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Jaime: Okay, so why do you believe that your god is a good explanation for the universe? Robin: Because everything that exists needs an explanation and the universe is no exception. Jaime: But then why doesn’t your god need an explanation? Aren’t we just headed for an infinite regress unless you just admit that something doesn’t need [...]
Archive for the ‘Christianity’ Category
Examining Some Alleged Divine Attributes
February 21st, 2012 
Daniel Fincke 
Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Atheism, Christianity, Christianity, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion 
Tags: Classical Theism, Divine Attributes, Divine Simplicity, Divine Timelessness, Eternal, God, God's Timelessness, Immutability, Temporality and Eternality, Theistic God, Timeless 
22 Comments »Occupy Heaven
February 20th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Mr. Deity’s captives beloved subjects are unsatisfied for a number of reasons: I examined arguments that hell is God’s favor to those who just don’t want to be with him in my post Hell as the Absence of God (a fictional dialogue between my characters Jaime and Robin). Although I think there are ways to [...]
Posted in Christianity, Christianity, Comedy, Comedy, Hilarious, Parody, Parody, Religulous, Religulous, Satire, Satire Tags: Downsides of Immortality, Free Will, Free Will and Evil, Hell as a Choice, Hell Is Unfair, Mr. Deity, Occupy Movement Parody, Personal Relationship with God, Scientology, The 1%, The 99% 2 Comments »Colbert Takes On His Church’s Demands For Exemptions From Health Care Law
February 19th, 2012 Daniel Fincke The Colbert Report Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive Colbert’s remark about Bishop Bucks struck me as eerily like a comment on Camels With Hammers from someone named Lyra the week before:
Posted in Hilarious, Political Satire, Political Satire, Right Wing Politics, Right Wing Politics, Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church, Satire, Satire Tags: Catholic Exemption from Affordable Care Act, Conscience Exemptions, Contraception Debate, Rick Santorum French Revolution, Rick Santorum Guillotine, Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church on Contraception, Stephen Colbert 2 Comments »The Argument from the Bible in the Briefcase
February 18th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Last night James Croft attended a lecture by famous Christian apologist (and Oxford Professor of Mathematics), John Lennox. James was struck by the especial susceptibility of the American audience to emotional appeals, which led them to give a charming but intellectually shallow, evasive, and unoriginal defense of belief a standing ovation: This shows us something [...]
Libby Anne on Growing Up Fearing The Rapture
February 18th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Libby Anne details some of the anxieties she and others felt growing up as true believers in the rapture: I was very afraid the rapture might occur and I might be left behind. One morning when I was ten or twelve I woke up and couldn’t find anyone in the house. Before I realized that [...]
The Vagina Ideologues
February 14th, 2012 Daniel Fincke It was nice to see Jon Stewart finally have a chance to weigh in on last week’s absurd push from the Catholic Church to win the exemption from the law requiring employers to provide health insurance that covers contraception: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The [...]
Posted in Authoritarianism, Authoritarianism, Comedy, Comedy, Politics, Politics, Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church, Satire, Satire, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State, Theocrats, Theocrats Tags: Catholic Church Demands Contraception Exemption, Catholic Privilege, Catholics and Obama, Contraception, Obama's Affordable Care Act, The Daily Show 8 Comments »The Catholic Church Wants Women Pregnant Against Their Wills
February 11th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Before this week, I never thought particularly hard about the way the Catholic Church wants to enforce its policies against contraception. I think my default assumption was that they wanted Catholics to assent to such policies freely and without coercion, as matters of shared belief and conscience. The thought actually never crossed my mind that [...]
Religious Privilege and Grievance-Based Catholic Identity Politics on Full Display
February 7th, 2012 Daniel Fincke In a column last week, Melinda Henneberger criticized the Obama administration’s refusal to exempt the Catholic Church from requirements it provide for its employees health insurance which would cover birth control at organizations it runs which have secular functions. The column is an extraordinary exemplification of religious entitlement, identity politics, and anti-secular, anti-democratic demands for [...]
Posted in Applied Ethics, Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheism, Authoritarianism, Authoritarianism, Barack Obama, Barack Obama, Christianity, Christianity, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Faith, Feminism, Feminism, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, Law, Law, Law & Politics, News Discussion, News Discussion, Philosophy Of Religion, Political Secularism, Political Secularism, Politics, Politics, Rape, Religion, Religion, Religious Extremism, Religious Extremism, Religious Moderates, Religious Moderates, Religious Rights, Religious Rights, Religious Secularism, Religious Secularism, Right Wing Politics, Right Wing Politics, Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State, Theocrats, Theocrats, Women's Rights, Women's Rights, Women's Rights, Women's Rights, Women's Issues Tags: Affordable Care Act, Bart Stupak, Birth Control, Catholic Identity Politics, Catholic Voters, Conscience Exemptions, Faith and Politics, Grievance Politics, Liberal Protestant, Melinda Henneberger, Obama National Prayer Breakfast, Obama's Faith, obamacare, Religious Rights, Religious Tests For Office, Reproductive Rights, Ressentiment, Secularism 11 Comments »“What Are The Limits of Church Authority In the Public Sphere?”
