Historian James Hannam has written an entertaining article called “Satirising the Christ Myth.” The piece uses similar methods employed by those seeking to make the case for the claim that Jesus never existed to show that Hannibal of Carthage did not exist either. It is written in Hannam’s classicly witty yet accurate style; Did Hannibal Really Exist? To ask […]
Entries Tagged as 'Social Commentary'
Did Hannibal of Carthage Exist?
January 12th, 2011 11 Comments
Tags: Carthage · Christ Myth · Hannibal · James Hannam
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
The New Zealand Association of Rationalist Humanists and the Privileging of Secularism
December 20th, 2010 189 Comments
The New Zealand Association of Rationalist Humanists (“NZARH”) has a statement of aspirational ideals for the New Zealand state on their website. Entitled “The Tolerant Secular State” it is anything but. The first two sentences of the document exhibit a confusion which is inherent throughout (and commonly found in discussions of church and state): “The […]
Tags: Doctrine of Religious Restraint · Free Exercise · Freedom of Religion · Harry Potter · Jurisprudence · Lord Voldemort · NZARH · Paul Rishworth · Religion in Public Life · Rights and Freedoms · Secularism · Steven Smith
The Separation of Church and Self: Rethinking Separationism
December 16th, 2010 119 Comments
Is it just for a pluralistic society to ground its public policy on religious premises? What role should religion play in such a society? Debate over questions like these has figured in theology, philosophy, political science, jurisprudence and popular culture for centuries. In contemporary Western pluralistic society the debate continues. Even for those unfamiliar with […]
Tags: Christopher Eberle · Coercion Test · Doctrine of Religious Restraint · Endorsement Test · Freedom of Religion · Gerald Gaus · James Madison · John Rawls · Jürgen Habermas · Justice Scalia · Law Studies · Lee v Weisman · Lemon Test · Nicholas Wolterstorff · Philip Devine · Philip Quinn · Philosophy of Religion · Political Philosophy · Religion in Public Life · Richard Rorty · Robert Audi · Separationism · Stephen Carter · Terence Cuneo · Vincent Phillip Muñoz
Contra Mundum: The Number of the Beast
December 1st, 2010 29 Comments
Recently TV3 screened The Omen. This classic horror is a about a boy called Damian who is the predicted anti-Christ and appropriately has the number 666 on his head. This film epitomises how the book of Revelation is understood in contemporary culture; apparently it predicts a future person, the beast or the anti-Christ who will […]
Tags: 616 · 666 · Contra Mundum · Investigate Magazine · Nero · Number of the Beast · Revelation · The Omen
Condolences for Pike River Miners
November 24th, 2010 14 Comments
New Zealand is a country in mourning tonight as news that the hopes we’d held onto over recent days for the trapped Pike River Miners were no more. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends and the community devastated by this tragedy.
Tags: Pike River Miners
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.
William Lane Craig, Original Sin and Original Guilt
December 31st, 2010 74 Comments
A lot of people are up in arms at the moment about a paragraph in William Lane Craig’s answer to Question 193 “Overweening Ignorance.” Facebook, blogs, twitter and message boards are abuzz with Christians angrily attacking Craig with the charge that this paragraph shows he either does not hold to the doctrine of original sin or […]
Tags: Original Guilt · Original Sin · Richard Swinburne · Steve Hays · William Lane Craig