Thursday, October 10, 2013

The Slaughter Of The Canaanites According To William Lane Craig


I'm really enjoying Thom Stark's critique of Paul Copan's book, Is God A Moral Monster?. Copan writes the standard apologetic that you will hear many Christians making who defend the Iron-age morality of the Old Testament, like slavery, polygamy and genocide. Stark's critique, Is God A Moral Compromiser?, is full of really great counter arguments and I think it's a must read for any atheist or critic of the current apologetic espoused by the likes of Copan and Craig and their minions.

It got me thinking about the Canaanite genocide in the Old Testament again with some new insights that I hadn't known before. I've covered the Canaanite slaughter numerous times here and debated it on other blogs. Since William Lane Craig is the loudest Christian apologist, at least in the English speaking world, I shall critique his justification of the Canaanite conquests that he did through his website Reasonable Faith.

I'm going to respond to one Q & A entitled "Slaughter of the Canaanites." As I read it, nearly everything Craig writes makes me want to hurl at my computer screen because of the moral depravity that being forced to defend the barbaric Iron-age literature makes him sink to. Craig makes every attempt to praise Yahweh and Mosaic "morality" to warm the reader up to an image of the Old Testament god and law as being perfectly on par with reasonable moral sensibilities. He writes:

The command to kill all the Canaanite peoples is jarring precisely because it seems so at odds with the portrait of Yahweh, Israel’s God, which is painted in the Hebrew Scriptures. Contrary to the vituperative rhetoric of someone like Richard Dawkins, the God of the Hebrew Bible is a God of justice, long-suffering, and compassion.

Well considering that Yahweh commands several genocides after the Canaanite genocide, it isn't actually totally out of his character. The Canaanite conquest is just the first of what will be a series of genocides and that's probably why up until this point in the Bible, it may seem so "at odds" with Yahweh. But the reader of the OT will already have come to understand Yahweh as having been responsible for mass killing the entire planet in Genesis, and mass killing all the first born in Egypt, as well as striking several people dead for rather trivial reasons, so no it is not out of character. What's "at odds" with Yahweh's character, is that with the Canaanites, he's commanding other people to do his mass slaughter, instead of doing it himself. That's so out of character for Yahweh, really.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

I Was Bored, So I Decided to Pick On Craig (Again)


I've been dry lately for material to write about. Whenever I get like this I always find that criticizing William Lane Craig can be used as filler. I just love tearing apart his arguments. And it pays dividends: If you get into a debate with a theist over god, you are almost guaranteed to hear Craig's arguments get recycled over and over again. Often verbatim. I've been debating this retarded Jehovah's Witness over on the Friendly Atheist's blog and he literally copies Craig's arguments word for word by copying and pasting them because he knows nothing about actual science or philosophy. So it's good to have refutations of Craig's arguments already written so that they too can be copied and pasted in response to the lazy theist who is going to plagiarize someone else's argument. I mean hey, if they're too lazy to write their own argument themselves and resort to copying and pasting, then I'm justified in copying and pasting my response too.

So without further ado.....

I came across a piece Craig wrote in a Christianity Today article from 2008, in which he summarizes his repertoire of arguments for god, so I will use that article as my critique of his arguments.Craig lays out first, as he almost always does, the two versions of the cosmological argument. He's so predictable. Most of you already know the cosmological argument from contingency. I will just dive into my criticism of Craig's justification of its premises. The argument goes as follows:

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the explanation of the universe's existence is God.

Craig justifies premise 1 with an example:

Imagine that you're walking through the woods and come upon a translucent ball lying on the forest floor. You would find quite bizarre the claim that the ball just exists inexplicably. And increasing the size of the ball, even until it becomes co-extensive with the cosmos, would do nothing to eliminate the need for an explanation of its existence.

I've heard this story used many times to illustrate that the universe's existence needs an explanation. First of all, the analogy is flawed. upon seeing a translucent ball lying on the forest floor, of course we'd ask the question of how or why such a thing exists. But the difference with a translucent ball, and the universe is that we have no known experience with such a thing existing by natural means. All balls that we know of are man made. So we could ask, what is the ball made out of? Plastic? Well we know plastic is man made. But suppose it was made of some unknown substance. It would still have to be made up of atoms. Atoms are matter, and matter is just another form of energy, all of which would go back to the early universe. But now an interesting thought arises. If the translucent ball were shrunk, instead of expanded, to the size of a subatomic particle, like a virtual particle, then it is not at all hard to see how the ball could pop into existence with no apparent cause needed. And when you apply gravity to the laws of quantum mechanics, space and time can pop into existence and whole universes can be born from quantum fluctuations.

Monday, October 7, 2013

Handy Video Explaining Time Dilation & Length Contraction In Relativity


If you're sometimes confused by understanding Einstein's theory of relativity in terms of length contraction and time dilation as I am, this handy video gives you a nice visual representation to understand these two mind blowing phenomena.





