The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and For Humanism by A. C. Grayling
There’s a short section in A. C. Grayling’s The God Argument where I was cheering him on. It was near the start of the book’s second part, after he had finished his argument against religion and was opening up his case for what unfortunately turns out to be Grayling’s hypocritical humanism.
It wasn’t right at the beginning of Part Two, where he offered up nonsense such as, “the …
Richard Dawkins’ hypocrisy drags on:
Professor Richard Dawkins has claimed that forcing a religion on children without questioning its merits is as bad as ‘child abuse’.
In typically incendiary style, the leading atheist said he was against the ‘indoctrination of religion’ and teaching it as fact.
He’s just wrong. Not “religiously” wrong (well, he is that, too) but scientifically wrong. Wrong according to the …
I wrote a first impression of A. C. Grayling’s The God Argument the other day. Now for a second impression of Grayling’s falsehoods. This one is horrific:
Religious individuals and institutions . . . sometimes accuse their critics of militancy. The critics reply that when religion occupied a dominant position in society, it dealt with its critics much more harshly than today’s critics now deal with religion: for one familiar example, by torturing them and burning them at the stake. Today’s critics of religions …
It only takes a moment, reading A .C. Grayling’s new book, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and For Humanism, to discover that his “humanism” revolves around distortions.
Whereas the consolations of religion are mainly personal, the burdens are social and political as well as personal.
He goes quickly on from there to complaining about religions’ attempts to have influence in the public square. Its consolations apparently must be kept mainly personal.
But this is either astonishingly ignorant or intentionally deceptive, at least with …
Atheists today often insist that atheism is not a belief, but a lack of belief. Here’s a question for them and others: Isn’t atheism a positive belief that “I do not need God in order to live my life”?
There are admittedly different kinds of atheism, but I think most of the atheists I’ve interacted with could affirm that as their personal belief. Atheists who are reading here: did I understand you correctly on that?
Last time in this series on atheism, faith, and violence, I took a very brief look at Richard Dawkins’s misunderstanding of faith: specifically, that it’s not just the fact of faith but also its content that matters.
That was the first of five items I said I would cover in pursuit of the question Dawkins raised: is there a more logical path from faith to violence than there is from atheism to violence?
The answer to that quite obviously is yes, provided that the …
I'm about a quarter of the way through John N. Oswalt's very readable The Bible Among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature? I've just been stopped short with a question about the relation of science to myth, and whether philosophcial materialism may itself be a form of myth.
Now I recognize there are a number of problems with that question. The first is that materialism is often associated with a certain school of thinking among scientists, which could cause anyone with half a …
Larry Tanner, frequent commenter here, has some kind words about me on his own blog. I missed it for a few days, but I have left him a note there now in response.
Richard Dawkins says there is a logical path from religion to violence, but not from atheism to violence. He comes stunningly close to the truth, while yet missing it altogether.
This comes from somewhere after minute 75 in a debate (video here) with John Lennox in Birmingham, Alabama on October 3, 2007. Dawkins said,
I think there is a logical path from religion to doing …
"The New Atheists claim to be the party of reason.... The problem is, they're not very good at it." — Discover the provocative ebook True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism.