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. 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

Bart Ehrman just shared a meme from a blog post which was foundational for an essay I wrote critiquing the penal substitution interpretation of the cross. My essay tries to take Ehrman's insight regarding Luke-Acts and apply it more generally to the New Testament. Here is Bart's new meme: ... Read Article

In the aftermath of Roe being struck down so close to July 4th, it's important to remember that rights and freedoms, and even democracy, are a work in progress, and are always tentative because as Reich pointed out, if history has taught us nothing else it's that the people can and will demand their own repression. A few days ago, a 10 year old pregnant rape victim was forced to go out of state from Ohio to Indiana for her abortion: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/03/ohio-indiana-abortion-rape-victim On this July fourth, I hope my American friends understand how important their country is, but also that there is a lot of work left to be done. Back in 2018, Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks posted this viral video of the anger many feel at religious people who want to impose their beliefs eliminating abortion rights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAvFfrYA2LM&t=7s A great difficulty in all this is that conservatives are arguing that liberals want to kill "human person babies ... Read Article

Carnival in Rome circa 1650 From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository ** Check out Secular Web Kids! Welcome to the June 2022 Biblical Studies Carnival at The Secular Frontier, the official blog of The Secular Web.  The Secular Web is owned and operated by Internet Infidels, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization dedicated to defending and promoting a naturalistic worldview on the Internet. Naturalism is the “hypothesis that the natural world is a closed system” in the sense that “nothing that is not a part of the natural world affects it.” As such, “naturalism implies that there are no supernatural entities,” such as gods, angels, demons, ghosts, or other spirits, “or at least none that actually exercises its power to affect the natural world.” And without miraculous interventions into nature from a spiritual realm, neither prayer nor magick are more effective than a placebo. So what is a Biblical Studies Carnival? Prof. Phil Long expla ... 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

Democritus (center) and Protagoras (right)17th-century painting by Salvator Rosa Πρωταγόρας; c. 490 BC – c. 420 BC "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 superna ... Read Article

In this series of posts, one side issue I tried to argue was the idea of Jesus as a mythical entity who was crucified in outer space as Richard Carrier argues for doesn't make sense of the evidence, primarily because the crucifixion is trying to arouse guilt to inspire repentance and this theme doesn't fit with sky demons executing Christ. But there is another related issue. Carrier argues original Christianity was just another dying-rising God cult that were numerous at that time. The problem is that if original Christianity was just another one of these, it would make sense to the Gentiles. But, Paul says the gentiles found the idea of the religion centered around the cross to be ridiculous: "23 but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, (1 Cor 1:23)" The idea of an executed deity as a object of worship in the ancient world was looked upon as ludicrous, hence the parody of Christian worship from around the year 200 with the The Alexamenos graff ... Read Article

Carnival in Rome circa 1650 From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository The Secular Frontier blog is happy to announce we are hosting the June 2022 Biblical Studies Carnival So what is a Biblical Studies Carnival? Prof. Phil Long explains: In the early days of blogging, people would collect blog posts on a particular topic and call it a carnival. I have no idea why a carnival (as opposed to a yard sale, a circus, or a monthly index… it’s an internet thing). There were psychology carnivals, sociology carnivals, etc. In March 2005, Joel Ng posted the first Biblical Studies Carnival at his now defunct blog, Ebla Logs. But nothing is really dead on the internet. You can still read that first carnival on The Wayback Machine. The first link is to Jim Davila, at PaleoJudaica.com, a remarkable blog still going strong after all these years. I notice the one-time keeper of the Biblioblog Top Fifty list, Peter Kirby (although his blog Christian Origins is now gone). Jim West ... 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