If you read atheist polemics against Christianity, Christian ideas about sin come up relatively infrequently. I know I’ve been tempted to dismiss what Christians say about sin as a superficial rationalization for the one really vile doctrine of Christianity, the doctrine that God damns people for unbelief. Recently, though, I’ve realized just how wrong this [...]
Category Archives: social and literary criticism
What Christians don’t believe about sin and why it matters
Posted by Chris Hallquist on October 22, 2010
1 comment
How to tell if you’re an anti-gay bigot
Posted by Chris Hallquist on September 27, 2010
10 comments
Last week, I found (via The Pugnacious Irishman) a post complaining about opponents of gay marriage having to deal with people thinking they’re bigots, then suggesting a strikingly dishonest way of dealing with this criticisms: start demanding definitions of every such word they use. This is dishonest because most people who don’t write dictionary entries [...]
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism & Bruce Almighty
Posted by Chris Hallquist on September 16, 2010
3 comments
Most religious believers in the U.S. are not Rick Warren. Most religious believers in the U.S. are not William Lane Craig. In some ways, this is not obvious from the statistics: surveys regularly report things like “half of Americans are creationists,” or “half of Americans accept Biblical inerrancy.” But in spite of these statistics, the [...]
Will sex be the death of Evangelicals?
Posted by Chris Hallquist on September 3, 2010
4 comments
Last week, Luke Muehlhauser reposted an essay by Robert M. Price under the title “Changing Morals and the Fate of Evangelicalism” (I don’t know if this was the original title). Price’s thesis is straightforward and compelling: Evangelicals are about to cave in to mainstream pressures to drop teachings that all non-Christians are damned, as well [...]
Moderate Islam
Posted by Chris Hallquist on August 31, 2010
2 comments
Sam Harris’ The End of Faith was the first and, to my mind, most important of the “New Atheist” books. Important, because after the September 11th attacks, the crazy in the liberal half of American thinking about religion came out and it seemed like everyone was saying that the attacks had nothing to do with [...]