Atheism tagged posts

This is a critical review of a 2009 debate between Christian apologist Matt Slick and atheist lawyer Eddie Tabash. Having previously heard Slick debate Matt Dillahunty on The Atheist Experience, as well as Tabash’s 1999 debate with William Lane Craig, I found myself curious to see how these two would square off against one another. Matt Slick is President and Founder of the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry, an ordained minister, and has a BA in Social Science and a Masters of Divinity...

If a loving god exists, and wants to be known, why have so many people down through history not believed in a supreme being? Theologians such as Anselm of Canterbury and Martin Luther developed the idea that the Judeo-Christian god is a hidden god, or one that does not reveal itself to all persons. There is even scriptural support for this view. “Truly you are a God who has been hiding himself,” Isaiah 45:15 states, while Psalm 22:2 reads, “My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer”.

The 17th century French Catholic philosopher Blaise Pascal comments on the significance of this doctrine...

How should we understand the concept of religion? How does our understanding of it impact the way we see different traditions, communities, and practices? What are the ways religion has been understood in the past and in the academy? For this episode of the podcast, I speak with Kevin Schilbrack about his contribution to the long-running debate over defining religion. Dr...

Leaving religion behind can have real life consequences for many people, some of them frustrating or even traumatic in nature. When one first walks away from a religious tradition, or stands up to the dominant tradition within their own community, a variety of challenges and questions may present themselves...

Is there evidence of life of death? What should we make of claims about near-death experiences, apparitions, and psychic encounters? For this episode of the show, I talk with Keith Augustine about these questions and more. Mr. Augustine is the Executive Director and Scholarly Paper Editor at Internet Infidels. He holds a Master’s in Philosophy from the University of Maryland, and recently co-edited a book with Michael Martin entitled The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case Against Life After Death. Keith has published articles in the Journal of Near Death Studies, Skeptic magazine, and at infidels...

The Big Questions, as their name implies, are questions about who we are, about the universe we live in, about our place in the universe, and more along these lines. Theistic religions, especially those that proselytize, have constructed cases for their beliefs that tend to pay a great deal of attention to these Big Questions. Sometimes widespread and culturally dominant religions even succeed in defining the terms of the questions, so as to give themselves greater assurance of their influence on the lives of their adherents and the societies in which they thrive. So far, we have considered w...

When The Passion of the Christ was released to movie theaters in 2004, it erupted into a storm of excitement and controversy. Many believers used the film as a witnessing tool, inviting friends, coworkers, and family with the intent of eliciting conversation. Others found themselves convicted by the story, and took its message as a call to change, including a Texas man who felt inspired to confess to the murder of his girlfriend.¹ Documentaries such as Changed Lives: Miracles of the Passion and Impact: Passion of the Christ have chronicled the enormous popular response to the movie around the...

In his dialogue with Euthyphro, Socrates asks, “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” To put the dilemma in more modern terms: does God command an action because it is good, or is an action good because God commands it? If the former is true, then the good exists independently of God. If the latter is true, then a question arises concerning the arbitrariness of moral obligations...

What does it mean to be a spiritual person? According to some, spirituality is about identifying with certain otherworldly beliefs. Others consider it to indicate faith in a deity or in supernatural beings. Recently, in Waking Up, Sam Harris has suggested that religious traditions have too often imposed their restrictive ideas onto spirituality. A spiritual person is not necessarily a religious person, and may only be spiritual in the sense of having a particular disposition towards life, the world, and the universe.

Robert Solomon, who was Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Business and Phil...