There has been some incredulity toward my claim that Mormons are really atheists. But that is not very surprising. As I have pointed out, the professional class in most fields of discourse holds definitions of terms that differ substantially from views widely held in the general population. Ask Joe the Plumber to define “free action”, “mind” and [...]
davidstarlingm has asked how the definitions that I provided for “God” and “theism” would relate to Mormonism: “where do the various flavors of polytheism, including Mormonism, fall into your definition? The Mormon Elohim is not the ultimate agent cause of everything that exists, as he is both contingent on a higher entity (the creator of [...]
I regularly dialogue with people who, though they identify themselves as “atheists”, do not have a clear sense of how God — that which they purportedly don’t believe in — should be defined. To be sure, they are able to say in a piecemeal fashion “I don’t believe in Yahweh, Thor or Allah…” but they can’t get [...]
Warning: Spoiler(s) ahead. (Not really bad spoilers as would be the case if I told you that Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) in “The Sixth Sense” is really a ghost who doesn’t know he’s a ghost. That’d be a wicked spoiler. The “spoilers” here are really nothing more than the untimely revelation of plot points.) [...]
In response to my illustration of the alien spaceship impact coverage Walter commented: “as far as insurance goes I opted out of alien spacecraft impact coverage and went for meteor and falling satellite coverage instead.” This got me thinking: what is the likelihood of dying from the impact of a meteorite? After some research I [...]
Sadly, nobody chose to engage with my Pascalian defense of the Mormon practice of baptizing for the dead. I’ll return to that point at the end of this article. However, let me begin by giving you another illustration. Mormon proxy baptism and alien spaceship impact coverage Imagine that when you buy house insurance the insurance [...]
The moment I saw the trailer for “The Grey” I wept testosterone tears. Liam Neeson stranded in the Alaskan wilderness bare-knuckling it with rabid wolves? This made John Rambo’s escapades in “First Blood” look like “Kindergarten Cop” by comparison. But there were two other factors that drew me inexorably to the theatre. Factor one: the [...]
I am the first to admit that it is extremely unusual to be handing out another Face-in-Palme d’Or award when the confetti hasn’t even been cleaned up from the last awards ceremony. But folks, I simply had to recognize the unique accomplishment of Piero’s comments. First some background. It all began when Piero commented in my [...]
For some time now a controversy has been brewing over Mormons engaging in proxy baptisms of Jews who died in the holocaust. (The theological belief behind the practice is that when Mormons are baptized in the temple in the name of deceased non-Mormons they make it possible for those people to find salvation in the [...]
A couple weeks ago I was checking in to “Trinities” (a great blog run by several very smart philosophers with good senses of humor) when I read an article by Dale Tuggy commenting on the conversion of Christian philosopher Michael Sudduth to … Hinduism, specifically Vaishnava Vedanta. What?!! I took Frank Beckwith’s conversion to Catholicism [...]
