot of hard work and I am especially grateful for the contributors to TCD and TEC. The last two books will come out early next year, which I'm the most excited about right now. I'm very grateful to Randal Rauser for inviting me to co-write God or Godless with him. These books will have an impact over the coming years. The main problem is getting people to read them. Most people don't read more than a book or two a year. ;-)Parsons: A further issue I have always had with Christianity is the one you express as follows:
"Christians are enjoined by their faith to love others, and I take it that means that regardless of how badly a person has gone wrong, we think that, by the grace of God, that they could someday be brought to disconnect themselves from their sin by repentance."
Taken literally, this means that Christians are enjoined to love, say, people who throw acid into the faces of little girls to keep them from going to school. Indeed, Christians are enjoined to love tyrants, serial killers, traffickers in sexual slavery, drug cartel thugs, terrorists, fanatics, con men who cheat the elderly out of their life savings, etc.
I think the New Atheists are doing things which are a fundamental betrayal of the basic rules which must underlie all discourse concerning matters so serious as religion. It affects people like John Loftus, who has some interesting ideas, but invariably ruins the possibility of serious discourse with him by propagandistic tactics. A kind of atheist fanaticism is brewing, which undermines the very process which makes atheist-theist dialogue at all rewarding. LinkDavid Marshall, a Christian apologist who has written several books defending his faith, said:
A. The Roman method of crucifixion, which included the beating Jesus received before he was nailed to the cross, was done by non-consecrated pagan gentile men who were not set apart as holy in God’s sight. Plus the fact that Jesus’ beating and crucifixion generally was not any different from the thousands of other rebels and criminals the Romans made examples out of. (1)
I have just listened to Ray Bradley debate William Lane Craig. I heard this several years ago but didn't really pay it close attention. This time round I was quite shocked at how many points Craig evaded, or logical demands from Bradley that he met with the terms "God may" and so on.
Craig squirmed big time when Bradley pressed him on subsets of compossibles. This is a REALLY important point. I will try to set it out here:
A decade ago, I read Steven McKenzie’s King David: A Biography
(Oxford University Press, 2002). What I soon realized was that the Bible creates propaganda to sell faith in its God, especially though famous characters created to promote belief in Israelite monotheism; be they Abraham, Moses, David or Jesus. These embellished Super Heroes function like our comic book (now in movies) Super Heroes such as Superman, Batman and Spiderman battling the forces of evil for a world of good. But these idealized figures simply function to serve our fantasies in a world where reality is fraught with suffering and injustice
The Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament, has some of the most dramatic and frightening language in the Bible. In her new book Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Elaine Pagels places the Book of Revelation in its historical context and explores where the book's apocalyptic vision of the end of the world comes from.
Listen on NPR
Jesus is created / redacted in each of the Gospel author’s mind to give credence to their own story of Jesus which – for them – would have trouble standing on its own merits. Thus in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is the New Moses and his life is set in a Roman Palestine context that mimics Israel in Egypt complete with the killing of the toddlers to Jesus even being taken down to Egypt by his family so – like Moses and the Israelites – Jesus comes out of Egypt.