Tag: atheism
-
Christmas Cheer
In the apartment just below mine, the lady has done a marvelous job of decorating. The door is covered in foil (reminiscent of the Throne of the Third Heaven) and there is a whole wall of Santa Claus-related elements. There’s even a shrine to the troops on the far wall, with the injunction, “Bring them…
-
Agnostic Machinery
Just released today is the first of what will hopefully be a series of articles of mine about science and religion on Seed magazine’s online edition. “Agnostic machinery,” it’s called. The idea is this: I went and saw the Bill Maher New Atheist movie Religulous (aided by trusty friend Jake), noticed that the religion biologizers…
-
Hitchens in “Conversation”
Christopher Hitchens has made it his business to debate whomever will come forward. The first page of Google results lists a considerable roster: Al Sharpton, Dinesh D’Souza, Chris Hedges, Tariq Ali, Stephen Fry, Shmuley Boteach, Alistar McGrath, Marvin Olasky, and Douglas Wilson. As a rule, Hitchens wins every time. He argues with a proverbially acerbic…
-
Dialogue in the Dark
It totally slipped my notice that, a couple days ago, Religion Dispatches posted my latest article, a review of Michael Novak’s No One Sees God. This one, unfortunately, may inspire more ire from the anti-atheists. But I promise, I genuinely tried to move a more sensible conversation forward on all sides. Take a look at…
-
Plato against Impiety
It is always a wonderful sensation when one discovers something in an ancient text that feels fresh and alive and of the present. That was my experience today in reading book X of Plato’s Laws, his conservative, unfinished final work. There is always this problem in doing historical work: what in our minds today was…
-
Dialogs and Debates
Thanks to Tom Gilson’s critique, I have already pulled back somewhat on things I said in my article this week at Religion Dispatches. And since it is a dogma of mine that there is truth in even falsehoods, I’d like to try teasing out what put me on a seemingly unwarranted attack. It all reminds…
-
Still Not Dead Yet, for Now, at Least
The last couple of days I’ve been working on a response to “God Is Not Dead Yet,” the current cover article of Christianity Today. Since I’m working on a project about proofs for the existence of God, I couldn’t help but want to tackle this meaty piece by the prominent evangelical apologist William Lane Craig.…
-
Don’t You Love It When Your Day Is in a Play?
I don’t know how many of you all out there have been spending your days like me, combing through proofs for and against the existence of God and trying to write clever things about them. But if you are, have I got a play for you: The Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist, now playing…