The UmBlog

First off, if you don't know who the Bad News Bears are, go read about them here . In summary, they are a Little League team of losers who gain hope and start to win. My premise is that every religious or philosophical team is a team of losers. But, because we are in teams, we support each other and tease the other teams, even if our coach wants us to recruit other losers to our team. Personally, by similar analogy, I can't imagine someone trying to convince me to become a Duke basketball fan. I hate Duke. And I'm not alone . Also I'm a UConn Husky fan and was there when Laettner ended our first NCAA run. Wait, I need to cool off.... I don't hate people who like Duke, I just hate the Duke basketball concept. So I can relate to this atheist's feelings towards Christians . The “hate the sin, love the sinner” line, especially when used in connection with LBGT rights, infuriates me. So now I just copy and paste the comment below. It always seems to piss th...

Larry Taunton 's book, The Grace Effect: How the Power of One Life Can Reverse the Corruption of Unbelief (2011), sets in contrast his friendly conversations with New Atheist Christopher Hitchens about evil with his experience of evil as he tries to adopt a Ukrainian orphan with HIV. In a post-debate conversation with Hitchens about absolutes he posits Then it seems to me...that the question is this: which philosophies or religions restrain our darker impulses, and which ones exacerbate them? ... Christianity...begins with the premise that man is evil and that he needs to be saved from himself. Atheism, on the other hand, offers no compelling reason why I should not do precisely as I want to do. pp. 4, 5. I never thought about it from this angle so I was really intrigued how Taunton would develop this. He tried to demonstrate it through his experience with the extremely corrupt Ukrainian government as he tried to adopt a young girl living in the awful conditions of an orphanag...

If dog ears and underlines per page mean anything, then by my physical interaction with this book, this book means plenty. More than that, it is such a pleasure to read a well-written book. Perhaps I should expect it from the chair holder of theology, ministry, and education at King's College London and former chair holder of historical theology at Oxford University. Alister McGrath has debated Dawkins and Hitchens and read the leading books of the gnu atheists. He also has read the works of the regular atheists, who share his disappointment with the fundamentalist approach of the gnu atheists. But with the poor reasoning spouting from the four horsemen of the gnu atheist movement, Dennet and Harris round out that party, not much can be expected from their followers. In my own conversation with atheistic friends, I have brought up the human propensity to violence apart from religion with Stalin's regime as exhibit A. I ask, is the violence independent of religion and simply a ...

Paul tells the crowd in Athens, God overlooked people's former ignorance about these things, but now he commands everyone everywhere to turn away from idols and turn to him. For he has set a day for judging the world with justice by the man he has appointed, and he proved to everyone who this is by raising him from the dead. Acts 17:30-31. Paul talks elsewhere about the resurrection as essential to the faith he was teaching. 13 But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. 15 We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have p...

The ultimate aim of Hart in his book Atheist Delusions : The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies is to refute the weak claims of the new atheists including books like Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great : How Religion Poisons Everything . Can Hitchens's hyperbolic claim be taken seriously? Hart writes, Even in purely practical terms, to despise religion in the abstract is meaningless conceit. As a historical force, religion has been neither simply good nor simply evil but has merely reflected human nature in all its dimensions. For our remote ancestors it was the force that shaped society, law, and culture by pointing to one or another "higher truth" that could fuse individual wills into common aspirations and efforts. In its more developed forms it has functioned as a source of prohibition and injunction, burning moral commands into obstinate minds with visions of hell and heaven, endless reincarnation or final repose in God, or what have you, fashi...

This quote from Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart is a corollary of his assertion I shared previously that the definition of humanity comes from Christian thought. I cannot help but wonder, then, what remains behind when Christianity's power over culture recedes? How long can our gentler ethical prejudices - many of which seem to me to be melting away with fair rapidity - persist once the faith that gave them their rationale and meaning has withered away? Love endures all things perhaps, as the apostle says, and is eternal; but, as a cultural reality, even love requires a reason for its preeminence among the virtues, and the mere habit of solicitude for others will not necessarily long survive when that reason is no longer found. If, as I have argued in these pages, the "human" as we now understand it is the positive invention of Christianity, might it not be the case that a culture that has become truly post-Christian will also, ultimately, become postman? p.215 ...

