“Peanuts” and theology

I used to assidulously read “Peanuts” cartoons when I was a kid, but the religion in them—and apparently there was quite a bit—went over my head. Atlantic has an 2016 article called “The Spirituality of Snoopy,” which recounts how often the artist Charles Schulz used religious themes in his strips. “Many familiar with the Peanuts strip don’t […]

Edward Feser godsplains why atheists don’t understand religion, and why there is absolutely, positively a God (the Catholic one)

Edward “Dogs Don’t Go to Heaven” Feser is able to discern the most extraordinary conclusions about reality from simply plumbing his brain and channeling revelations, being sure to weed the true revelations from God’s Fake News (see the first link). In other words, he’s a theologian: a Catholic who’s an associate professor of philosophy at […]

Two scholars: Jesus was a #MeToo victim because he was stripped before the Crucifixion

The Conversation, which I thought was a site for intellectual discourse (its motto is “Academic rigor, journalistic flair”), is increasingly publishing bizarre pieces that lack both rigor and flair. One of these, by Katie Edwards and David Tombs, insists on dragging Jesus into today’s sexual harassment debate, arguing that because Jesus was stripped during the […]

Does the nature of the Universe show that there’s no God?

That, at least, is the contention of Emily Thomas, an assistant professor of philosophy at Durham University, in an essay at RealClear Science (“Does the size of the universe prove God doesn’t exist?“) This point has been made by many people before, including, as I recall, Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins: the Universe is unbelievably […]

Prager University: Four “new” arguments for the existence of God

Here we have Frank Pastore, former professional baseball player (and atheist) who, once becoming religious, jumped the rails when he went to the evangelical Biola University. This all explains his video (below) giving four “new” arguments for the existence of God. Pastore died in 2012, but these arguments weren’t new even then; all of them are long-familar […]

Sean Carroll’s Gifford Lectures

The Gifford Lectures, first given in 1898, were established by a bequest of Lord Adam Gifford, and were intended to “promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term — in other words, the knowledge of God.” In other words, they were supposed to use evidence from nature to give […]

John Loftus’s new book: why religious philosophy should be deep-sixed

A philosopher friend who read John Loftus’s new book in draft recommended it to me highly, saying it was “spot on”. The image is below, and you can get to the Amazon store to order it by clicking on the screenshot: I like the cover image, though it’s a bit gruesome, but yes, I think the […]

C. S. Lewis’s puerile theology

As I noted last night, I’m reading C. S. Lewis’s  Mere Christianity, which, I hope, will be the last theology book I ever read. And I’m doing it not because it has knockdown arguments for God—those don’t exist—but because it’s surely the most popular and influential work of Christian apologetics in the 20th century. I’m 40 pages in, […]

Ceiling Cat help me: I’m reading more theology

Under duress, since Grania told me that this was one of the most influential works of Christian apologetics of our time, I am reading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. One of the reasons for its popularity, of course, was that Lewis wrote in a simple and straightforward fashion, addressing his arguments to the public rather […]

Theology schools are dying

It’s long been my opinion, as was that of Thomas Jefferson, that theology schools are useless parts of universities. Jefferson refused to have a school of theology at the University of Virginia, which he founded, for he was at best a deist who disliked organized religion. Theology schools are the wisdom teeth of academia: useless and sometimes injurious remnants of earlier […]