John Brown: On the Right Side of History?

It must be this wave of Black Lives Matter enthusiasm: I have recently heard multiple people assert that John Brown was on “the right side of history”. Really? Yes, slavery was wrong, we would say today, guided by history’s moral zeitgeist (as Dawkins would call our evolving sense of morality), but there’s more to JohnContinue

Ugly

I remember taking a freshman literature course in college when a classmate said to me, “You’re the ugliest person I’ve ever seen!” I told her that that would change if she were to look in the mirror; I wouldn’t say she’s the very ugliest person that I’ve ever seen in person, but she probably makesContinue

Getting Right With God

Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others during the Protestant Reformation argued about whether a person could freely choose to get right with God in order to get into Heaven. Calvin believed in predestination, meaning that God had already elected who would go to Heaven; it was determined beforehand. Luther would have it that people hadContinue

Comment on My Personal Library

I posted a video of my personal library on my YouTube channel (youtube.com/dustindareawf), and yesterday there was a new comment, one to which I replied. The comment and my reply are copied blew. Navy Federal: U seem to be interested in everything to do with atheism and ideas that disprove religions. Why don’t u readContinue

An Intervening God

If God were cake, Christians wouldn’t know whether to have it or to eat it. Take Newton and Leibniz, for example. Isaac Newton is renowned for being one of the greatest scientists in history. But he also studied alchemy and sought God. Newton’s God wound up the clock of the universe, but he intervened inContinue

Objective Morality

William Lane Craig is fond of saying, “If there is no God, then objective right and wrong cannot exist.” And that, this “divine command theory”, is supposed to answer the alleged shortcomings of atheism; atheism, the divine command theorists would have it, cannot be the right view of whether or not there’s a God, becauseContinue

Elementary School Softball

It’s summer, softball season, and my mother tells me that she’s been at my niece’s, a child in elementary school, game. I ask her if the league is organized by the schools, and she says that it is. I respond with disdain, asserting that it’s wrong of the school to have children participating in athletics.Continue

The Morality of Homosexuality

Conservative Christians insist that homosexuality is immoral. Their reasoning has something to do with some passages in their precious Bible. Even though early Christians were Jews, and Jesus would have been a Jew himself (if he existed), Christians say that they’re not Jews and don’t have to live by Jewish laws, but they still keepContinue

Politics & Science

Where conservatives and liberals debate their beliefs, we need solid social science. Social science may be necessarily soft compared to the natural sciences, but political scientists still do follow the scientific method, and they should therefore be in a position to help shape public policy. Politicians and voters on the left and right agree onContinue

Absurdity

Plato said that the unexamined life is not worth living. He thought that we need to find out wha constituted the good life. His god, the Demiurge, had crafted the world with purpose. Plato’s student Aristotle continued the examination of the good life. He wrote on what made a person virtuous. Aristotle thought that toContinue