Maybe you’ve seen this, or even participated in it: the occasion is a public meeting of the local PTA, school board, town council, or what have you, and someone gets up and leads everyone in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Everyone, that is, except the local atheist/agnostic, who stands there quietly but visibly NOT reciting …
Monthly Archive: May 2012
May 18 2012
Who’s attacking marriage?
You hear a lot from the religious right about how marriage is under attack and how Christians need to band together to defend marriage. And yet, nobody is really attacking people’s right to get married—except people like Jayman. I don’t view marriage as a civil right (i.e., it is not like the right to life, …
May 17 2012
Defending bad definitions
I got a lot of good comments on yesterday’s post about the definition of marriage, but not everybody was happy with my description. In particular, Jayman777 wants to take me to task. It makes sense, therefore, to define marriage in terms of what the relationship between those individuals is and/or should be. Which is it? …
May 16 2012
Not all definitions of marriage are equal
The other day I was listening to yet another Christian conservative parrot the tired mantra about how liberals are trying to change the definition of marriage. My first thought was that if marriage equality changes your definition of marriage, you’ve been using a bad definition of marriage. And that got me thinking about the various …
May 15 2012
The apologist’s dilemma
Thanks to some articulate and well-informed comments on yesterday’s post, I now understand that there’s a lot more to it than just needing to verify your conclusions before you accept them as true. Verificationism (or at least, the strict forms of verificationism that William Lane Craig was referring to) can go so far as to …
May 14 2012
Verificationism
A few people have commented (with good reason) that my last post was guilty of quote-mining William Lane Craig. And truth to tell, I don’t think I gave enough of the context of the original quote to give people a fair idea of what Craig was trying to say, nor did I do enough to …
May 11 2012
Who said it?
I have a new favorite quote. The person who follows the pursuit of reason unflinchingly toward its end will be atheistic or, at best, agnostic. Guess who said that?
May 10 2012
Better late than never
So President Obama has finally come out in favor of equal civil rights for gays. About damn time, and kudos to him for having the courage to do so ahead of the election instead of waiting until it was “safe” to take a stand. He should have done so years ago, but still, credit where …
May 09 2012
The cost of discipleship
The Christian faith isn’t just a story about how to get to heaven in the next life, it a way of walking by faith in all areas of your life. “We’re going to show you how to get wealth and use it for the building of his kingdom,” [Ephren] Taylor shouted to the congregation one …
May 08 2012
Perverted Science
Writing for the Finance section of Townhall.com (wait, the Finance section?), Mark Baisley has great hopes for the future of science. Galileo was a true scientist. I like Wikipedia’s description, “He displayed a peculiar ability to ignore established authorities, most notably Aristotelianism. In broader terms, his work marked another step towards the eventual separation of …
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