Post tagged with atheism

  • The Edsel of Christianity?

    August 17th, 201107:25 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    I have now completed Part II of The End of Christianity, a section which aimed through the essays of Hector Avalos, Jaco Gericke and Valerie Tarico, to establish on biblical grounds why Christianity needs to end. At this point I'd like to take a look back at the section by identifying a set of assumptions that appear to lie behind the three essays ...

  • The End of Christianity? A Skeptical Review (Part 7)

    August 17th, 201112:58 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Chapter 6 of The End of Christianity brings us to Valerie Tarico's essay "God's Emotions: Why the Biblical God Is Hopelessly Human". While the argument of the essay is not altogether clear, it would appear that Tarico hopes to extend Jaco Gericke's assault on the biblical portrayal of God by arguing that the presence of "human" emotions in the bib...

  • The End of Christianity? A Skeptical Review (Part 6)

    August 15th, 201107:58 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    "Can God exist if Yahweh doesn't?" This is the question at the center of The End of Christianity chapter five written by Jaco Gericke. Some of the other chapters in The End of Christianity have bad arguments, and at least one chapter seems to lack an argument altogether. But the argument of this chapter is strange. Let me explain. Gericke beg...

  • The End of Christianity? A Skeptical Review (Part 4)

    August 11th, 201109:12 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    In this installment of our ongoing review of Loftus, ed., The End of Christianity we turn to an evaluation of chapter 3 which is an essay by John W. Loftus titled "Christianity is wildly improbable". The essay begins with John's characteristic Braveheart-styled bravado: "When it comes to Christianity, two thousand years are enough. It's time this...

  • The End of Christianity? A Skeptical Review (Part 2)

    August 09th, 201111:38 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    My last exchange with David Eller over his essay in The Christian Delusion was not pretty. Simply because I pointed out that he forgot to include an argument in his chapter he responded that I was "clearly unfamiliar with the abundant literature". That's a great line. In fact it is so good that I've appropriated it for my arsenal. So if ever anyone...

  • The End of Christianity? A Skeptical Review (Part 1)

    August 07th, 201102:54 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    John Loftus, ed. The End of Christianity. Prometheus, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-61614-413-5. The End of Christianity is the final installment in an atheistic triumvirate designed to decimate Christiainty. (Previous entries include Loftus, Why I Became an Atheist and Loftus, ed. The Christian Delusion.) This review is going to be long and messy. As pr...

  • Has Stephen Law been sucked into an intellectual black hole? A Review of Law’s “Believing Bulls**t”

    August 02nd, 201111:04 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Stephen Law. Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole. Prometheus, 2011, 271 pp. ISBN: 978-1-61614-411-1. In the vein of Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World (Ballantine, 1997) and Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things (Holt, 2002), comes this new book by Stephen Law, senior lecturer in philosophy ...

  • On the ethics of a Christian positively blurbing a book on atheism

    July 20th, 201111:07 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    John W. Loftus' new book, The End of Christianity (Prometheus, 2011), a collection of essays by atheists, was just released a few weeks ago. It serves as a companion volume to last year's The Christian Delusion. And it wears its raison-d'etre on its sleeve. I intend to provide a review of the book in the weeks to come after I finish up some other o...

  • On God, leprechauns and really bad analogies

    July 09th, 201111:58 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    My first smile this morning occurred as I walked past a looking glass and caught a glimpse of my handsome visage peering back at me. My second smile came when I read the comment of Curt Cameron (not to be confused with Kirk Cameron) in response to my discussion of protest atheism. Let's begin by citing Curt's comment in full: Here's a hypothetica...

  • Does a really old universe show that human beings are not important?

    July 05th, 201110:07 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Mark Twain thought so. In one of his finest rhetorical moments (in a career sparkling with them) he wrote: "Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of pa...
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An exploration of faith, knowledge, reason and doubt (with the occasional trite pop culture reference thrown in for good measure).