Yearly Archives: 2009

Wishes or Prayers

An atheist who goes by the nom de blog “ylooshi” raised this question about my pre-Christmas post on Wishing and Celebrating: Then it occurred to be, even before I left the paragraph above, that if you replace “wish” for “prayer,” you really haven’t changed the criticism…. The author both criticizes ineffectual wishing the world was …

December 29, 2009 – 10:15 pm | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Prayer, The Faith | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Christ At Christmas: The Ordinary Meets the Extraordinary

The day of his birth was ordinary and extraordinary. That is the way of Jesus Christ. He was and is God, the eternal one, the creator and king of all that exists. He took on the nature and form of a human being (Philippians 2:5-8). The ordinary met the extraordinary. There were a man and …

December 25, 2009 – 6:42 am | By Tom Gilson | Posted in The Faith | Comments (1)

Christian Carnival CCCVII

“A Carnival of Praise” has been posted at Brain Cramps for God.

December 24, 2009 – 11:00 am | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Miscellanea | Comments Off

Year-End Partnership Opportunity

Update January 1, 2009: Is it too late to participate in this partnership? Certainly not! Glory! We hear that word more at Christmas than any other time of year. All year long, though, if someone asks me what motivates me to do what I do, I answer, “that the earth may be filled with the …

December 22, 2009 – 10:38 am | By Tom Gilson | Posted in The Faith | Tagged , | Comments Off

Wishing and Celebrating

The Starbucks coffee cup reads, We invite you to listen to your desires and to renew your hope. To see the world not as it is, but as it could be. Go ahead. Wish. It’s what makes the holidays the holidays. Wishing, it says, is “what makes the holidays the holidays.” Try not to see …

December 21, 2009 – 12:14 pm | By Tom Gilson | Posted in The Faith | Tagged | Comments (10)

Chocolate and Caring, Brussels Sprouts and Murder

Much of the discussion about ethics revolves around an analogy to matters of personal preference. doctor(logic) recently said, Morality bears all the hallmarks of something subjective, like taste in food or taste in art. And also, My argument is that, unlike the objective sciences, morality has no more basis for objectivity than the things we …

December 19, 2009 – 1:17 pm | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Ethics | Tagged , | Comments (110)

Christ Before Christmas

We’re in the season of expectancy, preparing to celebrate the birth of Christ. There was a season of expectancy before his actual birth 2,000 years ago–expectancy both on earth, where prophecies of a coming Messiah were passionately studied and only partly understood, and also in heaven, where the eternal God was preparing to break in …

December 17, 2009 – 3:51 pm | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Knowing God | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

The Dangerous Concept of Right and Wrong

We cannot explain our moral experiences as purely subjective phenomena. Our moral experience includes the gut-level awareness that some things are really right and some are really wrong. Only a metaphysical commitment to belief in an amoral reality could quell that awareness. If there are pure moral relativists who do not regard anything as really …

December 14, 2009 – 7:51 am | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Ethics | Comments (54)

Moral Relativism: Idolatry In Our Generation

This post differs from many others on this blog in that I am going to base it on my settled belief in the God of the Bible, and not try to make an argument this time in favor of that belief. In other words, you will agree with this or not based on your existing …

December 11, 2009 – 10:42 pm | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Ethics, New Atheism | Tagged , | Comments (59)

An Odious Law: Uganda and Homosexuality

John Mark Reynolds: Uganda may pass a law that could lead to the death penalty for homosexual behavior. The proposed law is odious…. No good can come of this bill and great harm will be done if it is passed. Some fringe Evangelical support may be behind the bill and so American Evangelicals have some …

December 5, 2009 – 7:13 am | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Life and Choices | Tagged , | Comments (19)