Refuting Religion - A Tippling Philosopher (Page 2)

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Refuting Religion

A collection of 33 posts

Divine command theory: How the religious are often not moral agents

Divine Command Theory

Divine command theory: How the religious are often not moral agents

Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist of religion and nonreligion and fellow OnlySky columnist, has written a superb book called What It Means To Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living an Ethical Life that should be compulsory reading. One of the early chapters, "You Will Obey," is

biblical contradictions

You say 'Gerasa' and I say 'Gadara'

This is a guest post by Lex Lata (prompted by Jonathan MS Pearce’s video, Biblical Contradictions: Demons and Gadara vs Gerasa). In the matter of proper names, the Greek copies are often incorrect, and in the Gospels one might be misled by their authority. The transaction about the swine,

Obliterating the Kalam Cosmological Argument

I love me a bit of the Kalam. Well, more accurately, a bit of criticism of the Kalam. What am I talking about? What is this Kalam? Well, the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) is a short, three-lined syllogism that supposedly shows that the universe required a cause for its existence,

Gambling on prayer: Getting addicted to blind hope

I've made it clear that prayer does not change God's mind. It can't. God is immutable, and his predictions or knowledge about the universe (and his own actions) are set in stone from causally before the creation of the universe. It's all

The prima facie problems with prayer

There are obvious—prima facie—problems with prayer. Prime problems that hit you in the face like a divinely unstopped tsunami. But what is really evocative of the bind that religious believers find themselves in is the idea that they are praying in the first place. Okay, let's

Biblical Exegesis

Christian apologetics and defending Matthew's guards

There's something meta going on when a Christian apologist takes aim at a biblical account of mine with some typical apologetics, claiming I am making stuff up out of whole cloth when I myself accused the Gospel writers (or apologists) of making stuff up out of whole cloth

Why Matthew's guards at Jesus' tomb are so important

I've written before on why the guards at the tomb of Jesus, included only in the Gospel of Matthew, are almost certainly invented by the author of that Gospel. Today I will tell you how they fit into a larger narrative construction of the Jesus story, and that

Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash

Jesus' family were asylum-seeking political refugees

Making America great again was largely about building a wall. Indeed, we have all seen footage of Trump rallies with large contingents of white conservative Christians shouting, "Build the wall!" Those with would be one side and those without the other (political refugees included). And that wall -