The single most infamous song of the backward masking craze of the 1980s was surely Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” A message from the devil or a trick of the imagination? I’ll say the latter. But when we were kids, playing “Stairway to Heaven” backward on the record player was still a memorable way to […]
devil
47. The Devil’s in the Music: On growing up evangelical in the 80s
I grew up reading Hal Lindsey books. Beginning with The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970), Mr. Lindsey had a string of bestsellers throughout the 1970s. And each of those books promoted a popularist form of dispensationalist Christianity that read the predicted future of the book of Revelation in the unfolding events of the evening news. […]
Is John W. Loftus “dumber than a box of rocks”?
In The End of Christianity John W. Loftus describes the following Christian belief which he finds very implausible: “That the highest created being known as Satan or the devil, led an angelic rebellion against an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent God … and expected to win. This makes Satan out to be suicidal, inexplicably evil, and […]
The Devil and the Atheist
John Loftus ends his essay “Christianity is Wildly Improbable” in The End of Christianity with an additional fifteen beliefs he finds wildly implausible. Since I already provided a critique that undercut his whole improbability method I didn’t bother to deal with these points directly in my review of the chapter. But I’d like to engage one […]