Here is one of Hart's explosive claims about the revolution that Christ brought to humanity, the concept of human. However, one phrases it, the essential intuition of the great churches remains the same: that Christ is one divine person, who perfectly possesses everything proper to God and everything proper to humanity without robbing either of its integrity, and who therefore makes it possible for every human person to become a partaker of the divine nature without thereby ceasing to be human. The rather extraordinary inference to be drawn from this doctrine is that personality is somehow transcendent of nature. A person is not merely a fragment of some larger cosmic or spiritual category, a more perfect of more defective expression of some abstract set of attributes, in light of which his or her values, significance, legitimacy or proper place is to be judged. This man or that woman is not merely a specimen of the general set of the human; rather, his or her human nature is only ...

Here is another delicious quote from  Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies  by  David Bentley Hart .   the result of the fourth ecumenical council convoked at Chalcedon in 451 was a fragmented church - divided for the most part by terminology rather than by faith. At the same time, the evolution of Christological dogma must also be remembered as one of the most extraordinary intellectual achievements of Christian tradition. Again the principal engine of dogmatic definition was the theology of salvation, and again the chief concern was ho the church might coherently affirm that, in Christ, the divine and the human had been perfectly reconciled and immediately joined. That Christ was wholly God had been proclaimed by the Council of Nicaea; but, in order for his incarnation to have created a truly divinized humanity, he must also have been wholly man. Gregory of Nazianzus stated the matter in a rather elegant aphorism in his "Epistle to Cledonius...

I picked this one up in the new books section of my local library. New books are only lent out for 2 weeks. I needed to renew it because each paragraph demands careful reading. This book is like an amazing cheesecake, rich and dense and altogether delicious. Unlike cheesecake, this book is nourishing for the soul as well. I highly recommend Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart . A collection of his articles can be found at this blog . His main contention is the the new atheists either don't know church history or have raised up strawmen to knock down. Hart shows, from primary sources, a true portrait of the early church. His other contention is that the new atheists are not honest about the trajectory of their philosophy. He points to Nietzsche as the post-Christian exemplar. I will share quotes later from him that draw the conclusion for the only possible post-Christian philosophy is nihilism . But I have several quotes t...

from the point n astute reader noted that a Darwinist proponent would respond with their standard mantra, "absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence,” while holding that, in regards to God, “absence of evidence IS evidence of absence.” He’s quite right, as I’ve found in a number of dialogues with materialists. When I point out their little double standard the fun begins.

regarding comparative religions, or spiritual tour guide company evaluations, I hope your taste testing is fruitful. I hope you can whittle down your choices a priori since there are too many to test. Unfortunately, we all can’t be true. Actually, Scientology believes my experience is tied to a movie I had to watch under duress 50 million years ago. I think they may be victims of the power of suggestion, psychologically and/or spiritually, in this present time. I’m sure my spiritual experience conforms to the ultimate reality and I think there is enough data to verify that. Unfortunately, whichever you choose involves faith. An atheist has faith that he can prove a negative, “there is no God”, or an agnostic has faith that the question, “is there a God?” is unanswerable. I’m glad God has led you to this stage of investigation. I hope that soon you will say “I do” to God, the Creator. Faith is like getting married. Not knowing everything about a potential spouse, but knowing enough to s...

Doug Groothius starts off... 1. These two books are offering nothing new by way of critiques of theism or specific religions. Christian philosophers and biblicla scholars have responded to all the charges before. What is different is their severe tone. Religion is not just wrong, but terribly dangerous. It should scarcely be tolerated. To demonstrate this, one must argue that a belief is both false and deleterious. That doubles the intellectual load--and produces a fair amount of bombast. he indicates more posts to follow....

article at CSM in light of the new atheist screeds The crimes of atheism have generally been perpetrated through a hubristic ideology that sees man, not God, as the creator of values. Using the latest techniques of science and technology, man seeks to displace God and create a secular utopia here on earth. Of course if some people - the Jews, the landowners, the unfit, or the handicapped - have to be eliminated in order to achieve this utopia, this is a price the atheist tyrants and their apologists have shown themselves quite willing to pay. Thus they confirm the truth of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's dictum, "If God is not, everything is permitted." Whatever the motives for atheist bloodthirstiness, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in 2,000 years not managed to kill as many people as have been killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades. It's time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has bee...

and a secular rebuttal from the TMQ himself, Gregg Easterbrook ...