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Randal Rauser

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morality

Why it is wrong to execute minors

December 18, 2012 by Randal

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 […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: Bible, capital punishment, ethics, morality, torah

Can objective moral value exist without God? Revisiting the Question

December 11, 2012 by Randal

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 […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: atheism, ethics, God, moral objectivism, morality, theism

On reading the Bible’s texts of terror

December 1, 2012 by Randal

Over the last several years I have wrestled extensively with what Phyllis Trible memorably called the “texts of terror” in the Bible. Texts that narrate slavery, genocide, assassination, beheading, cannibalism, rape, and many other heinous acts. Some of these texts depict Yahweh commanding, commending, or himself committing violent acts. In other texts the actions are […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: Bible, herem, hermeneutics, morality, problem of evil, theodicy

Did God accommodate genocide?

November 29, 2012 by Randal

In his 2008 book The God I Don’t Understand Christopher Wright makes the extraordinary suggestion that God commanded the Israelites to commit genocide against neighboring peoples as a form of accommodation to ancient near eastern standards of war. In the theaded discussion to my article “A Few Shades the Other Side of Silly” Jerry Shepherd suggested […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: Bible, genocide, morality, theodicy

On killing the dog

November 11, 2012 by Randal

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 […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: ethics, morality, veganism, vegetarianism

The Meat-Eater’s Dilemma Revisited

November 11, 2012 by Randal

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 […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: ethics, morality, veganism, vegetarianism

Does Mitt Romney have the moral character to be president?

August 25, 2012 by Randal

As you have probably heard, Mitt Romney made a joke yesterday during an election stop in Michigan. In the joke he noted that he and his wife Ann were both born in Michigan and that nobody had ever asked to see their birth certificates. Here’s the (24 second) clip: Of course Mitt is making a joking […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: character, ethics, Mitt Romney, morality

In Defense of Smokers

August 20, 2012 by Randal

The other day I was staying at a hotel with approximately four hundred rooms … and a designated outdoor smoking area the size of a moderately sized living room. As I walked briskly through this area every day while taking the dogs out for a walk I couldn’t help but marvel at the enormous social […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: morality, pollution, smoking

Christians who are skeptics about moral perception

August 18, 2012 by Randal

In “Is rape worse than sacrifice?” I critiqued Crude’s claim that moral atrocity is essentially linked to the infliction of physical and/or psychological suffering on a victim. I did so with the following scenario: “Three year old Billy is watching Sesame Street and eating Pop Tarts when his father kills him with a gunshot from […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: moral epistemology, morality, skepticism

The Problem of the Faulty Moral Perception Faculty

August 17, 2012 by Randal

Many Christians apparently believe that an act like killing and mutilating a child as a devotional act toward a deity can be morally virtuous (i.e. if God commands it, and God can command it because he has commanded it) but raping a child as a devotional act to a deity cannot (because God never would […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: ethics, genocide, metaethics, moral atrocity, moral epistemology, morality, problem of evil

What God could and couldn’t do: A conversation with Jerry Shepherd

August 15, 2012 by Randal

Let’s take a look at Jerry Shepherd’s response to my article “Rape, moral perception, and biblicism.” Jerry divides his response into two points. Let’s start, reasonably enough, with the first: (1)  I could pretty well sum up my response this way.  For the most part, your critique of my reply misses the mark, because you […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: Bible, ethics, morality, skepticism

Do the hard sayings of Jesus constitute defeaters for his moral excellence?

August 8, 2012 by Randal

In the thread of my essay “What if I stumble? Arguing against Christianity from the lives of Christians” Mike Gantt commented on the moral excellence of Jesus as follows: the moral excellence implied by his conduct, and made explicit by his teaching, were so elevated when compared to typical human behavior that even unbelievers will […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: defeater, ethics, hard sayings of Jesus, hermeneutics, Jesus, morality

What if I stumble? Arguing against Christianity from the lives of Christians

August 7, 2012 by Randal

A few years ago I had an interesting conversation with a couple Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to my door. After a few minutes they realized I was not going to be as easy to b-p-t (biblical proof-text) into submission as the typical mark, and so they suddenly switched tactics. “Do you know,” one of them […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: apologetics, belief, Christianity, hortatory, Jeffrey Jay Lowder, morality

Allowing is not commanding

June 25, 2012 by Randal

Over the last week I have heard on at least three different occasions claims made to the moral equivalency of God allowing x and God commanding x. The argument has been made by Christians to demonstrate that if I accept that God providentially allows evils like genocide and infant sacrifice, I should have no problem […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: Bible, moral evil, morality, natural evil, providence, theodicy

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