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Posts from the ‘Religion’ Category

Jan 12

14 Comments

Morality: Divine Spark or Evolutionary Trick?

A good deal of my reading this week has been on human moral intuitions and the role they are playing in the jeremiads against God and religion served up by the “new atheists.” I’ve read enough over the years to be roughly familiar with the typical evolutionary story told about the origins of morality: morality has evolved because it enhanced our evolutionary fitness. Whether the story told is one of group selection, preserving social cohesion, or reciprocal altruism, at the end of the day, the scientists tell us, we are moral creatures because this is the best way to get our genes into the next generation. Read more

Dec 22

2 Comments

An Atheist Christmas Homily

Due to the nature of my thesis work, my radar is unnaturally (and often annoyingly) tuned to any and all occurrences of the word “atheist”—especially when found in conjunction with the word “Jesus.” For the first part of this opinion piece by Andre Comte-Sponville in today’s Washington Post I was thinking, “OK, here we go again… another angry atheist, endlessly ranting about the evils of superstition, the innumerable deleterious social effects of Christianity, etc, etc.” Read more

Nov 29

20 Comments

Which Story?

One of the things we’ve talked about in the course I’m teaching out at Columbia Bible College this semester is the importance of understanding how all world-views—whether they consider themselves to be “religious” or not—offer their own set of explanations to questions about the nature of the world, the nature of human beings and the problems that plague us, and the potential remedies that are available. The nature of the story one accepts about the world will determine both the kinds of questions one will be inclined to ask and the nature of answers that will be deemed acceptable in response to those questions. Read more

Nov 6

2 Comments

Who Goes Where (or Who Cares)?

A couple of articles in the New York Times caught my eye over the past couple of days, the first dealing with the “conversion” of a prominent atheist and the second using this “conversion” in a discussion of the problem of evil. Antony Flew is a British philosopher who in 2004 announced, after a lengthy career as a professional philosopher devoted, at least in part, to arguing for the truth of atheism, that he had changed his mind. Professor Flew is apparently now an advocate of a form of deism—a long way away from belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but a significant change of course from the the position he held for the bulk of his career, to put it mildly. Read more

Sep 25

27 Comments

Consistent or Crazy?

Thesis research can be a tad monotonous at times, but every once in a while, in the midst of wading through page after page of different versions of the same arguments, you come across a book that really surprises you—where you read something that you’ve never come across before that forces you to rub your eyes, sit up, and take notice. That happened for me this week when I was introduced to Loyal Rue. Read more

Sep 15

6 Comments

The Political and the Divine

A couple of weeks ago I posted about an article by Columbia professor Mark Lilla which addressed, among other things, the persistence of religion in a post-Enlightenment age and what might account for it. For those who are interested, his book—The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West—is now available, as noted in this morning’s review in the New York Times. In an age where religion is frequently portrayed as the enemy of all that is good and true, any effort to provide clarity on the subject of the historical interaction between religion and politics seems (to me) to be a welcome one indeed. Read more

Sep 8

37 Comments

What’s Religion Ever Done for Us?

I’ve come across Sigmund Freud relatively frequently over the last couple of years, and I’ve read and heard just enough to be familiar with the broad outlines of his views on religion. Simply put, he wasn’t very high on it. According to Freud, religion represents the childish illusion of a creature that lacks the intellectual fortitude or the courage to face the world as it really is. It is the projection of all our fears and hopes onto an imaginary cosmic screen in order to provide comfort and security in a world where neither are possible. Freud (along with Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche) is often presented as a paradigmatic example of the modern atheistic critique of religion. It’s for the weak and the deluded, a “collective neurosis” for those who can’t handle the cold hard realities of the world in which we live. Read more

Aug 21

2 Comments

The Persistence of Religion

Columbia professor Mark Lilla wrote a very interesting article in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine which deals with the relationship between religious belief and politics (adapted from his forthcoming book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West). It’s an interesting article—one well worth taking the time to read and think about. Among the many interesting issues raised by this article, I was drawn to one in particular—the persistence of religious belief, and what might account for it. Read more

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