Category: Religion
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Why God Might Exist: A Dialogue Concerning Unnatural Religion
Modern religious skeptics often declare that the reason they are atheists is that there is no good evidence for the existence of God. It is as if they were mere dispassionate judges, and no one has yet submitted adequate reasons to adopt a belief in God to them—the immaculate Tribunal of Reason, of course. Such…
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On Attitudes Toward Evil
As I have been thinking in recent months both about different religions—but especially Christianity—and about evil in general, it strikes me suddenly that how different worldviews regard evil is deeply important. This is especially important to me now because of the stunning and sickening amounts of evidence that has emerged that many, not just a…
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Why I Have Not Been a Christian, and Why That Might Change
A Personal History of My Nonbelief I think I lost the faith I was raised in (Lutheran) when I was 16, a few years after the family stopped going regularly to church. That was when I first started studying philosophy more seriously. To be specific, I stopped being Christian because I stopped believing in God.…
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How I’m Reading the Bible in 90 Days
The Bible is easily the most influential book of Western literature. If you haven’t read any part of it at all, you aren’t educated, period. But, for that matter, if you haven’t read it all the way through, then again you still have a massive hole in your education. That’s what I told myself last…
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A Theory of Evil
First posted Aug. 16, 2019. Revised and reposted Nov. 4. Good to read alongside “Why Be Moral.” For a long time, the nature of evil eluded me. But dark contemplation of the Jeffrey Epstein case and of the very existence of pedophile rings has clarified the nature of evil for me. Here, then, is a…
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On the clash of civilizations
There is a global conflict underway. A good way to understand it is by looking at the different interests that are coming into conflict. And a good place to begin is, of course, with: The immigrants. People from the “global south” are immigrating north, inspired by the images of prosperity they see on television and…
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Gay activists and Hollywood liberals vs. traditional Muslims vs. free speech liberals
Here’s a richly ironic slice of our strange, sad old world in 2019. Ellen Degeneres is (quite rightly) protesting the Sultan of Brunei for introducing the death penalty (stoning to death) for gay sex. He’s also executing people for adultery, but Ellen doesn’t mention that: To this, a reply was posted by an account, “Jihyo”…
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Is Western civilization collapsing?
A perennial topic for me (and many of us) is the notion that there is a deep malaise in Western civilization. There are, it seems to me, three main camps on the question, “Is Western civilization collapsing?” 1. The conservative position. “Yes. And it’s a horrible thing. For one thing, elites have basically stopped reproducing.…
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Could God have evolved?
1. How a common argument for the existence of God failed—or did it? As a philosophy instructor, I often taught the topic of arguments for the existence of God. One of the most common arguments, called the argument from design or teleological argument, in one formulation compares God to a watchmaker. If you were walking…