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Some people want to have all the things – religion and science, belief and doubt, props for being thoughtful and admiration for being Deeply Spiritual. Do you struggle with doubt & questions despite your best intentions? What does it mean about someone if he or she admits to both embracing “belief” and “doubt?” How does [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Apologetics’
Will he never arrive?
February 26th, 2012 
Ophelia Benson Via Eric – more of Julian’s interminable Heathen’s Progress. This one is about tone: not just the tone that “new atheists” use but the allegation that they (we) are tone deaf to religion. Religion is comparable to poetry and pop music. Some people don’t “get” poetry, or pop music, or both. They can’t say anything [...]
Spot the agenda
January 24th, 2012 Ophelia Benson The letter to the Guardian cited a survey. “Muslims deserve a better press than they have been given in the past decade.” And according to a recent ComRes poll, one in three people in Britain today believe that the media is responsible for “whipping up a climate of fear of Islam in the UK”. The [...]
These crimes happen everywhere in the world
January 20th, 2012 Ophelia Benson Speaking of “Islamophobia,” as we were, we can always count on the Guardian for lashings of Islamophilia. David Shariatmadari tells us the University of East Anglia is going to set everyone straight on women, Islam, and the media. I bet you can figure out what’s coming. Women, Islam and the media are topics often found [...]
You did ask
December 23rd, 2011 Ophelia Benson I was asked what I think of the quotes from the NO God Blog and Al Stefanelli quoted in Chris Stedman’s most recent Letter to the Atheists. Ok; what I think. The first one is from a post titled “A Point was missed” on what appears to be a blog on the website of American [...]
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog 
Tags: Apologetics, Gnu atheism, The backlash, The stigma on atheism 
62 Comments »Heads we win, tails we win
December 13th, 2011 Ophelia Benson Another vulture licks his filthy chops and suggests that Hitchens may be about to convert to Christianity. Perhaps Hitchens’s admission that Nietzsche might have been wrong, even about something small, will lead him to a healthy curiosity about Christianity. Up until now, Hitchens has had nothing but bile for Christianity and all religion — including [...]
Religion is about literal doctrines after all
December 12th, 2011 Ophelia Benson So after weeks of heavy breathing, Julian’s Heathen’s Progress arrives at what we already knew – that believers actually do believe the tenets of their religion. So what is the headline finding? It is that whatever some might say about religion being more about practice than belief, more praxis than dogma, more about the moral [...]
BioLogos snares an MIT physicist
December 9th, 2011 Ophelia Benson Via Sigmund at WEIT, an MIT physicist offers part 1 of a series on “scientism.” Yes really, an MIT physicist. I know, I know. He (Ian Hutchinson) gives the gist in the first para. One of the most visible conflicts in current culture is between “scientism” and religion. Because religious knowledge differs from scientific knowledge, scientism claims [...]
Scraping the barrel
October 24th, 2011 Ophelia Benson Some fella says Richard Dawkins is bad and stupid and cynical and anti-intellectual because he refuses to debate William Lane Craig. Really? Well not the bad and stupid part, no, that’s my paraphrase, but it’s not far off; and the rest of it, yes, really. Richard Dawkins is not alone in his refusal to debate [...]
Higher bullshitting
October 13th, 2011 Ophelia Benson Andrew Sullivan thinks “militant atheists” have an excessively crude epistemology. (Via WEIT) First he tells us how his works. As to Coyne’s challenge to present a criterion of what is real in the Bible and what is true, I’d argue that empirical claims - like, say, a census around the time of Christ’s birth, or [...]
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