Evangelical Atheism
Two posts for the price of one: 1. This is an absolutely fantastic, must-read article by non-evangelical atheist John Gray. It’s probably just as well that the current generation of atheists seems to know so little of the longer history of atheist movements. When they assert that science can bridge fact and value, they overlook the many incompatible value-systems that have been defended in this way. There is no more reason to think science can determine human values today than there was at the...
Harm, Consent, and Fifty Shades of Sexual Liberation
Why I can't help but read Doug Wilson, writing on Fifty Shades of Grey: If you create a world defined by the excitement of breaking taboos, then how is an insistence upon "mutual agreement" anything but the creation of the final taboo? Secular moral philosopher Jonathan Haidt moved from liberal to moderate in (large?) part because his work showed him that Western liberal morality is truncated compared to conservative morality. The former rests on fewer moral foundations—basically just two,...
Wise Anecdote
A conservative describes his experience with radical secularist liberalism as a student at Harvard: In the intolerance, I also saw hope. During one particularly memorable day, when radicals started shrieking when I questioned why our professor referred to an unborn child as a mere “clump of cells,” I remember speaking to a small group of students after class. They told me they were questioning some of their pro-choice views. “Why?” I asked. Because, they responded, if the leading pro-choice...
Cutting Both Ways
One big thing I like about presuppositionalism is that it gives me these special gloves—gauntlets, I guess—that I can use in one of two ways. I can throw them down, of course. But I can also catch swords when they're swung at me. I catch the sword, pull it out of my assailant's hands, and swing it back. (Now I mean this all metaphorically, and this all usually takes place inside my head. I do not believe we should "repay evil for evil, reviling for reviling.") One small example: people will...
Human Rights and Responsibilities
I thought this was really insightful: The latter—the teaching of natural law and natural rights—is the view from the American founding. We may take our bearings from the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, which speaks of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” In its second and most famous paragraph, the Declaration says human beings are “endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights.” What can the men who wrote and signed this document have meant by this? A right that is...