In the this and a following post I’m going to provide answers to some of the questions/comments in “Would Jesus stone a misbehaving child?” I will start here with a response to MaxVel. Let’s begin by quoting MaxVel’s comments in full: I think your attempted parallel here doesn’t work well because the original is in […]
ethics
Filicide in “biblical” perspective. But which biblical perspective?
Now I’m slowly getting caught up on some of last week’s comments. In this article I address a comment in response to my essay “Should lazy teenagers be stoned?” I will then address the comments in “Would Jesus stone a misbehaving child?” Finally, I will address comments on morality and naturalism in “Can objective moral […]
Did the “systematic removal” of God from public schools lead to the Connecticut massacre?
Just this morning I had vowed not to blog until I finished my grading. Then I heard about the horrific mass shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. And then I heard Mike Hukabee suggest that the shooting could somehow be explained by the fact that God is being “systematically removed” from public schools. […]
Would Jesus stone a misbehaving child?
But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a child weeping frantically who had been caught being stubborn and rebellious against his parents. They […]
Should lazy teenagers be stoned?
“All your words are true; all your righteous laws are eternal.” (Psalm 119:160) Imagine that you open up the newspaper one day and read the following article: Child publicly stoned to death (Kabul, Afghanistan) Yesterday reports surfaced of a public stoning in the city of Saidu Sharif in the Swat Valley of eastern Afghanistan. […]
Can objective moral value exist without God? Revisiting the Question
Yesterday Kerk commented in the blog: Randal, I keep seeing well educated philosophers such as yourself claiming that on the atheist worldview objective morality is impossible or at least inscrutable. But surely you are aware that there are platonic atheists who believe that morality exists objectively on its own outside the temporal reality just like […]
Is lip-syncing legitimate performance?
My wife and I were (are) big Whitney Houston fans (though things definitely seemed to deteriorate in the later years). And for years I thought the highlight of Whitney’s career was that chilling performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Superbowl. Just leave aside legitimate concerns over nationalism and militarism for a moment to take […]
Why are you laughing? Reflections on the ethics of gallows humor
Fads come and go. And thirty years ago the fad on the playground was collecting stickers. So I followed the herd and got my photo album which I promptly filled with scratch and sniffs and various other stickers. I had quite a collection (indeed, I still have that album packed away somewhere). While the scratch […]
How long, O Lord? An Advent meditation on suburban injustice
“Americano. Grande. Extra room.” The emphasis was crucial. Failure to include it and “extra room” could easily become mere “room” resulting in three shots of espresso hopelessly diluted in excess hot water with no room for cream. It was a delicate balance, one that I thought I’d secured by the carefully placed emphasis. “Americano. Grande. […]
The Ethics of Book Blurbs
Last week I was perusing the book tables at the ETS conference when I came across a book that featured a blurb from a friend of mine. The blurb made the book sound like a great purchase so when I saw my friend later in the day I asked him to elaborate on the book. […]
How good is God Behaving Badly? A Review
David T. Lamb, God Behaving Badly: Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist and Racist? Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011. David Lamb’s new(ish) book God Behaving Badly (GBB) covers much of the same terrain as Paul Copan’s Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Baker, 2011). However, if […]
On killing the dog
Walter asked for an argument against eating meat. Here it is. This is Sonny, a Lhasa-Apso cross. We adopted him several years ago from the Humane Society. Lucky for him. Things could have worked out very differently for the little guy. Imagine a different scenario in which the Humane Society is replaced with the Home […]
The Meat-Eater’s Dilemma Revisited
In “The Meat-Eater’s Dilemma” I explore the morality of people who have moral objections to the killing of animals for meat but who continue to eat meat nonetheless due to the willingness of others to kill the animals. I am one of the people that I place in this category so the dilemma is actually […]
Merely squeamish?
My discussion these last few days has been concerned with the ethical obligations of those who would refuse, on moral grounds, to kill animals simply for the culinary pleasure of eating them. But the argument depends on people being able to read their own intuitions about killing. Could it be that they’re misreading those intuitions? […]