Saturday, October 5, 2013

Autumn Sun






Autumn sun, I'm in pain and numb.
Keep me warm 'til winter's done.
Be there when the October rain has come.


You twinkled different in your summer run.
Now you sit so low your rays are shunned.
Autumn sun what have you become?



Friday, October 4, 2013

Here's Why Poor People Vote Against Against Their Economic Interests




If you're white, conservative and poor in America, you've basically been fucking yourself over economically for the past 30 years if you've been voting republican. The democrats have a more favorable economic platform, but they're attached to liberal social values, and you prefer conservative social values like the kind republicans offer. But the republican economic platform favors the rich, and so you're stuck between a rock and a hard place: Vote for your social conservative values, and against your economic best interests, or go vote against your conservative social values and for your economic best interests.


Perhaps The Most Pressing Issue Of Our Day


Believe it or not, I don't think that the threat from religious fundamentalism is the most pressing issue of our day. Although it's an important issue that needs to be addressed, the destruction of the middle and working class by big business, Wall Street, and the politicians they've bribed to facilitate their agendas is the most pressing issue we face in America today. Millions are negatively impacted by the economic policies and the tax policies we have that are skewed in favor of almost exclusively benefiting the rich and the ultra rich, and making a decent living has never been harder.

The cost of everything is going up while middle class wages from the year 2000 has even gone down when adjusted for inflation. Almost all the new wealth that has been generated since the economic meltdown in 2008 has gone to the top 1 percent - to the very people who essentially screwed up the economy in the first place. And college tuition has been rising over three times the rate of inflation while job prospects for recent graduates are bleak.

There has never been a time in recent memory when the gap between the wealthy and the middle class has been so wide, with such a callous disregard for those who are struggling.

And the rich simply don't seem to care. They're living it up while everyone else sees their take home pay eroded away by rising costs of living. The thing is, the rich today don't need the middle class as they once did. They don't need manufacturers making anything. Those jobs could either be outsourced to cheaper labor markets or done by machines. And they don't need the purchasing power of the middle class anymore. The rich can make their money in the financial services industry - a pseudo-economy that doesn't make or produce anything, and that mostly caters to and benefits those who are already wealthy. It essentially just cashes in on (often) risky investments and financial speculations often at the expense of worker's jobs and benefits. Should these investments go awry, as they did, tax payers will be standing by ready to bail them out because Wall Street's got most of our politicians in their back pockets. And banks are in the business of coming up with convoluted schemes to trick people out of their hard earned money. There are literally people in the financial services and banking industry who sit around in board rooms and think of elaborate schemes to fuck people over, and out of their money because we don't make or produce anything anymore and now our economy is propped up on the exploitation of unsuspecting workers.

It makes me sick.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Presuppositionalism, Again


Where do I even begin?

Presuppositionalists have got to be the most annoying kind of Christian that exists. I spend most of my time debating evidentialists because they're at least willing to start from a neutral standpoint and build a case for god using the same evidence that we all have access to. But when you put the evidence and arguments for god under the microscope for a detailed analysis, it often doesn't end well for god. And presuppositionalists are weary of this. So what they do is they dismiss the evidence altogether, and simply presuppose that Christianity is true and that the Bible is god's infallible word, and any evidence or argument that contradicts the "truth" of Christianity must be wrong by definition. This shields them from having to deal with any counter evidence - they will simply conclude that all the evidence against their religion is a delusion through their presuppositions.

I've been debating with this presuppositionalist lately to sharpen my skills in that area. His argument is basically this: We all assume a metaphysic on faith. He assumes Christianity is true on faith, and then he interprets all the evidence for it and against it under the metaphysic that Christianity is true. Therefore, it's impossible for him to be argued out of his position that Christianity is true because any evidence or argument you use against him is either dismissed a priori, or "interpreted" under the metaphysic that Christianity is true. It's a firewall of sorts. But think about it - if you have to presuppose a metaphysic that excludes even the possibility that you're wrong and that your religion may be false, that shows the inherent weakness of your religion. If Christianity is indeed true and the Bible is its god's infallible word, there should be plenty of evidence from the natural world corroborating its narrative and its claims. And on top of that, he accuses atheists of presupposing naturalism to interpret the evidence for and against god and Christianity. It's the most annoying thing ever.

This is what presuppositionalism gives you. If you don't assume the metaphysic that Christianity is true, then you'll be accused of assuming another metaphysic, either a naturalistic one or one presupposing another religion, in order to interpret the evidence for and against Christianity. In other words, no one can come from a neutral playing field, we all, according to the presuppositionalist, come to the table with our worldview already presupposed. This is because the presuppositionalist knows he can't win without presupposing his religion to be true. If going just by the evidence, and a debate over whether evidence bests fits his Christian worldview, or the naturalists worldview, the naturalist will do better.

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