I will be debating Dan Barker right before Christmas on the topic “Is the Christian God Worthy of Worship?” Barker’s recent book God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction will undoubtedly be a big part of the discussion.
biblical ethics
How Christians engage in special pleading when they try to justify bad biblical behavior
Many conservative Christians believe that men should follow the Billy Graham Rule to never be alone with a woman who is not your life. Unless you’re a king like David: then you can climb into bed with a young virgin girl. In this video, I criticize that kind of painful special pleading.
Quick Thought on Canaanite Genocide and the Brutalizing Effects of Violence
You can’t hire a guy to work 9-5 in a slaughterhouse and not expect that to affect how he interacts with animals outside the workplace. The same principle applies in war. People can only sustain the cognitive dissonance introduced by combat situations for so long before it affects their character generally. The history of war […]
Should Christians defend parental honor killing? Many already do.
Christians today react with horror and revulsion when they read of parents who kill their children in the name of parental honor. But the Law in the Old Testament also presents cases where parents kill their children in the name of parental honor. So should Christians revisit their principled moral rejection of honor killing or […]
If God commanded you to sacrifice your child, would you? Here’s my response
If God commanded you to sacrifice your child, would you? The answer is simple: God wouldn’t command that. And if you still want to consider the scenario as a per impossibile claim, you can do that with any moral system, not just divine command theories of ethics.
Don’t Sacrifice Your Conscience to Defend Your Reading of the Bible
I’ve been talking about biblical violence on Twitter over the last day. So now I’m back to my blog and drawing on several articles I’ve written over the years all to the end of driving home a singular point: don’t sacrifice your conscience in defense of a particular reading/interpretation of the Bible. If you know […]
Would Jesus want you to stay married to a psychopath?
This morning, I tweeted the following survey: Clinical psychopaths are manipulative anti-social narcissists who are incapable of experiencing love or empathy. The condition is untreatable. If you came to believe your friend was married to a non-violent psychopath, would you support your friend divorcing that individual? — Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) July 27, 2018 As of […]
Reckoning with the Peaceable Kingdom: A Review of Disarming the Church
Eric A. Seibert. Disarming the Church: Why Christians Must Forsake Violence to Follow Jesus and Change the World. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018.) Carl Norden was a devout Christian. So when he developed the Norden bombsight, it was with the intent of increasing the accuracy of aerial bombing to the end of decreasing the resulting collateral damage wrought […]
Does the Bible condemn same-sex relationships? A Response to Michael Brown (Part 3)
In this article, I continue my response to Michael Brown’s response to my review of his book Can You Be Gay and Christian? For starters, here is the link to the third part of my review of Brown’s book. In this section of my review, I explore the position that I call, for lack of a […]
Are same-sex relations and menstrual intercourse moral abominations? A Response to Michael Brown (Part 2)
In this article, I continue my response to Michael Brown’s response to my review of Brown’s book Can You Be Gay and Christian? The topic in this installment is Brown’s response to the second part of my review. (You can read that part of my review here.) Let me begin with a quick summary of the claim […]
The Bible depicts God commanding moral atrocities. Should we believe it?
The Bible includes some descriptions of divine action which are fundamentally at odds with the moral perceptions of properly functioning human beings. In some cases, God is presented as performing actions that appear to be wicked. In other cases, he is presented as commanding humans to perform actions that appear to be wicked. Of the latter, […]
The Complementarian Dilemma
Egalitarianism is the view that all offices of church ministry and leadership should be open to both genders. By contrast, complementarianism insists that some offices of ministry and leadership should be restricted to males. I am an egalitarian and yesterday I posted this tweet expressing my concern that complementarianism is not just wrong, but potentially […]
In a Heartbeat: Changing Attitudes among Christians Toward Same Sex Attraction
For years now attitudes toward homosexuality have been shifting in society generally and among Christians in particular. According to statistics published by Pew Research in 2015, significant majorities of the following Christian groups now accept the morality of homosexuality: Catholic, mainline Protestant, and Orthodox. In addition, a slight majority of “historically Black Protestants” also accept […]
Can divine wrath explain divinely commanded genocide?
In his 2005 book Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace theologian Miroslav Volf provides a penetrating reflection on the extraordinary challenge and inestimable rewards of acquiring a robust understanding of grace and forgiveness. I first became aware of Volf’s book some years ago when I was critiquing evangelical apologetic readings of […]
