Philosophy of religion must end. If the philosophy of religion is using reason to examine the the claims of religion, and if religion is based on faith, then philosophy of religion must end. For faith has no justification nor merit. A reasonable faith does not exist, nor can faith be a guide for reasoning to any objective conclusion.
Religion is indeed based on faith in supernatural forces and/or entities. Faith is indeed an unreliable way to gain objective knowledge about the world. And faith-based reasoning cannot justify any claim concerning matters of fact like the nature of nature and its workings. So philosophy of religion is reasoning about that which is unreasonable. It takes the utterly unwarranted conclusions of faith seriously. To reason about religion requires granting more than a philosopher worthy of the name should do, since the very first principle of religion is faith. There are some things philosophers should not take seriously and still remain as intellectuals. A faith-based claim is one of them. There are other ways to deal with those types of claims. The proper discipline to determine if a claim is faith-based or not is to be found in the sciences.
Robert Conner studied Greek, Hebrew, some Aramaic and even Coptic back in the mid-70's at Western Kentucky University. He's written nine books, including
Jesus the Sorcerer,
The Secret Gospel of Mark and
Magic in Christianity, as well as a number of articles and essays. If you want a primer on what the earliest critics of Christianity had to say about this new cult then I'm publishing an essay he wrote in several parts, with approval. This is Part 2. To get up to speed
Part 1 can be found here.
Sophisticated theology/philosophy is argumentation used by delusional people to defend the indefensible. It is pure sophistry, empty rhetoric without substance, fallacious reasoning, ungrounded assertions lacking sufficient evidence. Sophisticated theology/philosophy is a kind of red-herring argumentation used as a smoke screen to hide the fact that faith lacks sufficient evidence. Follow its trail and you will be led down the rabbit hole of definitions used to obfuscate the lack of evidence. Sophisticated theology/philosophy confuses people who don't share that sophistication. At its most fundamental level sophisticated theology/philosophy is nothing more than special pleading.
Here is Bernie Sander's closing at last night's debate. The crowd chanted his name afterward! That's amazing for a debate where initially the crowd was largely in favor of Hillary Clinton.
An atheologian is a non-theologian, an atheist opposed to theology. That's a good description of Parsons on his good days. A hypocrite might be better one, according to sir_russ in his letter to him below. Over at the Secular Outpost I'm being judged by my commenters, and also by who I have banned. As an example of one of my commenters let me introduce you to sir_russ, someone I personally know. As to my banning people, every online blog writer devoted to topics like atheism or theism bans people. I guarantee you I have never banned anyone merely because they disagreed with me, ever. In a few rare cases over the past decade I've banned a disagreeable person when the ignorance was just too great to tolerate and when that person would not give it a rest. After banning people they never say they were banned for good reasons, either. So that just about covers everything except the substance of our recent disagreement. Here's sir_russ:
The whole reason sophisticated Christian argumentation exists in the first place is because it takes sophistication to make the Christian faith palatable. The more the sophistication then the more the obfuscation, since their faith can only be defended by confusing people who don't share that sophistication. Defenses of Christianity are nothing but special pleading hiding underneath several layers of obfuscation with a sophistication to make it appear otherwise. It's nothing less than special pleading all the way down, and it doesn't take sophistication to see this or to call it out. Even a child can recognize what it is.
The red headings represent PowerPoint slides. Here we go...
I’m very honored to be here and happy people actually showed up to listen to this debate. I have a lot of ground to cover so I must begin.