Religion

Click here first, then click on the javascript link: Click here to view your video, “‘Blasphemy Challenge’” Check it out. Gil

This year’s Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum pits Alister McGrath against Daniel Dennett (last year’s pitted me against Michael Ruse): The Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum in Faith and Culture is a pilot program of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. The Forum is designed to provide a venue in which a respected evangelical scholar and a respected non-evangelical scholar dialogue on critical issues in philosophy, science, religion, and/or culture from their differing perspectives. This year’s forum will feature Alister McGrath of Oxford University and Daniel Dennett of Tufts University in dialogue on the future of atheism. SOURCE: www.greer-heard.com

Over at ATBC one of our brightest detractors Altabin (banned here, natch, because he’s just too smart for us) suggested an experiment. He misquoted the bible of course. It’s wolf and lamb or lion and calf. But we get his drift.

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53. Were all the animals friendly to man before the Flood? Idea: raise several baby animals like snake and mouse together to see if they remain friends as they are older.

That one may not have such a happy ending. Next time try it with a lion and a lamb.

As it just so happens… Read More ›

“I thought creationists were monsters, until I married one.” -Tatiana Hamboyan Harrison

Loving the Enemy -Special to Newsweek

Hat tip to the shimmying atheist Kristine for pointing to this article. Read More ›

It is my speculation the notorious Beyond Belief Conference and Dawkins call to make religion illegal are signs secularism could be on the brink of crisis. Ironically, Daniel Dennett unwittingly gives powerful “scientific” reasons why secularism is doomed and why religion (which tends to be ID-friendly) will prevail as the dominant paradigm in human culture. See Evolution is Cruel to Dawkins and Dennett.

Mike Gene said it so well:

And therein may lie the most cruel irony of evolution. While it may make it possible for Richard Dawkins to be intellectually fulfilled, it also means that Dawkins, from an evolutionary perspective, embraces a world view that is maladapted to his biological essence and thus is nothing more than another evolutionary oddity whose lineage is a dead-end.

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After mulling over the recent blasphemy challenge brouhaha, I have a concern I’d like to express. Spiritual matters aside, I want to draw attention to the potential psychological ramifications of committing such an act as the challenge requires. As long as the person remains an atheist (or at least a non-Christian), I see no problems. However, what if he or she were to come to believe later in life that Christianity is true and that he or she had committed a sin for which no forgiveness can be attained and for which the penalty is eternity in hell?
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Richard Dawkins continues to publish my past emails to him without permission and I continue to return the favor. The following correspondence is current and remarkable. The subject hearder “Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime” is Dawkins’s. I’ve omitted the portions of our correspondence not relevant to this theme. =-=-=-=-=- Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:35:39 -0600 To: Richard Dawkins From: “William A. Dembski” Subject: Re: Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime Dear Prof. Dawkins, Your response below regarding The Blasphemy Challenge (http://blasphemychallenge.com) is predictable, though thank you for being so forthright in endorsing it. Question: Would you be willing to go further and endorse expanding The Blasphemy Challenge to include blaspheming the God of Islam, encouraging young people in the Muslim Read More ›

I found the images of young people in “The Blasphemy Challenge” giving up their immortal souls on a dare disturbing enough to make me weep for them. I’m not rationally convinced we have immortal souls to give up but certainly the possibility exists. Imagine on judgement day that was you in the video and it was being replayed. There’s nothing to gain and everything to lose in this. Please join me in a simple prayer for the young victims of this stunt. “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

My shortest UD post ever. The link says it all. http://blasphemychallenge.com/ “There’s only one catch: We want your soul.”

Here is an excerpt from Richard Kirk’s review of Dawkins’s The God Delusion, which appeared in The American Spectator. . . . When it comes to magnanimity, here’s a sample of the author’s generosity: “To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird.” This comment shows the contempt Dawkins consistently displays for ideas that don’t conform to his own — a bio-creed that includes the following affirmations: life emerged on earth due to random interactions of material elements; life evolved from its primitive forms to its current complexity because of natural selection; no god is needed to make sense of these (or any other) phenomena. In truth, Dawkins’ entire book is an exercise in Read More ›

I was an atheist, brainwashed by the establishment, into my 40s. I got a triple dose of indoctrination: from the public schools, from the secular environment in which I grew up (a small college town, surrounded by intellectual university types), and from the university itself. There was no doubt in my mind that God was a human fabrication and that we were the product of purposeless Darwinian mechanisms. In retrospect, however, I realize that I accepted these conclusions completely uncritically, which is ironic, because educated intellectual types supposedly take pride in critical thinking.

