Response To The ExterminatorTwo times lately, Exterminator asked me to define terms I'd used in various statements I'd made around the internet. The first time was at Chaplain's, and when I asked if he was serious, Ex didn't reply. The second time was at SI's, and I decided to give him a formal response here, just for the sake of establishing a record. As for how he and I got to this point, well… SI wrote a post called I Wish I'd Written That in which he re-posted a few questions from Greta Christina's essay, Hey Religious Believers, Where's Your Evidence?
In accordance with my reaction to Greta's original post, in SI's thread, I argued that the reproduced questions were fallacious, which provoked criticism from some of his readers. Here's that conversation summarized:
TWIM / RvA Dialog IIIjim at RvA has responded to Reason, Intellect, Religion, & Belief. Per the usual format, my response follows, but we should address some tangential things which don’t relate to jim’s actual criticism of my post, first. I suspect that jim composed his response either drunk, or buzzed, because of the way it “went off.” I emailed jim and asked him to distill his criticisms into concise, clearly-stated objections. He refused, and hit me with the surprise of posting that email, instead. Well! It’s like that, eh?
TWIM / RvA Dialog IIjim at RvA has responded to Asteroids, Cathode Rays & Requisite Knowledge, Pt. II, and once again, my response follows.
TWIM / RvA Dialog: Introductionjim has challenged me to what he offers as a "better way to debate." He's written a rebuttal to last week's post Asteroids, Cathode Rays & Requisite Knowledge, and invited me to write a response to his rebuttal, which he's agreed to post in its original entirety on his blog.
I accepted the challenge, and my response follows.
Excuse Me Mr. Preacher Man: Doesn’t Perpetual Mean Permanent?A certain subset of Arabs and Israelis refrain from battle during the holiday of Ramadan, but seeing as how I'm not much a respecter of so-called "holy-days" in the first place, I'll spare no mercy to Ebonmuse this beautiful Thanksgiving afternoon.
Besides, the 'wife' (and 'baby') are out-of-town along with the rest of my usual 'crew' up here, so I've got ample writing time today. Which shouldn't matter, as although we'll certainly give it a fair shake, we don't need more than eight syllables to expose the flaw in Ebonmuse's so-called "Lesson of Autumn Leaves," and I already accomplished that in the title.
Giraffes, X-Rays, & The Earth’s Axial Tilt: My Response To DFirst, some backstory to this admittedly oddly-titled entry: Ebonmuse has a post titled Ten Questions To Ask Your Pastor in which he uses the following rhetorical device:
Why do Christians believe in the soul when neurology has found clear evidence that the sense of identity and personality can be altered by physical changes to the brain? —Ebonmuse, Ten Questions To Ask Your Pastor
My immediate questions were, “What in the Christian concept of the soul suggests that our sense of identity and personality shouldn’t be altered by physical changes to the brain?”
Response To DD’s “What Biblical Inerrancy Really Means” Pt. IIIThis is my third response to DD's "What Biblical Inerrancy Really Means."
Response To DD’s “What Biblical Inerrancy Really Means” Pt. III've reread DD's arguments a few more times, and I'd like to give them more thorough address, mostly to show why I think they are not justified by a solid foundation of logic, or historical fact. As we noted yesterday, DD's first objection to Jesus' response to the Sadducees as described in Matthew 22 was that,
..Jesus tells the Sadducees that they are wrong because they do not know the Scriptures… then proceeds to “correct” them by declaring that “at the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven”—which is not written anywhere in the Old Testament Scriptures!
In that post, DD also introduced the unsupported claim that,
..the Sadducees believed in the idea that the dead continued to exist as disembodied spirits…
I'd like to stop here and see if perhaps DD's claims contain any assumed premises or historical inaccuracies. I believe they do.
Response To DD’s “What Biblical Inerrancy Really Means”So Deacon Duncan of Evangelical Realism wrote a recent post in which he attempts to justify his opinion that the Bible is not the inerrant word of God. This time, his strategy consists of objecting to Jesus' answers to the Sadducees when asked about marriage and the resurrection as recorded in Matthew 22. For those prone to reading source material, you might want to also absorb Exodus 3:6.
Re-Introducing: TWIM’s Power CommentersI know what I said yesterday about not wanting to bore anybody with my arguments with other bloggers, but lately I’ve been thinking about a concept a few of us came up with several months ago, the concept of power commenters. After Deacon Duncan declined to participate in the debate I invited him to have with me, we had one post where we actually attempted the format, then pretty much set the whole idea on the backburner. Yet, as I did then, I think it’s a valid idea that could function as a sort of “intellectual broom” for the blogosphere, especially if we can find a few more qualified participants.