The Great King

 

A boy of nearly six lay weeping on the side of the road. His father, face down in the mud beside him, had just been slain. He was unable to pay the taxes required by the local governor. He pleaded with the collectors to spare his life, as he had no money with which to pay them. This was not their concern. The man was killed; the debt passed to his son.

 

A woman who witnessed the event came to comfort the boy. “I know this is hard…

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The creation account in Genesis is quite obviously a confused myth. However, there are a very large number of people who still believe in its literal truth. Here are three short, simple arguments for those people.



 



1. Adam and Eve did not deserve their punishment.



Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:

“Cursed is the ground for your… Continue

This is my first post in a planned series on the Historical Method. I will discuss general topics and areas of tension between conservative biblical scholars and skeptics. This series will include discussions of authorship, dating, and general reliability. My focus in this first post is the question of whether either group—the skeptic or the theist—is committed to a double standard regarding ancient texts.

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This is a sample post from my blog: Foxhole Atheism

 

The Huffington Post currently has an article describing some controversy over the exclusion of religious clergy/material from the 9/11 memorial service. Bloomberg has pledged to maintain his position despite conservative religious group protests. A spokesperson for the…

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What can the history of chemistry teach us about the popular-level objection to evolution regarding the “gaps” in the fossil record? I think we can gain insight from Dmitri Mendeleev and the creation of the Periodic Table of Elements.

 

Mendeleev (1834 – 1907) sought to group the known elements in an organized and informative way. He arranged the elements into columns (groups) and rows (periods). These are based on certain properties of their atomic components. Based on these…

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I am an atheist. Let me be clear. I don’t believe in any gods or goddesses. I don’t believe in ghosts or ESP. I don’t believe in anything you might associate with the supernatural. Period.

 

Yet, there is a move often made by theists. It goes a little something like this:

 

Theist: Can you prove that (my) God does not exist?

Atheist: Not absolutely, no.

Theist: Then you should really call yourself an agnostic.

 

Many of us then go into…

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From my blog: Foxhole Atheism

 

One of the most popular arguments for theism is the Fine Tuning Argument (FTA). The FTA is generally formulated something like this:

1. The “constants” of the universe either arrived by chance or design
2. The chance is overwhelmingly small
3. Therefore, they must have arrived by design

 

There are a lot of things we could discuss about the FTA. It…

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Read more of my posts at http://foxholeatheism.com



Whenever you attack someone on the inconsistencies in the Bible, they will often retreat to the realm of possibility. But the point I always make is “Why should we care about possibility?” It’s possible that you are reading a blog post typed by a large, green rodent. It’s possible that you will wake up tomorrow only to discover that you’re on a Vogon ship and you forgot your towel. Shouldn’t we… Continue

Oxford philosopher Peter Millican, in this free series on philosophy (you should download it and listen to it – it’s free!), raises a very simple challenge to biblical innerancy. I’ve adapted it slightly below:

 

1. Commanding genocide is not morally praiseworthy.

2. Every act of God is morally praiseworthy.

3. God commands genocide in the Bible.

4. Therefore, not everything in…

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It’s time for me to renew my license plates. Luckily, I received a card in the mail with a PIN number, License Plate Number, and some other information I would need to renew them online. Given the many wasted hours spent waiting in line at the DMV over the years, I was grateful for this new alternative.



So, I went to log into the site with the information provided. I was asked for my PIN and plate number (changed). The PIN Number was completely new to me, but I was pretty confident I… Continue

There has been a lot of discussion about what grounds morality following the debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig on whether God is the only possible ground for morality. Many will argue this is the case, and I think it’s even the reason C.S. Lewis switched teams. So, let’s consider the problem of grounding morality.

 

It seems to me that certain theories only manage to compound problems when it comes to explaining morality. For example, a Divine Command theorist…

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This is a shortened version of my second post in a series on the New Testament Gospels. My first post was on whether the Gospel writers were eyewitnesses. Now, I’ll turn my attention to the contradictions between the Gospels.

 

Regardless of what anyone says, the Gospels do contain prima facie…

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