CAMWatch: Why do people do bad things?

Anthony Horvath has an interesting post over at the Christian Apologetics Ministries blog. It’s particularly interesting in that it raises an issue you don’t ordinarily hear.

Christian religion says that people are by nature sinful and fallen. So it isn’t any surprise to Christians- or it shouldn’t be- when humans do bad things to other humans. We shouldn’t even be surprised when Christians are mean to other Christians…

But what explains that fact?  I have never heard of a genocide by the gorillas.   Have we found concentration camps erected by dogs?  …  No, raw brutality towards one’s own entire species seems to be a problem unique to the human race, with or without religion.

But can we generate an explanation for that fact without religion? …

The response of [Neibuhr and Chesterton] in the face of human nature’s apparent depravity was to identify it with a doctrine that was already known to them within the Christian community.  What is the atheist going to turn to?

So man’s inhumanity to man is supposed to pose a tough problem for atheists, not because it’s so difficult to stop, but because the atheist’s lack of belief in God means he can’t explain why man is sometimes cruel to man. In other words, if God did not exist, we would expect man to behave better.

That’s a refreshing change from the usual argument, isn’t it? Let’s see if we can’t explain human cruelty without recourse to superstitious ideas about God.

Christianity is winning! — D’Souza

Phil Brennan, at the right-wing newsmax.com, gives us a glowing review (beware popups at newsmax!) of Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, an attempt to rebut the recent round of atheistic best-sellers.

There is no better way to inoculate a young man or woman against the virus of atheistic brainwashing epidemic on America’s campuses than Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, which carefully and calmly goes about the job of not only exposing the emptiness and lies of the atheistic materialism fervently embraced by a great number of academics, but also shows how effective Christianity has proven to be in combating its deleterious effects on our culture.

According to D’Souza atheism is losing and Christianity is winning. “God has come back to life,” he writes. “The world is witnessing a huge explosion of religious conversion and growth, and Christianity is growing faster than any other religion. Nietzsche’s proclamation ‘God is Dead’ is now proven false.”

Yup. He’s exactly right. And anyone who whines and moans about how Christians are poor, oppressed souls, and how Christianity is being “expelled” and banned from the public eye, is lying. Christianity is still the dominant force in our culture, and it got that way by inoculating young people’s minds before they could be exposed to viewpoints that would question their assumptions.

Thanks, Phil, and thanks Dinesh, for at least being honest about that part. (Maybe I’ll find a second-hand copy of that book to review someday…)

Proverb for the day

Life is pretty hectic right now, so today’s blog post will be real short: a simple proverb.

He who praises his God, praises himself.

That one’s not in the Bible, by the way.

Maybe if I get time, I’ll post something longer about the truth behind the proverb.

Mosey on over…

A new Skeptics Circle just rode into town over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable. Y’all oughta mosey on over there for a look-see, if’n you ain’t come here from thar in the fust place.

More on natural moral law

[UPDATE: the post to which I was replying seems to have disappeared from the original blog it was posted to, so there's not much point in following the link below, I'm afraid.]

Samueljames seems to want to keep the discussion going on the subject of CS Lewis’s “Natural Law” argument. Unfortunately, he’s morphing it into a subjective philosophical exercise about what a good moral system should be, which strays quite a bit from Lewis’s point and my discussion of it.

Wow

Just a few days ago I was telling some friends how pleased I was that my new blog had received 71 hits on a single post. Then the 68th Skeptics Circle came out, and somehow my entry made it onto reddit.com, and foom. Over 30,000 hits since yesterday. Evangelical Realism is currently, as of this post, #1 in Top Posts and Fastest Growing, and #3 in Top Blogs, according to my WordPress Dashboard. Apparently, my “How God Works” post even beat out “Porn Name All-Stars” and Edwards vs. Clinton.

Awesome.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and I hope you come back. Thanks especially to everyone who took the time to comment. I appreciate your remarks (even pujyboy’s), and look forward to hearing from more of you.

Cheers.

Harem Yoyo’s Most Hated Blogs

According to PZ Myers, some clown who calls himself Harem Yoyo or some such is trying to silence his critics, specifically the following:

http://www.yahyaharun.com/yahyaharun/Default.aspx
http://adnanoktar.wordpress.com
http://adnanoktarveislam.wordpress.com/
http://fitikado.wordpress.com
http://oktarbabuna.wordpress.com
http://adnancilar.wordpress.com/
http://adnanoktarveislam.wordpress.com/
http://whoisharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://adnanoktargercekleri.wordpress.com/
http://quiestharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://harunyahyaarabic.wordpress.com/
http://safsataciharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://savsatalaracevap.wordpress.com/

Oh, you say his name is Adnan Oktar, aka Harun Yahya? My bad.

