The Secular Frontier

WHERE WE ARE In Chapter 7 of their book Handbook of Christian Apologetics (hereafter: HCA), Christian philosophers Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli make a case for the divinity of Jesus. Here is the main argument they present in Chapter 7: 1A. Jesus was either God, liar, lunatic, guru, or myth. 2A. Jesus could not possibly be a liar, lunatic, guru, or myth. THEREFORE: 3A. Jesus is God. In Part 3 of this series, I analyzed and clarified a series of four dilemmas (four EITHER/OR statements) that they use to support premise (1A). The four dilemmas are used to try to prove that there are only FIVE possible views that can be taken on this issue. In Part 4 of this series, I argued that the answer to the question posed in this FIRST DILEMMA is: NO. Furthermore, this NO answer to the question does NOT logically imply that the MYTH VIEW is true, so the logic of the FIRST DILEMMA is INVALID. In Part 6 of this series, Part 7 of this series, and Part 8 of this series, I showed that if we ... Read Article

WHERE WE ARE In Chapter 7 of their book Handbook of Christian Apologetics (hereafter: HCA), Christian philosophers Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli make a case for the divinity of Jesus. Here is the main argument they present in Chapter 7: 1A. Jesus was either God, liar, lunatic, guru, or myth. 2A. Jesus could not possibly be a liar, lunatic, guru, or myth. THEREFORE: 3A. Jesus is God. In Part 3 of this series, I analyzed and clarified a series of four dilemmas (four EITHER/OR statements) that they use to support premise (1A). The four dilemmas are used to try to prove that there are only FIVE possible views that can be taken on this issue. I summarized the clarified version of their four dilemmas in this decision tree diagram: In Part 4 of this series, I argued for some key points about the FIRST DILEMMA in the above diagram: Two of those key points are: The answer to this key question is "NO" and yet the MYTH VIEW is FALSE, contrary to the logic of the FIRST DILEMMA. So ... Read Article

WHERE WE ARE In Chapter 7 of their book Handbook of Christian Apologetics (hereafter: HCA), Christian philosophers Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli make a case for the divinity of Jesus. Here is the main argument they present in Chapter 7: 1A. Jesus was either God, liar, lunatic, guru, or myth. 2A. Jesus could not possibly be a liar, lunatic, guru, or myth. THEREFORE: 3A. Jesus is God. In Part 3 of this series, I analyzed and clarified a series of four dilemmas (four EITHER/OR statements) that they use to support premise (1A). The four dilemmas are used to try to prove that there are only FIVE possible views that can be taken on this issue. I summarized the clarified version of their four dilemmas in this decision tree diagram: In Part 4 of this series, I argued some key points about the first dilemma in the above diagram: Here are those key points: When Kreeft and Tacelli added two more possible views to the TRILEMMA to make their QUINTLEMMA, they unknowingly changed the me ... Read Article

This essay is in association with the June 2022 Biblical Studies Carnival you can check out at https://secularfrontier.infidels.org/2022/06/test-post-for-june-2022-biblical-studies-carnival/ Just the Stat’s Ma’am I first got a hint of the facts that -- as screamingly obvious as they are have gone shockingly ignored -- refute the premise presented in the Bible and other scriptures that there is a benign and moral creator deity when I many a decade ago was reading the opening sentences of the preface of my SciFi/futurist hero’s Arthur C. Clarke’s novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke casually noted that around 100 billion people have been born. That caught my attention because it seemed a high number. Where he got the value from I do not know, but it is correct. All serious calculations agree on the basic figure, plus or minus about 20%. ~10 billion were born in the 1900s alone, and with humans being around for a few hundred thousand years, 10,000 of them since agriculture allowe ... Read Article

It has not worked. The prochoice movement opposed by the religious right has been making an enormous mistake. We know that because it is experiencing disaster. That when a solid majority of Americans favor abortion rights Roe v Wade included. It is all too clear that what it has been done in support of women being full class citizens has been gravely defective. It follows that it is time to move on to a more effective strategy. Defunct RvW rested largely upon the 14thAmendment principle of privacy as a legal and societal expression of individual freedom from invasive state control in favor of personal responsibility. The thesis is valid, but it is a defensive posture that has proven insufficient to fend off assaults from a dedicated forced birth campaign. The situation is so bad for the sovereign rights of American women that even as Catholic heritage nations like Mexico, Argentina, Columbia and Ireland place their trust in the gender to make the best choice, the USA is reverting to the paternalist ... Read Article

            “I’d have to say look, there’s always a plan. I believe God has a plan. Life is short               no matter what it is.”                         Comment on the Uvalde mass school shooting by pro-gun Republican                         Texas State attorney general Ken Paxton God, guns, and the Bible. It’s the old motto going back to frontier days when gun toting Christian colonists and early Americans were ethnically sweeping the continent nearly clean of the aboriginal peoples as part of divine Manifest Destiny. And Bible endorsed enslavement applied to Blacks kidnapped from Africa and kept in line at the end of the gun. Followed by ... Read Article

I just wanted to conclude this small series of posts that began with movedness/presencing and provide a little ancient philosophical context. “Being” for the Greeks basically means “presence,” and so Plato says with the beautiful thing beauty is “present.”  Similarly, with the piece of chalk materiality is co-present.  Before I said presence means presencing, and so Aristotle makes the point that with the beautiful mansion beauty is presencing through it, it is Beauty incarnate, the universal presences through the particular.  Heidegger, commenting on Aristotle’s Physics 193 a 31-b3, says Aristotle begins the demonstration in a wholly extrinsic way with a reference to a way of speaking, one that in fact we still use. For example, we may say of a painting by Van Gogh, “This is art,” or, when we see a bird of prey circling above the forest, “That is nature.” In such “language use” we take a being that, properly considered, is something by virtue of and on the basi ... Read Article

WHERE WE ARE For the sake of being able to evaluate the second DILEMMA in Kreeft and Tacelli’s series of four dilemmas, I am going to temporarily set aside the serious problem of the historical UNRELIABILITY of the Gospel of John, and pretend (assume for the sake of argument) that the historical Jesus actually spoke the words attributed to Jesus in quotations from the Gospel of John presented by Kreeft and Tacelli in support of the view that Jesus claimed to be God. The question at issue concerning our evaluation of the second DILEMMA is thus whether Jesus meant these statements LITERALLY, and whether in making them he was LITERALLY claiming to be the eternal creator of the universe and the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good ruler of the universe. Here are the six verses from the Gospel of John that Kreeft and Tacelli quote in the opening pages of Chapter 7 of their Handbook of Christian Apologetics (hereafter: HCA): John 8:12John 8:46John 8:58John 1 ... Read Article

Last time I mentioned that: "Homer talks about the gods not appearing to everyone in their fullness (enargeis), with the example of Odysseus experiencing the full radiance of the goddess presencing through a woman, while the next person wasn’t experiencing her that way. Or, of a beautiful mansion we say “Now that’s a house!” though the next person may experience it to be presencing in a gawdy manner: The universal appears or manifests through the individual/particular."  This has interesting philosophical implications for the foundations of religious life, specifically the experience of the holy (sometimes called the numinous). If, for instance, you feel the presence of God while listening to some gospel music, there is no reason to think this really is contact with God, but rather just the mind acting on itself, because if the same gospel song is played 30 times in a row, it goes from presencing as holy to presencing as irritating. So, it is something our mind i ... Read Article

"Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not, nor of what sort they may be (Protagoras, On the Gods)" Protagoras was a proponent of either agnosticism or, as Tim Whitmarsh claims, atheism, on the grounds that since he held that if something is not able to be known it does not exist. This reflects my own position of theoretical agnosticism but pragmatic atheism, since life clearly does not seem to reflect the hand of a responsible God (eg., hurricanes, three year old's dead from cancer), but since an immaterial, supernatural being is unfalsifiable, who knows? I live my life as though immaterial goblins aren't the cause of quantum gravity, since to live otherwise would be odd. By God or theos Heidegger has in mind the notion of an arche that we find with the PreSocratics rather than the later Christian notion of a supernatural entity of faith.  This is why Heidegger says  “Faith has no place in thought (Heidegger, Anaximander’s ... Read Article