February 5th, 2012 Daniel Fincke This is part 2 of a debate with Roman Catholic theology graduate student named Mary. In part 1, we introduced and began to debate the topic of whether or not universities, hospitals, and social agencies run by the Catholic Church should be exempted from laws requiring employers to provide their employees health insurance that covers [...]
Posted in Abortion, Abortion, Applied Ethics, Applied Ethics, Authoritarianism, Authoritarianism, Authority, Authority, Autonomy, Autonomy, Barack Obama, Barack Obama, Bio-Medical Ethics, Bio-Medical Ethics, Christianity, Christianity, Civil Rights, Civil Rights, Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Feminism, Feminism, Gay Marriage, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights, Gay Rights, Homophobia, Homophobia, Law, Law, LGBTQAA, News Discussion, News Discussion, Personal, Philosophy, Political Secularism, Political Secularism, Politics, Politics, Religious Extremism, Religious Extremism, Religious Moderates, Religious Moderates, Religious Rights, Religious Rights, Religious Secularism, Religious Secularism, Right Wing Politics, Right Wing Politics, Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State, Women's Rights, Women's Rights, Women's Rights, Women's Issues Tags: 1st Amendment, Affordable Care Act, Conscience Exemptions, Discrimination Against Gays, Free Exercise, Freedom of Religion, Gay Rights, Health Coverage For Gay Spouses, Mary C. Young, Pharmacists Rights of Conscience, Relig, Religious Discrimination, Reproductive Rights, Roman Catholic Adoption Agencies Refuse Gay Adoptions, Roman Catholic Charities, Roman Catholic Church 55 Comments »“Should Catholic Employers Be Exempted From Paying For Health Insurance Covering Contraception?”
February 5th, 2012 Daniel Fincke If you were reading Camels With Hammers regularly before we made the move to Freethought Blogs, you would have frequently been treated to the long, insightful, and vigorously argued comments of my friend Mary. Mary is a Roman Catholic and is politically liberal in many (but not all) respects. We met when I was a [...]
Posted in Applied Ethics, Applied Ethics, Authoritarianism, Authoritarianism, Authority, Authority, Barack Obama, Barack Obama, Christianity, Christianity, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Feminism, Feminism, News Discussion, News Discussion, Personal, Philosophy, Political Secularism, Political Secularism, Politics, Politics, Religious Moderates, Religious Moderates, Religious Secularism, Religious Secularism, Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State, Women's Rights, Women's Rights, Women's Rights, Women's Rights, Women's Issues Tags: 1st Amendment, Affordable Care Act, Catholics and Obamacare, Conscience Exemptions, Discrimination, Freedom of Religion, Mary C. Young, obamacare, Obamacare and Contraception, Religious Discrimination, Reproductive Rights, Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Universities 48 Comments »God and Goodness
January 30th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Robin: Look, I get it, Jaime. As an atheist, you think that God’s wisdom is foolishness, that God’s righteousness is wickedness, and that the bloody death of Jesus on the cross is hateful and ugly rather than the epitome of love and beauty that Christians like I think it is. The Bible makes it very [...]
Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Authority, Authority, Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, Ethics, God, God, Metaethics, Metaethics, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Morality, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy Of Religion, Problem of Evil, Problem of Evil, Rationalism, Religion, Religion Tags: Divine Command Theory, God and Goodness, God's goodness, Theological Voluntarism 26 Comments »Hell As The Absence of God
January 29th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Robin: I know you don’t want to hear it, but Jesus loves you, Jaime. Jaime: Yes, yes, a man who either never existed or who is long dead and rotted by now loves me—and will torture me in hell forever if I don’t worship him, of course. Robin: He just wants you to love him but [...]
Posted in Atheism, Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, God, God, Jesus, Jesus, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism Tags: God as Goodness, Goodness, Hell as Absence of God 84 Comments »The Author of The Cranston High School Prayer Outraged
January 14th, 2012 Daniel Fincke This week, Jessica Ahlquist and the ACLU won their court case against Cranston High School West in Rhode Island. The school was ordered to immediately remove a banner containing an official school prayer addressed to “Our Heavenly Father” and ending in “Amen”, which hung over the school gymnasium as an unambiguous endorsement of the Christian [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Christianity, Christianity, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, News, News Discussion, News Discussion, Philosophy Of Religion, Political Secularism, Political Secularism, Religion, Religion, Religious Extremism, Religious Extremism, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State, Theocrats, Theocrats Tags: ACLU, Cranston High School West, David Bradley, Jessica Ahlquist, The American Civil Liberties Union 22 Comments »Christians Sexperimenting
January 12th, 2012 Daniel Fincke One of the myriad indicators of Christianity’s falsehood is the distinctly religious neuroses it regularly creates around something as natural and as good as sex. In the video below Lisa and Ed Young, authors of Sexperiment: 7 Days to Lasting Intimacy with Your Spouse, discuss how they asked the married couples in their church to have [...]
