November 23, 2009
Cost of a Typepad Pro account? $149.50 per year.
Cost of freedom of speech? Hundreds of thousands of American lives.
Cost of banning me in the thread from In Defense of Free Speech, and then closing comments so those who really value free speech couldn't criticize Ebonmuse like they did last time? Priceless!
November 13, 2009
This is my third response to DD's "What Biblical Inerrancy Really Means."
November 7, 2009
I'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.
October 20, 2009
I 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.
October 19, 2009
I'm a semi-regular reader of Common Sense Atheism, maintained by Christian-turned-atheist philosophy student, Luke. If you've never checked out Luke's site, I suggest you do. The commentary is usually thoughtful, and the integrity of the debate more than you typically find in the blogosphere. He's got what might be the most thorough collection of William Lane Craig material besides Craig's blog, and also links to over 400 debates between atheists and believers. Luke's blog is a genuine resource to (a)theism.
What originally turned me on to Luke's style was his sharp dismissal of much of what the New Atheists have to say. Luke ##— like myself — has a very low tolerance for sloppy atheist arguments. He's usually apt to call them when he sees them, too, which is all the better, as I've noticed atheists can be quite fond of towing party lines and refusing to rebuke their own, even when such is clearly called for. The only real negative I'd noticed up until last night was that I've seen Luke threaten to ban commenters (no, not me) for what I'd call nothing more than "disagreeable disagreement." While I don't know that Luke's ever banned anybody, I have absolutely zero tolerance for those who resort to censorship and moderation, and this opinion would not relent even of my own mother. Hence the offensiveness of even the suggestion.
August 3, 2009
Hmmm…. I'm not sure, but I believe Deacon Duncan considered my response to his Unscientific America trolling, and deleted it. I suppose time will tell. What is it with atheists and censorship, anyways? Do the dissenters now fear the dissent they were once so fond of championing?
DD's post was about the great American intellectual decline, and of course, he blames religious influence – and only religious influence – for the current problems facing our education system. I've noticed that many otherwise educated individuals erroneously brand religion as the convenient scapegoat for society's ills-du-jour, and for me, such usually comes across as rhetorical stretching, just like when religious individuals blame evolution for society's problems.
I felt DD's argument had a tincture of merit, but was also grossly oversimplified. I figured I might as well post my thoughts somewhere else they be wasted, so my response follows. I'm mostly interested in your thoughts on the great American intellectual decline, but I'd also like to know if anyone can speculate on why this comment might have been deleted.
July 29, 2009
So, we were discussing the hypothetical scenario of a limb generation, and how much supernatural credence we could assign to such a thing. The blog owner, jim, banned me, because his blog is, in his own words, "not a free-speech zone." He claimed I committed an "egregious breach of honesty above" and demanded that I apologize for it, yet 40 comments preceded his, and he refused to be any more specific than that. I felt such a demand was a bit strange coming from somebody who apparently has no problem calling others things like "mealy-mouthed prick" and "disputational pissant." Further out of line for a rationalist was that jim didn't even offer a testable claim: he never even said where this "egregious breach of honesty" occurred, that I could challenge it. He just deleted my next comment.
July 22, 2009
I have an open mind (I think) so I am willing to be convinced. I’ll even say that if you show me good evidence, I’ll bow down and worship your god, whoever he may be. But I want evidence. -SI, The Existence of God
MiracleQuest is alive and well again, this time at SI's. So far, it's went more or less exactly as every other discussion of this nature I've seen: hundreds of comments, plenty of insults and not much to mention in terms of reasonable resolution.
SI asks believers to present their "good evidence" for God. Sounds innocent enough, right?
July 13, 2009
In Pt. 1, we discussed SI's version of the oft-repeated "no evidence for God" argument. In the thread, Lifeguard asked a few good questions:
Can an ironclad case for God’s existence can be made? Absent an ironclad case, regardless of why such a case cannot be made, then what is a believer left with besides the naked decision to believe? If even an IRONCLAD CASE does NOTHING without having ALREADY made the decision to believe, then what does that say about the warrant for belief in the absence of an ironclad case? Doesn’t this amount to saying that evidence for the existence of God only becomes evident when you’ve already made up your mind to believe? Isn’t that putting the cart in front of the horse?
I believe answering these questions as clearly as possible is mandatory in making myself understood here, so let's tackle the necessary definitions first.
July 9, 2009
If you've spent more than a passing moment listening to contemporary debates between atheists and believers, you're likely to have heard the claim that there is no evidence for God. I've heard this claim countless times, and I believe that many, most or possibly all who make the claim conflate the two related but distinct concepts of evidence and proof.
I also believe that attempts to resolve the matter are futile without firmly cementing the goalposts before beginning. Whether the responses are single or list, I've not once had an atheist accept anything I've ever suggested or heard suggested as evidence for God, and IMO there's nothing more annoying than, "Here is good evidence," followed by some variant of, "No it's not you douche," only to be repeated ad nauseum.