“Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house…” begins some of the most enchanting verse in American literature. The enchantment is real, and powerful. Clement Moore’s poem may not have started the commercialization of Christmas, but it certainly added fuel to the fire—enough, perhaps, to turn it into a raging inferno. Yet, even …
In a preamble to this topic, I set forth some important caveats. I may have some more when I am done. In this post, I aim to set forth my basic principles and practices for drawing as close as I can to ‘knowledge.’ 1. Have as few preconceived notions as possible, and be aware of …
Many disagreements on issues come down to a fundamental difference on how people arrive at what they consider to be ‘true’ and the different weighting they give to different kinds of knowledge claims. It is even worse when people are unaware of how they are arriving at their conclusions and have given no thought whatsoever …
Judging from my Facebook home feed, Bill Nye has (once again) said some things monumentally stupid. As I scanned the episodes in his Netflix series “Bill Nye Saves the World,” I was reminded of Joel Achenbach’s March, 2015, National Geographic article titled, “Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?” Achenbach says something very revealing about …
Every year about this time there are complaints about the commercialization of Christmas. I think even my hero, C.S. Lewis had some cynical things to say about it. No doubt, it is ironic and even scandalous that the ‘reason for the season’ is often only a pretext for people and businesses to make a load …
I am writing this before we know who the next president of the United States is so that readers understand that the issues I’m raising are not tied to the election, even if they are manifested within it. References to politics are for illustration only. ———— In America, politics often falls along distinct lines: Republican …
This is the third essay of musings, organizing my thoughts for an upcoming presentation. In the first essay, I showed that the rise of the ‘religious nones’ within just the last decade or so is massive, and provided data that supports what most of us already knew: most of these were raised in the Christian …
I had an interesting conversation recently with an atheist. Essentially, the atheist built a syllogism (with a little helpful prodding by myself) where he accepted both of the premises, and then refused to complete it. It was pure logic–but he wouldn’t accept it. The irony, of course, is thick. He believes atheists are the masters …
I have been involved in Christian apologetics for a little over 20 years, with about 7 years of ‘professional’ church work under my belt. I’ve had many, many conversations with unbelievers, online and off. Many, if not most, were not raised as atheists, but were former Christians. We tended to focus on argument and evidence …
In Part 7.A of this series, I tried to explain some of the features of a Christian culture that made it a ‘bulwark’ against Islamicism. Opponents of this perspective nearly always interpret such statements to mean, “Christians are better people, and that’s why…” but that’s no where near the real argument, which is, “All people …
One of the things that led me to reject atheism is the realization that most of its arguments, if true, mean that we couldn’t possibly know its true. It violates what I call “the Golden rule of Epistemology,” which means, basically, “any epistemological approach that undermines epistemology itself must be rejected out of hand.” I …
Evidently the talking points are out, since I have now heard multiple individuals, especially those of Democrat persuasion, opine that ‘We have been bombing Iraq for 20 years so obviously that doesn’t work!’ Under their breath, they take a jab at GW Bush… as if he was president 20 years ago. But it is not …
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