I was once debating “evolution” with a friend, and I was spouting all the platitudes I had been taught. He said, “Look, rather than debating me, why don’t you read a book, Evolution, A Theory in Crisis, by Michael Denton”? I assumed that it would be some nonsensical religious hogwash, but I was in for a big surprise.

I devoured the book in a couple of days, and when I was finished I slapped myself on the forehead and thought, “I’ve been conned all my life!” My atheism was quickly unraveling.

This is what the hysterical anti-ID folks fear: Once the evidence of modern science is evaluated without the blinders of a passionately materialistic worldview, design screams at us from every corner.
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The presentations of the Beyond Belief 2006 conference recently held in San Diego are available at http://beyondbelief2006.org/Watch. Here is an excerpt from Session 2, which begins with a presentation from Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium. At the conclusion of his talk (beginning at the 40:47 mark in the clip) is the following exchange: Tyson: I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t. That’s really what we’ve got to address here. Otherwise the public is secondary to this. [Moderator then turns to the panel for responses.] Larry Krauss: It’s hard to know how Read More ›

Steven Pinker has published an interesting op-ed in today’s Harvard Crimson, criticizing the current report of Harvard’s committee on general education. If one could reformulate Pinker’s dogmatic pronouncements as questions to be examined, this would be a good essay. For example, What is faith? Is Earth truly an undistinguished speck in the cosmos, or is there something special about it? How is the paramount value of “reason” affected if the mind and its thoughts are merely products of chemical activity in the brain? Opinion –Less Faith, More Reason Published by The Harvard Crimson On 10/27/2006 4:36:48 AM By STEVEN PINKER … [T]he picture of humanity’s place in nature that has emerged from scientific inquiry has profound consequences for people’s understanding Read More ›

With Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al. on a rampage against religion, its worth putting the sins of atheism in perspective:

Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history

By Dinesh D’Souza

RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIF. – In recent months, a spate of atheist books have
argued that religion represents, as “End of Faith” author Sam Harris puts
it, “the most potent source of human conflict, past and present.”

Columnist Robert Kuttner gives the familiar litany. “The Crusades
slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the
torture and murder of millions more. After Martin Luther, Christians did
bloody battle with other Christians for another three centuries.”

In his bestseller “The God Delusion,” Richard Dawkins contends that most of
the world’s recent conflicts – in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in
Northern Ireland, in Kashmir, and in Sri Lanka – show the vitality
of religion’s murderous impulse.

The problem with this critique is that it exaggerates the crimes attributed
to religion, while ignoring the greater crimes of secular fanaticism. The
best example of religious persecution in America is the Salem witch trials.
How many people were killed in those trials? Thousands? Hundreds? Actually,
fewer than 25. Yet the event still haunts the liberal imagination.

It is strange to witness the passion with which some secular figures rail
against the misdeeds of the Crusaders and Inquisitors more than 500 years
ago. The number sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition appears to be
about 10,000. Some historians contend that an additional 100,000 died in
jail due to malnutrition or illness.

These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower
at the time. But even so, they are minuscule compared with the death tolls
produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of
creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph
Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no
Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants
murdered more than 100 million people. Read More ›

There’s a hilarious typo in the illustration accompanying the article on the recent Salk Institute evangelical atheism conference that appeared on the front page of the Science Times today. The fact that this got by the author and the editors at the NYT speaks volumes about the broader cultural illiteracy of the science-worshipping, liberal literary establishment. The conference itself was remarkable — I include the opening paragraphs of the Times story and a link below. ====================================================== November 21, 2006 A Free-for-All on Science and Religion By GEORGE JOHNSON Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist Read More ›