oddXian: Challenge the Consensus

The standard of ethical and rational in the Christian worldview is God. To make ethical judgments on God, one has to propose a standard greater than God, that God would be subject to. For those unfamiliar with the dilemma, it stems from Plato's dialogue between Socrates and Euthyphro, and was later rehashed by Bertrand Russell to refer to the Christian God. It goes like this: Socrates: And what do you say of piety, Euthyphro? Is not piety, according to your definition, loved by all the gods? Euthyphro: Certainly. Socrates: Because it is pious or holy, or for some other reason? Euthyphro: No, that is the reason. Socrates: It is loved because it is holy, not holy because it is loved? In terms of non-believers assertions then, is something good because God says so, or is God good because He adheres to a morally good code of conduct? At first, almost all Christians will say something is good because God says so, and be done with it. Go...

Kudos to Tom Gilson over at The Thinking Christian Click here to read the full article - see below for some exerpts: What's Going On In The God Delusion? If his objective was to cause someone like me to reconsider my Christian faith, he has accomplished the opposite. ............... The question underlying his critique is: based on naturalist assumptions, does theism make sense? It's an illegitimate question, of course, akin to saying, from the standpoint of basketball rules, it makes no sense to kick a soccer ball. Of course theism will not live up to naturalist assumptions, if by naturalist we mean (as Dawkins does) that naturalism is the whole show. Theism doesn't have any desire or need to live up to this; it starts with the opposite belief. And I mean it really does start there. You can read the first three or so words of the Bible (in English) and not find it, but by the time you get to the fourth and fifth words, naturalism is ruled out. ............... ...much of ...

Adapted from Covenant Theology, Tuesday, November 7, 2006 “Your righteousness is righteous forever, and your law is true.” ( Psalms 119:142 ) "Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it…Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later." ( C.S. Lewis – Mere Christianity ) Atheist Richard Dawkins spends a lot of time addressing the “evils” of religion. " How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?" Dawkins asks. "It's one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?" Two issues must be raised here. First of all, on what grounds does an a...

Another "re-post" from my home blog : This was the Original Post (OP) in a thread on the Internet Infidels Atheist discussion forum - I thought this was worth capturing. Rational reasons to believe in Christianity by BadBadBad I was hoping that in this thread we could capture any rational reasons for believing in the Christian religion. Angela2 prompted this thread. She criticized athiests for "espousing atheism" for emotional reasons. I corrected her that for me anyway it's not promoting atheism, but criticizing religion. I do that for emotional and rational reasons. Yet I have yet to hear a single rational reason for believing in Christianity. So, hopefully we'll be able to sort through the best ones here and sort out emotion from rationality. Let's have the rational reasons for believing the Christian story as presented in the Bible. I replied that experience was one reason. The poster replied that this rationale could be used to support belief in San...

1 Begin to doubt Scripture as the authoritative source of truth for all matters of faith and practice 2 Accept that current accumulated evidentiary experience and knowledge are the best measure of truth (e.g., secular science) 3 Accept the interpretation of “truth” by non-Christian skeptics 4 Accept I can be dissuaded from my faith through doubt and skepticism 5 Reject Scripture as truth 6 Reject Christ as Lord and Savior 7 Become agnostic  8 Reject God entirely