The Definitive Christmas Meditation
December 25th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Robert G. Ingersoll sums up better than I ever could my thoughts on Jesus. He gets to the heart of why it has always rankled me when people who do not believe he is God nonetheless fall all over themselves to stress how admirable he was as a “great moral teacher”: IX IS CHRIST OUR [...]
The Hounds of Heaven
December 23rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke Before reading the very interesting story of his faith and deconversion, I never knew that my vitriolically anti-religious Freethought Blogs colleague Al Stefanelli had until relatively recently been a fundamentalist Christian preacher. The portion of his account in which he writes about how he was treated when he came to realize he was in error explains a [...]
A Few Christian Replies to Hitchens’s Death Worth Noting
December 17th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Shortly before Christopher Hitchens’s death, Andrew Sullivan movingly reminisced about him and gave a sense of how their friendship was so strong despite such differing views on faith:
Dan Barker Makes Sense of the Gospel Message
December 3rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke I know Dan Barker claims to be only a former Christian minister but he still has a gift for bringing the Gospel message alive in a fresh, new way that makes powerful sense of it. It’s weird it would take an atheist’s description to make me see angles in the story of salvation which I [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheist Videos, Atheist Videos, Christianity, Christianity, God, God, Hilarious, Jesus, Jesus, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Religulous, Religulous, Satire, Satire 3 Comments »Kentucky Church Excludes Interracial Couples
December 1st, 2011 Daniel Fincke Is there any evil at all that the alleged Christian God, who is allegedly love itself, can prevent those who worship him from committing? He cannot even make it so that in 2011, all his American churches have caught up with repudiating racism? Before stepping down as pastor in August, Thompson told Harville that her fiance [...]
Why Bother Blaming People At All? Isn’t That Just Judgmental?
November 25th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Before moving on to addressing the question of when it is right or wrong to get offended, let me quickly address a certain attitude that arises a lot in response to my posts on morality. I sense in the tone of a lot of comments I get in general that there is a fear of [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Christianity, Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Ethical Pluralism, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, Ethics, Hypocrisy, Hypocrisy, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Virtues, Intellectual Virtues, Jesus, Jesus, Metaethics, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Rationalism, Virtues, Virtues Tags: Blame, Blame and Determinism, Determinism, Free Will, Immoralism, Judgmentalism, Moralism 32 Comments »Learning About Love From The Bible
November 24th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Using the “New Comprehensive Self-Referencing, Taking The Words on the Page To Mean What They Actually Say Version” of the Bible (that’s the NCSRTTWOTPTMWTASV), NonStampCollector shows us how the biblical God of love (the God who is love) models and illuminates for us all the virtues of love described in 1 Corinthians 13: Your Thoughts?
Full Video of Republican Theocratathon
November 22nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke Last weekend the Republican candidates met for the “Thanksgiving Family Forum” where, except for Ron Paul, they each tried to prove they were the holiest Christian and, therefore, the most deserving candidate for president of our theocracy democracy. The actual discussions with the candidates do not start until 36 minutes in. And, as Jerry Coyne [...]
Posted in Authoritarianism, Authoritarianism, Christianity, Christianity, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, Politics, Politics, Religion, Religion, Religious Extremism, Religious Extremism, Right Wing Politics, Right Wing Politics, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State 2 Comments »The Injustice of the Universe and Christianity
November 22nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke Matt Dillahunty has a nice five minute reply to someone who believes in Christianity in order to believe justice will be meted out even to those escape worldly justice. He weaves several important considerations about the irrationality of basing a belief on such a desire and about the problems with Christianity’s views on justice: Your [...]
Calling Out And Debunking William Lane Craig’s Smears Against Infidels and Apostates
November 21st, 2011 Daniel Fincke Is William Lane Craig a philosopher? Some atheists seem to want to dismiss him as strictly a theologian and in no way a philosopher but sometimes he clearly attempts to make strictly philosophical arguments. By strictly philosophical arguments I mean ones whose premises make no necessary appeal to any presumed religious authorities but theoretically could [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Christianity, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Personal, Secularism, Why I Am Not A Christian, Why I Am Not A Christian Tags: Apostates, Sex and Apostasy, Why People Leave Their Faith, William Lane Craig 16 Comments »Jesus Wouldn’t DARE Coerce People Into Charity!
November 21st, 2011 Daniel Fincke You know, for a guy who’s supposedly all about hating gays, Jesus as sure had a lot of people’s arms up his ass using him as a ventriloquist puppet. As far as I’m concerned when nearly everyone except serious historians talk about Jesus as an authority who proves their own values are correct, they had [...]
Posted in Atheism, Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, Jesus, Jesus, Religion Tags: Easier For Camel To Go Through Eye of Needle, Hell, Jesus, Jesus and Ayn Rand, Jesus and Hayek, Jesus Rich People Hell, Lazarus and Rich Man, Libertarianism, Luke 16:19-31, Luke 6:20-26, Mark 10:17-25, Matthew 25:31-46, Occupy Jesus, Occupy Wall Street, Rich People, Rich Young Man, Sheep and Goats, Threats of Hell, Woe to the Rich 13 Comments »
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