Going through my Twitter feed this morning I saw the following retweet via Secular Outpost: “Atheism does not require certainty. But we can be as certain the Christian god does not exist as Christians are that Thor does not exist.” I assume that the original tweeter was intending to make a claim like this: “Evidence […]
Yahweh
Cannibalizing infants as punishment?
The conversation began when I raised some problems with calling God the perfect Father based on particular depictions in the Bible. I gave as a test case the text of Lamentations 4 where God judges Israel for her unfaithfulness by orchestrating conditions that will include women eating their infant children. The Israelites understood those conditions […]
Yahweh and Yahweh: A second and final footnote to my Jaco Gericke review
I cannot help but make one more point in response to Gericke’s argument. I apologize because this should have been included in my first footnote. Unfortunately it comes from that wing of philosophy which Gericke refers to as “fundamentalist and analytic”. (152) (Incidentally, Gericke seems to have a thing about labeling people. He even calls Walter […]
What Gericke failed to do: A footnote to my review of Jaco Gericke
Terms have both a reference and a sense. The reference of a term is the thing it refers to while the sense of a term is the means by which it refers to that thing (i.e. it’s content). If Jaco Gericke is going to succeed in his argument he will need to demonstrate first that the sense […]
The End of Christianity? A Skeptical Review (Part 6)
“Can God exist if Yahweh doesn’t?” This is the question at the center of The End of Christianity chapter five written by Jaco Gericke. Some of the other chapters in The End of Christianity have bad arguments, and at least one chapter seems to lack an argument altogether. But the argument of this chapter is strange. Let me […]
Hector Avalos puts Yahweh in the dock (or tries to)
Hector Avalos, “Yahweh is a Moral Monster,” The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails, ed. John Loftus (Amherst: Prometheus, 2010), 209-236. At long last we continue our ongoing, meandering, waxing and wandering review of The Christian Delusion with a quick review of Hector Avalos’ essay “Yahweh is a Moral Monster.” I don’t have too much to say about […]