The Unapologetic Encyclopedia, and “XFiles Friday”

I’m introducing a couple of new features at ER: the Unapologetic Encyclopedia, and “XFiles Friday.”

The Unapologetic Encyclopedia is going to be an ongoing project for a while. From time to time, I’m going to look at the various apologetic arguments used to support Christianity, and show where their error lies. My goal is ultimately to accumulate a comprehensive reference list of Christian apologetic arguments and their refutations, similar to the Index of Creationist Claims. The “Encyclopedia” link at the top of the blog points to an index page that lists each apologetic in alphabetical order, with links to the post(s) in which that particular argument is refuted.

The new “XFiles Friday” feature doesn’t have anything to do with any popular TV shows (think “X as in Xmas”), but instead serves as a handy place to put my blog postings about the various books of apologetics (XFiles) that I’ll be reviewing. I was going to make such reviews the main feature of this blog, but unfortunately I’m not finding the time to do a proper rebuttal every day, so I’ll have to be content with a weekly feature.

Readers are encouraged to send in apologetics-related material (individual arguments or entire books) for either or both of the above. You can leave your suggestions in the comments section below.

Measuring success

A writer for IndyStar.com suggests an interesting way to measure the success of Bush’s “faith-based” initiatives:

Perhaps the success of Bush’s idea is revealed in some statistics that Hein offered his audience last week. Of the 50 states, 33 governors have established some kind of office to enlist faith-based groups in a war on crime or poverty or drugs. Another 100 mayors have set up similar offices.

Isn’t that interesting? The article highlights programs designed to keep prison inmates from becoming repeat offenders after they get out of jail. So what standard do we use to measure the effectiveness of “faith-based” initiatives in reducing crime by ex-cons? Do we measure a reduction in arrests? Court cases? Convictions? Reported crimes? No, we count how many other political opportunists join the president in violating the part of the Constitution that mentions not passing laws “respecting the establishment of religion.”

It isn’t about producing practical results. It’s about pumping up the numbers for political purposes. And of course funneling tax dollars into church coffers.

Our Patron Deity

Welcome to the Online Seminary of Evangelical Realism. Since this is my inaugural post, I thought it would be appropriate to introduce you to my patron deity: Reality.

Some of my readers will be unfamiliar with the idea of Reality as a god, but if you think about it, Reality has many of the traditional attributes of deity, and indeed most of our traditional ideas about God are merely garbled perceptions of the incomprehensible complexity and enormity of Reality.

For example, Reality is omnipresent (exists in all places) and omnipotent (all-powerful). Wherever you go in the entire universe, Reality is already there, and no matter what you do, you cannot violate any of Reality’s rules for how things work. Reality is, in fact, the only god powerful enough to truly claim that no disobedience is possible. Do what you will, you cannot help but obey the laws of Reality (and if you think otherwise, the consequences will be uncomfortable at best, if not downright disastrous!).

Reality is also eternal, since if there was ever any time when Reality did not exist, then nothing else would exist either. Reality is also the Creator, having produced everything which exists today. Reality is the “thing than which no greater can be imagined,” as Anselm once put it. Any lesser God we might imagine would be either a non-existent God, or a God which was part of Reality. God therefore either is Reality, or is merely a part of Reality. Reality, therefore, must be greater than or equal to any existing God.

Now, one of our failures as limited, finite beings is that there are limits to what we are capable of holding in our minds. Deity is too vast and too complex for us to comprehend fully and precisely; we necessarily reduce God to a representation that is small enough to fit inside our minds. But how can we represent something as complex, something as knowable yet unpredictable, as Reality itself, in all its fullness and detail?

Answer: by analogy. The most complicated, subtle, familiar, and yet unpredictable things we know of are other human beings, and therefore we imagine God as a being Who is, in many ways, similar to a human-type being. Though this approach is not precisely accurate, it’s not entirely wrong. It’s merely a concession to our own limitations. God (that is, Reality) is and always has been beyond our powers of comprehension. Thus, the fact that Reality is not a “person,” in the traditional sense, is not an argument against the deity of Reality. Traditionally, men have viewed their gods as human-like persons, but even they will admit, if pressed, that the truth about God is more complicated than that.

It is with great pride and pleasure, therefore, that I present to you our patron deity, Reality, to whom we ascribe all honor and glory, and whose knowledge we commend to every honest soul.