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Entries Tagged as 'Ethics'

William Lane Craig, Raymond Bradley and the Problem of Hell. Part Two.

June 23rd, 2008 13 Comments

In a previous post I mentioned Professor Raymond Bradley’s (Bradley) contention that, [3] The bible teaches that God will torture people endlessly for their beliefs. In his article he cites several scriptural passages in support of this contention. I think his exegesis is problematic; I cannot go into huge detail in a blog post but […]

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William Lane Craig, Raymond Bradley and the Problem of Hell Part One

June 21st, 2008 5 Comments

During the Q & A at the recent Auckland Cooke – Craig debate, Professor Raymond Bradley (Bradley), Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Auckland University, offered an argument, which he has laid out in more detail in his article A Moral Argument for Atheism, as follows: Christians accept that: [1] Any act that God commits, causes, […]

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Praise from our Critics

June 20th, 2008 3 Comments

Despite holding to a somewhat contrary viewpoint and despite having had more than one clash of viewpoints it appears that our critics accord us some praise. I just now stumbled accross this thread on GayNZ.com’s forum discussing Christian blogs and websites and was pleasantly surprised by the comments on our blog. Kay writes: “The M […]

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Patrick Nowell Smith on Divine Commands

April 15th, 2008 2 Comments

In a widely-anthologised essay Morality: Religious and Secular. Patrick Nowell Smith offers a influential criticism of “religious morality” It is clear from his definition of religious morality that it is Voluntarism ( or a Divine Command Theory of Ethics) he has in mind. Smith states that the religious moralist has “assumed that just as the […]

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Abortion and Brain Death: A Response to Farrar

March 19th, 2008 26 Comments

David Farrar of Kiwiblog weighs in on the abortion debate. I have met David a couple of times and worked with him on several issues and I have a lot of time for him but on this issue we disagree. Given how widely read Farrar’s blog is, and seeing the ethics of killing a fetus […]

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Permissible Lies

February 19th, 2008 2 Comments

In wake of the return of the stolen victoria crosses and the Police claiming they are “honour bound” to pay the thieves the promised reward not PC argues that it is permissible to lie to an agressor. The standard example in the literature (which PC utilises) goes something like this: You are hiding someone fleeing […]

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Greens, Tasers and Torture

November 29th, 2007 3 Comments

Watching the news the other night, I heard how some UN body had declared that the use of tasers constituted torture. (At least that is how it was reported). Predictably the Green party cited this as  a for rejecting the use of Tasers.The implicit argument here seems to go something like this. [1] The use […]

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