Applied Epistemology

James Wood aptly observes: "Perhaps the disciples just meant more to Jesus than a few hundred thousand Asians." He does a good job explaining J.L. Mackie's old point that the free will defense is a total failure for traditional Christianity, since the notion of Heaven (e.g.) implies a world

Alan Wolfe (whom I have long regarded as one of America's most shallow public intellectuals) read a Pew study on religions around the world and draws the obvious conclusion: that religion is slowly dying. It's gratifying to find others draw the same conclusions I did a while back.

The NYT has a detailed piece on Antony Flew and the thoroughly suspect genesis of "his" book There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

As [Flew] himself conceded, he had not written his book.

“This is really Roy’s doing,” he said, before I had even figured out a polite way to ask. “He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I’m too old for this kind of work!”

I genuinely thought this was a Comedy Central piece until I found Chuck Missler's online ministry. Wow.

This page has been blogged by several sites, but it must be seen to be believed. Certainly, it's better than actually going there and enduring the hurricane-force crap-storm in person.

Jesus's wisdom about pigs and dogs.

One of the few pleasures of growing older is seeing your enemies die. So it is that I greet the death of Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and Liberty University -- institutions devoted to the public advancement of tyranny and the destruction of reason. Though journalistic obituaries feel obliged to strain for balance, there's really nothing good to say about Falwell. All his projects were tightly connected to the shameless promotion of brazenly 19th-century Appalachian-Southern Christianity.

The latest find in my occasional explorations of the sustained nuttery which is religion. It's only a dollar per teaspoon. The tin container was from Heaven, too. Couldn't God make it out of adamantium, though?

Have questions? Be not afraid, there's an FAQ. (Could maybe God also put up a website with bullet lists?

Here's a link to an interesting article about a study on the religious "beliefs" of American teenagers. It certainly fits with my own anecdotal evidence on the matter. And Rev. Al Sharpton offers confirmation that the American Religion is not merely a youth phenomenon as well:

Following a trend that has been building momentum since the 5th century, Benedict XVI looks ready to excise the dimension of Limbo from the Catholic manual of the planes. The LAT article actually does a fair job of noting that the underlying issue has to do with the necessity of baptism and original sin.