Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: Wishful Thinking in Apologetics.
Today we’re talking about wishful apologetics: those arguments that ache and yearn for an idealized form of Christianity. Special Guest: C.S. Lewis.
Analyzing Christianity
The Vast Comfort of Literalism
Ever wonder how someone converts into fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity? Here’s how I ended up there.
Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: Science- and History-Based Apologetics.
One popular form of apologetics is the attempt to demonstrate the veracity of the Bible. This is probably the easiest form of apologetics to dismiss, as well.
Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: Apologetics: Pascal, Ontological, Cosmological
Some of these arguments rise to the level of apologetics classics. Others are painfully cringeworthy modern inventions that could only exist in a Christian population that is vastly deteriorated from loftier standards. I’ll show you three of those arguments today–and how you’re likely to encounter them in the wild, so to speak!
Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: An Overview of the Apologetics Field, and Its (Hopeful) End
We’re about to plunge into actual apologetics works and examine their authors’ major ideas and claims. Before we do that, let’s just real quick-like run through the field as a whole so we’re all on the same page. I’m sure it didn’t take long at all for the earliest Christians Read more…
Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: The Second Big Mistake Apologists Make
Last time we talked about apologists, we talked about their first big mistake: that they start with a conclusion and find some kind of logic that will get them to that conclusion. That’s called arguing top-down. In bottom-up arguing, one starts with observations and measurements and builds the argument around Read more…
Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: The First Fundamental Mistake Apologists Make
The first fundamental mistake apologists make is that they don’t actually refer to any facts to make their various arguments, making their conclusions highly suspect. Indeed, apologists really can’t do that. It’s almost unfair even to make the request that they do so. After all: There is not one single demonstrable bit of objective evidence about the supernatural to which they actually could refer.
Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: Examining the Evidence
I wasn’t stupid, willfully-ignorant, or mentally will when I made the decision to become a fundamentalist, and I really don’t like it when someone implies that about anyone. I thought the religion had evidence supporting its claims. On that count I was wrong, and here’s the list of what I was wrong about.
Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: Learning to Move Past Religious Narcissism
We recently added another line to that cosmic address–did you notice? After “Virgo supercluster,” we now have Laniakea, a galactic supercluster that comprises Virgo and some other local superclusters. Scientists have figured out how to tell what galaxies and groups are part of our galactic supercluster, and in addition and almost as importantly, they finally have a model of it that fits predictions and equations both. And that discovery has spoken to me on a very fundamental level.
Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: Unlearning a Rather Distorted Narcissism
It’s a seductive storyline. I can’t deny that. It’s powerfully alluring. Just imagine: You’re the klutzy, totally undeserving, inexperienced, vastly underpowered childlike person who catches the eye of some huge, unthinkably powerful, completely in-control and self-possessed being whose monstrous will and complete focus lands, laser-like and pinpoint-accurate, on you. You Read more…