Rod Dreher on Whether Doctrine Matters to Liberal Roman Catholics

Posted on January 18, 2014 by PaulVK

The American Conservative

Douthat on the same subject “Catholicism and Cognitive Dissonance – NYTimes.com” http://feedly.com/k/1jezFqy

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Doesn’t Mind the Charge of Living Off Old Christian Moral Fat

Posted on January 17, 2014 by PaulVK

Fascinating piece on Camels With Hammers about this man’s attitude towards Christians who suggest to him that his post-Christian moral behavior continues to depend upon its Christian legacy.

So long as people don’t ignore and dismiss the numerous ways that I have thought for myself outside of Christianity and underestimate the amount of scrupulous care I put into rationally testing and redeveloping all my ideas after I left faith-based believing, and so long as they don’t take the evidence of the continuity of my self with my Christian past as some self-serving way of telling themselves “this is just a faze and I’ll come back to the faith where I belong eventually”, and so long as they don’t falsely try to claim that no one could have my virtues or ideas without Christianity as their philosophical progenitor and practical guarantor, I am delighted when my honest and uncensored self-expression resonates with Christians and is praised by them.

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Is AA too religious?

Posted on January 17, 2014 by PaulVK

From The Dish from AA Verses the Doctors in Slate

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When God’s Public Appearance Didn’t Work

Posted on January 17, 2014 by PaulVK

Zion

A Manuel for Creating Atheists

Peter Boghossian has written A Manual for Creating Atheists. The subtitle of chapter one gives the purpose: “To give people the conversational tools to talk people out of their faith and help them embrace reason.”

In one script he asks what it would take for someone to change their beliefs. When they ask him he borrows this scenario.

I’ll use a variation of American physicist Lawrence Krauss’s example in his debate with William Lane Craig: if I walked outside at night and all of the stars were organized to read, “I am God communicating with you, believe in Me!” and every human being worldwide witnessed this in their native language, this would be suggestive (but far from conclusive as it’s a perception and could be a delusion).

On Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher has a humorous response to what it would take for him to believe: Jesus Christ coming down from the sky during the halftime show at the Super Bowl and turning nachos into bread and fish.

Boghossian, Peter (2013-10-26). A Manual for Creating Atheists (Kindle Locations 1428-1431). Pitchstone Publishing. Kindle Edition.

For many atheists and agnostics the simplest answer to the question “why don’t you believe in God” is “I’ve never seen God. Why should I believe in something I can’t see or know by my senses.”

It’s a reasonable and understandable answer. If God is so big and important why not just show himself in an indisputable way so that everyone can see he exists. Why doesn’t he speak from his uniqueness and tell us what is right and what is wrong. Surely this would improve things on the planet and short cut all the often pointless wrangling and debating we do not only about God but mostly about what we should and shouldn’t do.

Saying “My Holy Book says…” Usually Doesn’t Help

Religious people will often wade into the debate at this point with their holy book(s) and declare that God has spoken and they know the truth. If people would only listen and comply then the world would be saved from its calamities.

Skeptics will respond that there are many holy books and many conflicting accounts. How can we choose? We must KNOW that it is God who speaks and we must KNOW that his commands are clear and understood. Skeptics will point to the fact that because we have no such agreement surrounding either the source or the content of this divine revelation then no such revelation has occurred.

A Singular Event Continue reading →

Posted in On the way to Sunday's sermon | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Ryan Bell’s Quest for the Natural Elephant

Posted on January 17, 2014 by PaulVK

Ryan Bell certainly started out his year without God with a media splash. The first entries in his blog were mostly noting the splash. Now it seems he’s settling into the project a bit more and beginning to process.

Getting down to work

His posting from Wednesday (as well as some that have followed) give me hope that it may be productive to follow. He seems to write well and he is listening to his critics. He’s being sufficiently transparent to let us in on not only his year but also himself before the year. As in most cases this “year” is not just a bolt from the blue. He’s been on this path for a while. In this posting he confesses to have been a functional atheist. In a way this is a “coming out” for him.