Regarding a moral influence interpretation of the cross that exposes/makes conspicuous guilt rather than wipe it clean, we read adapted from Rohr: In the Franciscan view, God did not need to be paid in order to love and forgive God’s own creation. Love cannot be bought by some “necessary sacrifice”; if it could, it would not and could not work its transformative effects. Duns Scotus and his followers were committed to protecting the absolute freedom to love in God. If forgiveness needs to be bought or paid for, then it is not authentic forgiveness at all. Love and forgiveness must be freely given or they do not accomplish their deeply transformative healing. Self-serving love does not change the heart. It must be free and undeserved love or transformation does not happen. (Think about that and you will know it is true!) The scapegoating ritual described in Leviticus 16 offers a helpful perspective on Jesus’ death. On the “Day of Atonement” the high priest, Aaron, wa ... Read Article

Regarding the transformation of the Roman soldier at the cross in Mark, last time I said: Just to show Mark’s Roman Soldier isn’t being sarcastic as Neil Godfrey claims, we read: 37 Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. 38 And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. 39 Now when the centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” (Mark 15:37-39 NRSVUE) As anyone can see, the miracle of the temple curtain being torn precedes and is the context for understanding the admission by the soldier that Jesus is God’s true son, snubbing Caesar who the Romans would have seen as the son of God. Just as the curtain miraculously tore, the Roman soldier miraculously declared Jesus the son of God rather than Caesar. The soldier has undergone a transformation. A “gospel” means propaganda, that’s what kind of writing it is – exaggeration and flattering a known historical figure. Helms com ... Read Article

Ehrman comments: It is easy to see Luke’s own distinctive view by considering what he has to say in the book of Acts, where the apostles give a number of speeches in order to convert others to the faith. What is striking is that in none of these instances (look, e.g., in chapters 3, 4, 13), do the apostles indicate that Jesus’ death brings atonement for sins. It is not that Jesus’ death is unimportant. It’s extremely important for Luke. But not as an atonement. Instead, Jesus death is what makes people realize their guilt before God (since he died even though he was innocent). Once people recognize their guilt, they turn to God in repentance, and then he forgives their sins. see: https://ehrmanblog.org/did-luke-have-a-doctrine-of-the-atonement-mailbag-september-24-2017/ I expand the Lukan Moral Influence interpretation of the cross to the New Testament generally, not just Luke, and use it to argue against the Penal Substitution (sin debt payment) interpretation of the cross. As ... Read Article

Theists Get All the Breaks – Really, They Do Conservative LOVE to go on and on and on complaining about Cancel Culture, about how the secular lefties are suppressing the free speech rights of those of the right on campuses, denouncing right wing nonacceptance of LGTBQ rights as bigotry, demanding to dismantle Confederate monuments and place names, and so forth. That is rich in that conservatives LOVE to cancel of the culture of those who dare disagree with their righteous opinions, such as those who take a knee during the National Anthem (which was written by an advocate of slavery and trashes Black rights but that is another subject), evicting  views on alternative sexuality and Common Core and liberal social-emotional learning out of public schools and libraries, is going after corporations for standing up for nonconservative social values, and denounces Woke Culture, the 1619 Project, BLM and intersectionality in an effort to protect the delicate sensibilities of White theocons fr ... Read Article

 Anthology co-editor Keith Augustine has kindly provided a response to the Hasker review I mentioned previously.  He writes:  Incidentally, Hasker is interestingly wrong about some things. For example, he writes: "However, they [my coauthor of chapter 10 & I] go well beyond the dependence thesis, arguing that brain function is not merely a necessary condition but in fact is a sufficient cause for experience, thus rendering an immaterial soul otiose."In fact, all my coauthor and I argue is that brain functioning is necessary for human mental life, although we indicate that we suspect that the right kind of brain functioning is probably sufficient, too. (That brain function is "sufficient" for human mental life is rendered false by the fact that there's still some brain functioning going on in unconscious patients--it's got to be the right kind of brain functioning.) First, by simply saying that "having a functioning brain is a necessary condit ... Read Article