Dear Maurice Williamson, I hear you are having some troubles in the media at the moment. Apparently there are moral questions swirling around you about honest disclosure, potential abuse of power, unduly influencing the police in favour of a person who donated money to you, and so on. Don’t let judgmental people like Prime Minister John Key […]
Entries Tagged as 'Celebrities'
Open Letter to Maurice Williamson
May 2nd, 2014 3 Comments
Tags: Big Gay Rainbow · Maurice Williamson
Contra Mundum: Pacifism and Just Wars
July 5th, 2011 27 Comments
Comedian Bill Maher recently berated Christians for being hypocrites for supporting military action against terrorists in his “New Rules” segment on the U.S. TV show Real Time (transcript here). Jesus, Maher contended, was a pacifist; “Jesus lays on that hippie stuff pretty thick. He has lines like, “do not repay evil with evil,” and “do […]
Tags: Bill Maher · Contra Mundum · Investigate Magazine · Just War · Pacifism · War Ethics
Easy Dupes: Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari “Gay Girl in Damascus”
July 3rd, 2011 7 Comments
Narratives are powerful. They control what we identify as significant data or facts, how we empirically apprehend the data, what interpretations and shades of significance we place upon the evidence, and the conclusions drawn. Absolute objectivity is impossible. Only relative neutrality and disinterestedness are possible. The cut of our jib determines the winds we catch […]
Tags: Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari · Gay Girl in Damascus · Homosexual Conduct · Islam · Israel · Palestine · Paula Brooks · Syria · Tom MacMaster
Oprah Winfrey, Religious Pluralism and Woolly Thinking
December 24th, 2010 19 Comments
I once caught 5 minutes of Oprah discussing religion. She made the comment, in a very sage-sounding tone, that she believed all religions are true. The audience immediately interrupted her with resounding applause; camera shots caught audience members nodding in approval, clearly impressed with the wisdom of the claim just made. This commonly heard platitude […]
Tags: Bad Reasoning · Oprah Winfrey · Pluralism
Turning the Tables
November 17th, 2010 20 Comments
“The gentleman in the red shirt” shows us a simple lesson in why you should think through what your argument entails before you state it on national television and in front of a live audience. Too often we get tied up in knots trying to answer all the objections hurled at us, especially the specious […]
Tags: Bad Reasoning · Deepak Chopra
Bread and Circuses: NZ’s Most Trusted People List
July 5th, 2010 6 Comments
Flicking through the New Zealand Herald the other day reminded me of one of my pet peeves, celebrities being touted as authorities. I found the results of the survey about who New Zealanders most trust. The Readers Digest “New Zealand’s Most Trusted People 2010” were ranked as follows: 1. Corporal Willie Apiata, Victoria Cross recipient 2. […]
Tags: AJ Hackett · Alison Holst · Colin Meads · David Bain · Fair Go · Irene van Dyk · Joe Karam · John Kirwan · Kevin Milne · Margaret Mahy · Most Trusted People · Peter Jackson · Peter Snell · Readers Digest · Valerie Vili · Willie Apiata
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.
An Interesting Comparison
February 4th, 2016 5 Comments
This from Occupy Democrats: This from the Unites States Founding Fathers: When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature […]
Tags: Bad Reasoning · Christian History · Declaration of Independence