Larger Story of Secularism

This brings me to James KA Smith’s body of work on contemporary liturgies. Our beliefs are shaped by our lives. Even thought we don’t chose our beliefs we can shape them by shaping the liturgies of our lives. Continue reading →

Posted in Culture commentary, How to become a Christian | Tagged | 2 Comments

If God wrote my name in the stars in the sky

Posted on January 15, 2014 by PaulVK

A fun piece written by an atheist about a classic parable.

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Of Story and Physics

Posted on January 15, 2014 by PaulVK

Grandma and the bird

Can science crack “story”? Science can analyze the paper and the ink, and social science tries to engage the effect of story, but story stands beyond physics.

A young man kills himself because a girl says she doesn’t want to be with him. Story governs biology. It’s an amazing reality that we pay little attention to. Our “self” is only tangentially connected to this biology. When our biological self ends, our story doesn’t. The heat death of the universe is a physical certainty according to everything we know. Yet that heat death cannot touch story. What does that say? I think it says something.

Some physicists are eagerly looking for clues of the multiverse because it resolves the “problem” of the fine tuned universe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe. Religion has long recognized the power of story over the power of physics. Religion essentially says that physics serves story not the other way around.

Christian resurrection is not simply about people coming back to life, it is about the beginning of a universe where decay doesn’t destroy story. “The fall” in the Christian story is about physics no longer faithfully hosting or honoring story. Christians believe that the resurrected body of Jesus is the beginning of a better universe, one that tells better stories and hosts them more faithfully. It is the place where story is unleased from decay.

If Christians are wrong about this it is a very sad thing indeed because I deeply want your stories and mine to endure beyond our biology and the death of the decaying universe. I could of course be wrong. There are days when I think I might be wrong, but there are days when I think that this happy thought is in fact true, and those days are good days indeed. 🙂 It is a joy to give others good days like these.

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Why TULIP Does not Equal Reformed Theology

Posted on January 15, 2014 by PaulVK

by J. Todd Billings

So why does TULIP–a relatively recent creation that was never intended as a summary of Reformed doctrine–get so much press? A number of sociological reasons could explain this, but a central one is that Reformed and non-Reformed alike frequently share a basic misunderstanding about the Reformed tradition itself: that predestination is the “center” of Reformed theology, from which all else flows. Although scholars of the Reformation have repudiated this account of early Reformed theology for years, it is still a common perception. Predestination is indeed important in the Reformed tradition, because the Bible–given by God for our edification–speaks about predestination. Pastorally, Reformed teaching seeks to use this doctrine to encourage humility and gratitude to God for salvation.But predestination is not the theological center of the Reformed confessions, from which all other doctrines are deduced. It is one among many teachings that rises and falls on scriptural exegesis. While Reformed positions on predestination and related issues will have ripple effects for other Christian teachings, they do not form “the center” of the Reformed tradition which could be summarized by TULIP.

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LeadingChurch.com 2013 in review

Posted on January 14, 2014 by PaulVK

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 40,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 15 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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Fairness is as Fictitious as God

Posted on January 14, 2014 by PaulVK

DR HomeAmerican Want Fairness

Fairness is a big cultural value of Americans. It is one of the foundational assumptions between our idea of justice. Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind shows how for individualist westerners the basis for our assumptions about justice are the two concepts of fairness and harm. We imagine morality is defined as seeking our fairness for individuals and that individuals are not harmed.

For many Americans fairness trumps other controlling concepts. One example of this is the idea of cultural relativism. In order to be fair and avoid harm we must respect the cultures of others. The prime directive of modern anthropology is to study the culture of the group they are examining, not to judge or to change it. Western missionaries have been regularly criticized for colonial cultural imposition that has happened in their attempts at proselytizing people of other cultures.

It is also true, however that westerners who embrace cultural relativism will attempt to impose their ideas of justice upon other cultures for the sake of fairness. There is a lot of attention today on laws in much of the world against LGBTQ concerns and equal rights for women. In this article an anthropologist processes the dilemma and basically decides that when justice issues as she construes them are in conflict with the prime director of her academic discipline she will pitch the prime directive and attempt to impose her ideas of justice upon her subject culture. Colonialism, apparently, is not as dead in us as we wished to imagine.

God Cannot Be Found or Agreed Upon
Continue reading →

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