When I was a non-Christian I was forever hearing about how Christians are hypocrites. When I converted to Christianity at 17, one thing that struck me is how often these charges were often a case of the pot calling the kettle black. While there is undoubtedly some hypocrisy within the church, it is also pervasive […]
Entries Tagged as 'Series'
Contra Mundum: Dawkins and Secular Hypocrisy
July 7th, 2012 105 Comments
Tags: Contra Mundum · Investigate Magazine · Kirk Cameron · Peter Singer · Richard Dawkins · Secularism · William Lane Craig
Contra Mundum: Separating Church and State
September 2nd, 2011 87 Comments
Co-authored by Matthew and Madeleine Flannagan The late Philosopher Richard Rorty once described religion as a “conversation stopper”, something that polarises discussion and ends or prevents fruitful dialogue. Rorty was an advocate of, “the happy, Jeffersonian compromise that the Enlightenment reached with the religious. This compromise consists in privatizing religion — keeping it out of […]
Tags: Contra Mundum · First Amendment · Investigate Magazine · Separation of Church and State · Separationism · Steven Smith · Thomas Jefferson · Wall of Separation
Contra Mundum: Religion and Violence
June 1st, 2011 41 Comments
On 1 May 2011 the world received the news that Osama Bin Laden was dead; gunned down in Pakistan by an elite team of US Navy Seals. Even before his death Bin Laden had become a legendary persona. Not only was he a terrorist leader responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents but he […]
Tags: 9/11 · Alister McGrath · Christian History · Christopher Eberle · Contra Mundum · David Lindberg · Glenn Peoples · Historical Atrocities · Investigate Magazine · Jim Peron · Nicholas Wolterstorff · Osama Bin Laden · Regine Pernoud · Religion in Public Life · Religious History · Richard Wurmbrand · Ronald Numbers · Sam Harris · Terence Cuneo
Friday Fallacy: Affirming the Consequent
May 13th, 2011 1 Comment
In my last Friday Fallacy post, I looked at the fallacy of denying the antecedent. There I discussed conditional statements, statements of the form “if P then Q”. Examples would be statements such as “if it is raining then the grass will be wet” or “if the US had not shot Bin Laden then he would still […]
Tags: Affirming the Consequent · Bin Laden · Fallacy Friday
Contra Mundum: Stoning Adulterers
May 2nd, 2011 92 Comments
Back in 2005 there was a minor furore when Labour MP Ashraf Choudhary stated he agreed with the Koran’s teaching that people who engaged in homosexual conduct or who committed adultery should be stoned to death. In the media spiral that followed, some commentators pointed out that it was not just Islam that held this […]
Tags: Adultery · Ashraf Choudhary · Capital Punishment · Contra Mundum · Gordon Wenham · Investigate Magazine · J J Finkelstein · John Goldingay · Old Testament Ethics · Raymond Westbrook · Walter Kaiser
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
IS A FETUS A HUMAN BEING? Part one: Viability
June 7th, 2019 1 Comment
This is one of a series of posts based on a class I teach for level 3 NCEA Religious Studies. In the last few posts we saw that most of the Christian religious tradition sketched the following argument against feticide; Premise [1] Killing a human being without justification violates the law of God. Premise [2] […]
Tags: Abortion · David Oderberg · Feticide · Michael Tooley · Peter Singer · Susan Sherwin · Viability