The bold statement “Richard Dawkins opens minds” leaped out at me from the newsletter sitting on the University of Auckland’s Law Library counter. The article went on to sing the praises of Richard Dawkins and mentioned his book The God Delusion. On reading the piece one could be forgiven for concluding that Dawkins’ works are […]
Entries Tagged as 'Contra Mundum'
Contra Mundum: Richard Dawkins and Open Mindedness
May 6th, 2010 146 Comments
Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Atheism · Contra Mundum · Faith and Reason · Investigate Magazine · Nicholas Wolterstorff · Peter Van Inwagen · Richard Dawkins · Richard Swinburne · Science and Religion · The God Delusion · William Alston · William Lane Craig
Contra Mundum: Slavery and the Old Testament
April 3rd, 2010 33 Comments
“Why didn’t the Christian God ever explicitly and clearly condemn slavery?” This was John Loftus’ question in his book, Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity. He posed it after sharing the following chilling account of slavery as practiced in the antebellum American south, He took her into the kitchen, and stripped […]
Tags: Contra Mundum · Investigate Magazine · John Loftus · Old Testament Ethics · Slavery · Theology
Contra Mundum: Secular Smoke Screens and Plato’s Euthyphro
March 2nd, 2010 35 Comments
In “Religion: A Barrier to Clear Thinking,” the final article in the award winning series of lay philosophy articles published in the Christchurch Press, Canterbury based Philosopher Simon Clarke addressed the question, “what is the biggest obstacle to thinking clearly about social and political issues?” Predictably he answered “Several answers suggested themselves but time and […]
Tags: Contra Mundum · Euthyphro Dilemma · God and Morality · Investigate Magazine · Peter Geach · Plato · Simon Clarke · William Lane Craig
Contra Mundum: The Judgmental Jesus
January 29th, 2010 22 Comments
Few things are thought to be more morally pernicious than the practice of judging others. Sometimes this is given a theological spin with people citing the Sermon on the Mount “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure […]
Tags: Contra Mundum · Ethics · Hermeneutics · Investigate Magazine · Judging
Contra Mundum: Confessions of an Anti-Choice Fanatic
January 5th, 2010 76 Comments
If current media is to be believed opposition to legal abortion comes from misogynist fundamentalist fanatics who want to impose their religious mores onto others. This string of pejorative terms is amusing; however, it does not actually address the more crucial question of whether laws against feticide (the killing of a fetus) are just. I […]
Tags: Abortion · Contra Mundum · David Boonin · Feticide · Investigate Magazine · Peter Singer · Selection
Contra Mundum: The Flat-Earth Myth
December 1st, 2009 218 Comments
A while back I made a passing comment on my blog criticising an advertisement which claimed that, prior to Columbus, the Church taught that the world was flat. In response I received the following email from a high-school student in the US, I’ve been studying Christopher Columbus in my history class and my history books […]
Tags: Christian History · Contra Mundum · flat earth · Investigate Magazine · Science and Religion · Selection · Urban Myths
Contra Mundum: “Bigoted Fundamentalist” as Orwellian Double-Speak
November 2nd, 2009 16 Comments
I am a Theologian with a strong background in Philosophy; apart from Philosophical Theology, my particular area of interest is Ethics. Given this, I often publish my thoughts and reflections on moral issues, of various persuasions, in various media. I have written on the morality of warfare, whether it is sometimes permissible to lie, the […]
Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Contra Mundum · Fundamentalism · Investigate Magazine
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.
