RESPONSE TO JOHN LOFTUS ON MISCOMMUNICATION, PART II: THE LAW IS A CONCESSION TO MAN’S EVIL HEART

Dateline:  August 1, 2009   Don’t go blaming God for miscommunication.   It was man that told God to “SHUT UP!” As I noted in an earlier post, over at Christian Cadre atheist author John Loftus has raised the issue of miscommunication, the idea that if there is a God he has failed to clearly communicate his will, making him responsible for atrocities and other moral failings of man. I argued that both the Gospel and the Bible... Read more

RESPONSE TO JOHN LOFTUS AND MISCOMMUNICATION, PART I: THE MURDER OF GOD

Dateline - July 25, 2009  Not only does the Bible frankly admit the connection between murder, religion, and power, the central message of Christianity proclaims that God was murdered in the name of religion in the struggle for power. As such, it is an incredibly salient cautionary, if not an indictment, against those who would carelessly and gratuitously make religious condemnations. Any writing or gospel that points to – indeed, makes the... Read more

Martin Buber: The Mythology of the Tree of Knowledge

In his book, “Good and Evil,” Martin Buber has written an essay that describes the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in mythological terms, in terms other than the literal one that the Pharisee – Creationist – Rational Atheist takes the story. The essay, “The Tree of Knowledge” is a good example of how we can reap meaning from the Bible by searching in the depths behind its superficial literal face. Buber begins his work by noting that... Read more

An Overview of the Limitations of Reason, Part XI: The Embarrassment of the Logical Positivists

The unabashed aim of the Logical Positivists - a group of philosophers including Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath, a.k.a. the Vienna Circle or the Logical Empiricists - was the complete and total destruction of the metaphysical (everything transcendental or “otherworldly” and of course, religion and theology), which they felt were tools of social and political conservatives.   It’s important to recognize that they... Read more

The Meanings of the Cross of Jesus Christ

The meanings of the Cross are multiple and deep.  To understand these meanings, we need not know that the Cross is objectively true, I need only observe its effect on me by considering it as if it were true. Even without an objective confirmation, I can see that meaning in an otherwise absurd world is possible through the Cross. The Cross is Atonement Before I even encounter the Cross, I know through living life of my own condition - the absurdity... Read more

The Effect of Language on the Evolution of Man

Again, I wrote this about thirty years ago, but it may still have some useful thoughts in it.  It’s chilling to see that not only did I foresee the political correctness of language, I was actually advocating for it.  I had read 1984 by that time, but was focusing on what I believed to be the positive influence of language. Introduction Man is in the process of evolving; he is in the process of obtaining all true thoughts.  And, by knowing... Read more

Sartre on the Fruitlessness of Textual Criticism

As I was studying “A History of Western Philosophy:  The Twentieth Century to Wittgenstein and Sartre” (W.T. Jones) so I could blog about the human condition, I ran across this passage about the historian Roquetin in Sartre’s Nausea: “The Marquis of Rollebon, whose biography Roquetin is writing, is as inaccessible as any long-lost classical text, and what one thinks of as ascertaining the facts, as reconstructing the life... Read more

The Starting Point of All Inquiry is the Human Condition

In his book, “Why I Became An Atheist,” John Loftus relates how one of his former teachers told him that “in order to get to God, we have to start with God.”  Loftus disagrees with this and so do I.  Loftus asserts that we should start from below, beginning with the world, but even that is assuming too much.  Why should I start with the world when I have a reality closer and more certain than the world - my self?  Not that... Read more

Man Gave the Law, Not God

The Apostle Paul showed his vehemence and disgust for the Law and the traditions of men in his letter to the Galations: “You foolish Galations!” he writes to the church who had allowed themselves to be talked into circumcision and going under the yoke of the Law. “Who has bewitched you?” (Gal 3:1) Paul was so adamantly opposed to the Law that he confronted Peter about it: “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew.... Read more

Leviathan: You Have Seen the Father

My previous blogs entitled Leviathan: The Common Myth and Leviathan: The Old Man and the Sea of Possibilities discussed the common myth of the Leviathan that is found throughout the ancient Middle East and beyond and tried to pieced together the myth from its composite parts. The story of the Leviathan is essentially the story of the Gospel since the gospel is the story of Jonah, a form of Leviathan. The following essay is meant to stimulate the... Read more

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