10 Tips for Winning a Debate
Some good advice from Hemant Mehta.
The James Ossuary |
In The Improbability Principle, the renowned statistician David J. Hand argues that extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month. But Hand is no believer in superstitions, prophecies, or the paranormal. His definition of “miracle” is thoroughly rational. No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive. All we need, Hand argues, is a firm grounding in a powerful set of laws: the laws of inevitability, of truly large numbers, of selection, of the probability lever, and of near enough.
We have only two main sources on the resurrection of Jesus: the writings of Paul, and the Gospels. Let’s look at each of them in turn.
Labels: Philosophy of Religion
Labels: "Avalos"
Let's just ask the right-handers, which I am one, to use left-handed guitars then! I see no reason to think anyone should use right-handed guitars! Let's have a revolution. Let's start strumming with left-handed guitars and do away with the right-handed ones! Usually the majorities rule while minorities suck. Screw that caste system. In the past, left-handed people were demonized by Christian folks. True story. So to correct this injustice let's make right handers conform from now on. Let's do it from compassion and love.To see what produced the stigma and even demonization of left-handed people and what is eliminating it read below. Again, as Dawkins said, "science works, bitches." Faith does not! Get. Point. The.
What I do find disappointing, tremendously disappointing, is that modern people would defend the abhorrent views on slavery we find in the Bible. After all the progress we’ve made. But they don’t just defend these views as the primitive ideas of people in an ancient society; they ascribe them to God. God! The creator of the universe! The unchanging, omni-benevolent designer of morality himself wanted the Hebrews to own other people as property? Wanted people to do hard labour and provide sexual services against their will, amid violent beatings that left them barely clinging on to life?
And it is Christians who ask me where I get my morality from?
Matilda Gage was a suffragist, a Native American activist, an abolitionist, a freethinker, and a prolific author, who was "born with a hatred of oppression". She spent her childhood in a house which was used as a station of the Underground Railroad. She faced prison for her actions under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 which criminalized assistance to escaped slaves. Even though she was beset by both financial and physical (cardiac) problems throughout her life, her work for women's rights was extensive, practical, and often brilliantly executed.
Gage became involved in the women's rights movement in 1852 when she decided to speak at the National Women's Rights Convention in Syracuse, New York. She served as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1875 to 1876, and served as either Chair of the Executive Committee or Vice President for over twenty years. During the 1876 convention, she successfully argued against a group of police who claimed the association was holding an illegal assembly. They left without pressing charges.
Gage was considered to be more radical than either Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton (with whom she wrote History of Woman Suffrage). Along with Stanton, she was a vocal critic of the Christian Church, which put her at odds with conservative suffragists such as Frances Willard and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Rather than arguing that women deserved the vote because their feminine morality would then properly influence legislation (as the WCTU did), she argued that they deserved suffrage as a 'natural right'. LINK.
I give this book two thumbs way up. In addition to courageously sharing his personal story, Loftus applies his considerable training and expertise into developing a cumulative case against Christianity and for atheism. I cannot think of another book like it on the market. Loftus is clearly familiar with the work of evangelical apologists like Copan, Craig, Geisler, and Moreland, as his book is filled with references to their work and objections to their arguments. In fact, his book might best be described as a “counter-apologetics” textbook. Anyone who reads this blog (The Secular Outpost) but has not yet read Why I Became an Atheist should do so. LINK.
Labels: Lowder
I think Dickson and many other “public Christians” are guilty of exactly the same thing. They speak out against the Dawkinses and Krausses of the world, rather than tackling leading atheist philosophers such as Graham Oppy, Theodore Drange and Quentin Smith, to name just a few. Christians devote entire websites to attacking The God Delusion, yet seem to completely ignore books like Why I Became an Atheist,in which John Loftus absolutely does engage with Plantinga, Craig and company, very successfully I think. And then there are classics such as Oppy’s Arguing About Gods, Sobel’s Logic and Theism, and so many more. LINK.
I'm new to agnosticism. And I'm positive of my outlook. However, the emotional aspects of my former Christian faith are still present, i.e. the guilt and the shame. What's the best way to get beyond this. I can see the positivity in a life without religious barriers. I'm just struggling to get there.My reply:
Thank you so much! I've been depressed for the last two weeks.My reply:
Labels: atonement, Good Friday, j. m. green