Anne was clearly angry. She relayed how her former husband had been abusive, had beaten her and sexually violated her. Despite this, however, he had never – as far as she knew – had an affair. Did this mean she had sinned before God for leaving her marriage? Was she now required to remain celibate [...]
Entries from February 28th, 2011
Contra Mundum: “Till Death do us Part” Christ’s Teachings on Abuse, Divorce and Remarriage
February 28th, 2011 40 Comments
Tags: Adultery · David Instone Brewer · Divorce · Hermeneutics · Marriage · Remarriage · Spousal Abuse
Hearing the Voice of God: Tragedy and its Aftershocks
February 28th, 2011 25 Comments
The “big one” has hit Christchurch. Few in the entire country will be untouched or unaffected, since we in New Zealand are a little village. To a man each will have relatives, friends, colleagues and mates in Christchurch. In that sense it is a national disaster. The meaning and significance of such disasters are always [...]
Tags: Christchurch Earthquake
Fallacy Friday Podcast on Apologetics 315: Introduction & What is an Argument?
February 27th, 2011 No Comments
Apologetics 315 are producing an audio version of Matt’s Fallacy Friday series. The Fallacy Friday Podcasts will be released every Friday on Apologetics 315. You can subscribe using: • RSS Feed • Via iTunes • one-click to your feed-reader The Mp3 of the introduction to the series is here; the first episode: What is an Argument? is here. [...]
Fallacy Friday: Tu Quoque (But you did it too!)
February 25th, 2011 25 Comments
Last week I looked at the Straw Man Fallacy, today I want to explore the tu quoque fallacy. In latin tu quoque (too kwo-kwee) means “you too”; in fact, the phrase “you did it too” is a good, succinct account of this fallacy. A tu quoque occurs when one rebuts a particular criticism of one’s own position by [...]
Tags: Fallacy Friday · Osama Bin Laden · Tu Quoque
Hoist with one’s own petard
February 24th, 2011 28 Comments
When a Christian says that all other religions are false, he is deemed narrow minded. When an atheist says that all religions are false, she is deemed open minded.
Tags: Atheism · Bad Reasoning
The Presumption of Theism
February 23rd, 2011 87 Comments
Modern analytic philosophy of religion, so it seems, is largely dominated by purely theoretical and evidential considerations. That is, the question of whether or not theistic belief is rational is decided purely on the balance of total available public evidence as opposed to existential and pragmatic considerations. The addition of the term “public” to the [...]
Tags: Atheism · Happiness · The Presumption of Theism · Theism · Worldview analysis
Prayers for the victims of the Christchurch Earthquake
February 22nd, 2011 9 Comments
We are devastated for our countrymen who were struck by a very shallow, yet very destructive, 6.3 magnitude earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand this afternoon. While it may have been smaller than September’s 7.1 magnitude earthquake, all reports show that this one was far worse in terms of its violence and impact. Today many people have [...]
Tags: Christchurch Earthquake
The Sceptic and the Scientist: Ed Feser on Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers
February 20th, 2011 39 Comments
He is not one to pull punches and true to form, in To a Louse, Ed Feser holds a mirror up to the kind of reasoning that is all too common amongst Dawkins and Myers fans with this fictional dialogue between a scientist and a science sceptic; Skeptic: Science is BS. Physicists believe in these things [...]
Tags: Bad Reasoning · Edward Feser · PZ Myers · Richard Dawkins · Science and Religion
Fallacy Friday: The Straw Man
February 19th, 2011 15 Comments
In my last Fallacy Friday I covered the The Genetic Fallacy, the error of arguing that an idea is false on the basis of where it originated from. Today I want to look at what’s known as the “straw man” fallacy. Origins of the Name This fallacy takes its name from a practice common in the [...]
Tags: Fallacy Friday · Straw man
Abortion and the Morality of Feticide: Part II
February 16th, 2011 154 Comments
In my last post, Abortion and the Morality of Feticide: Part I, I briefly sketched an argument against feticide, [1] It is wrong to kill a human being without justification; [2] A fetus is a human being; [3] In the case of feticide (at least in the majority of cases) insufficient or no justification is forthcoming. [...]
Tags: Abortion · David Boonin · David Oderberg · Ethics · Ethics and Medicine · Feticide · John Locke · Michael Tooley · Peter Singer · Susan Sherwin
