This is the advert that someone I know took out in the newspaper, The South Bend Tribune,which is in South Bend,…
Category God’s Characteristics
Myself and author James A. Lindsay were both involved in contributing chapters to John Loftus’s recent excellent addition to his growing number of titles.
Here is a broad selection of claims and quotes from the Catholic Encyclopedia article “The Nature and Attributes of God” compiled by my friend Julian Haydon:
God is infinitely perfect
He is infinitely good, intelligent, wise, just, holy, etc
no Theist of average intelligence ever thinks of understanding literally the metaphors he applies, or hears applied by others, to God
Thus God is said to see or hear, as if He had physical organs, or to be angry or sorry, as if subject to human passions
I love this quote from Valerie Tarico in her chapter “God’s Emotions” in John Loftus’ book The End of Christianity.
To say that the descriptions of God in the Bible are metaphors does not make the situation any better. A metaphor about something as deep as the human relationship to ultimate reality needs to be deeply accurate.
Some weeks back I wrote a piece on the general incoherence of the Holy Trinity from a logical and philosophical point of view, taking into account existence properties and the like. In this post I want to return to the subject, though to look at it from a theological perspective.
Gah! I posted my Trinity piece with some alterations on John Loftus’ Debunking Christianity where I used to be a more full-time contributor. It was picked up by some Catholic chap who tried to critique it, except that he really didn’t deal with the substantive points.
The Holy Trinity has had a problematic history, partly evidenced by point of fact that theologians still don’t agree on how it works, and partly seen from its ex post facto evolution, shoehorned into the scant evidence of the biblical texts. From Ignatius of Antioch onwards we see development of the idea in early church thinking, until it is codified at the Council of Nicaea in the 4th century CE. There will be more talk later on what was creedally set out.
Thanks again to Andy Schueler for finding this. Good way of showing that those oft-used analogies to describe the Trinity…
My book, The Little Book of Unholy Questions, is a cumulative case against God (the Judeo-Christian version predominantly, but not exclusively) and it includes a number of chapters on different topics. I will include the last questions in the book before I sum up there. These questions are by an large irreverent. But actually, many do pack a punch, if you tease out what they can lead to.
I am sure I have posted this before, but this is well worth a watch. Actually, the screenplay was written…
My last post in this series looked at the idea that Yahweh, as the parochial Jewish God of a particular section of the Middle East in time, bears no resemblance to the God that Christians believe in, and is supposedly that exact same God. The Janus-styled god who appears to flip personality, characteristics and general existence at the turn of the New Testament, is fundamentally different from the present-day Christian God. We are all atheists on this god, except Christians don’t seem to realise it.
I am reposting this one again because it came up in a comment by Shatterface here. This was a…
This has come up recently in conversation so I thought I would post this video I did some time back.
Many people believe ridiculous things. Most of the time, we eventually shuffle off such beliefs. But some remain. In the case of Christianity, this is the belief in Yahweh. I don’t mean to be overly rhetorical, but the belief in Yahweh is patently ridiculous, much more so than the belief in God.
Many people, particularly fundamentalists, still believe in a real and actual Satan. Of course, to everyone else, this is completely incomprehensible. And here’s one reason for why, as John Loftus sets out in his book The End of Christianity (p. 100):
Brilliant: The fundamental question here, is whether Yahweh explains things as they are better than the alternatives. I don´t see…
Some time back I posted an argument on mentalizing deficits with regard to God being unfair. This broadly stated that certain autistic type people who have an inability to empathise are less likely to believe in God, presumably because the intersubjectivity of empathy allows an agent to see the,selves from somebody else’s point of view. This means that they are less able to suppose what God would think about them whilst doing any given moral action, and such like. The abstract, to the paper looked at in the post, reads:
OK, so it’s not here on my site, but on James A. Lindsay’s (whose book Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly I have just edited) site, God Doesn’t; We Do, in a debate with apologist Tom Gilson.
As I am sure you are by now aware, I edited and published James A. Lindsay’s Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly on my Onus Books skeptical imprint. It has received some great reviews and received a foreword by Victor Stenger.
New Books in Secularism is part of the New Books Network which interviews authors about their books. Their piece on this:
So I posted on John Loftus’ DC the other day in plugging Aaron Adair’s The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View and James A. Lindsay’s Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus god Equals Folly. Vincent Torley, about whom I have written a series of posts, and who writes at Uncommon Descent, looked to critique the two heavily. But it seems he got more than he bargained for. I won’t go through the tos and fros with him and Adair – they are long, though fascinating. Well, well, worth a look at. Here is Vincent on Lindsay’s book, well, his video that we concocted.