• Blog — http://realevang.wordpress.com/
• Posts news feed — http://realevang.wordpress.com/feed/
• Comments news feed — http://realevang.wordpress.com/comments/feed/

Thank you.

In this week’s installment, Dr. William Lane Craig addresses the topic, “Why Is Apologetics Important?” As I mentioned last time, apologetics is important because God’s failure to show up in real life leaves Christians without an objective basis for their faith, and therefore they have no alternative but to rely on the works of men like Dr. Craig. But that might be a bit blunt for a book intended to encourage Christians to keep believing, so he offers three other reasons instead…

Continue reading at the new blog site

I’ll give you a little of the background below the fold, but if you’re impatient, you can just skip to my new blog over at Changing Religions.

It was early in the year 2000 that I admitted to myself that I no longer believed the Gospel, a confession that was followed by a good few years of “angry atheist” mode. I’d wasted the first 40 years of my life on a swindle and a con job, and I was seriously pissed off about it. I turned up on Usenet in talk.atheism, and made almost a career out of mocking and haranguing those few smug, self-righteous, and self-appointed evangelists who showed up to share with us the good news that we were all going to hell.

Eventually I mellowed out somewhat, and ceased raging and lashing out, at least publicly. I still harbored a deep resentment that would occasionally spill out, but by and large I moved on. I retained one lesson I learned, however; a seed from a chance remark by a Christian I was arguing with. He informed me, with predictable smugness, that I was a worshiper too: I worshiped the truth. He thought he was accusing me of idolatry, but it struck me that worshiping the truth was not really a bad idea, and that Truth made a far better God than anything he could come up with.

Thus was born my vision of Alethea as the One True God. I originally used it against him as a purely trollish maneuver, mocking him by showing how my “god” was better than his despite not even being a real god. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to see how Alethea might actually fill the role a genuine God would really play, if such a thing existed. Not of course the kind of Divine Person you might see walking down the street, but then again would a genuine deity be either? If you’re omnipresent, you can’t walk down the street, because anywhere you might go, you’re already there!

Anyway, the idea grew on my. I played around with it some, but wasn’t all that active. Then my home state passed a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage—a purely spiteful act of Christian persecution against gays that got me riled. I started Evangelical Realism partly to exercise my faith in Alethea, but mostly to speak out against the vile and hateful religion that was abusing the law to oppress an innocent minority. The angry atheist rose up again, and I was out to strike some blows against tyranny, ignorance, and superstition.

This is 2011, the first year after my first decade as an ex-Christian, and I think it’s time the angry atheist went away. I needed him for a time, and I think he may even have done a teensy bit of good while he was here. But now there are better things I could be doing, and I’m anxious to get started doing them. I’ve become comfortable and even predictable in the things I’ve been doing, and it’s time to shake that up.

So I’ve started a new blog, Changing Religions, that builds on the understanding I developed on my post about “Getting Religion.” Some of the comments on that post were along the lines of “Yeah, but what can we do?” and I even ended the post with a question about who will bell the cat. But the more I think about it, the more I think we can do something, and I think it’s time we, or at least I, gave it a try.

So thanks for all your support here at ER. It’s been good to have you all as readers and commenters. Some of you may want to join me at CR, some of you may not find its new direction entirely palatable. Either way I wish you all the best of luck.

ER probably won’t go away entirely; I may have a new post here now and then, and someday I may even finish the series on Mere Christianity. I’m going to focus the bulk of my attention on the new blog, though, so for those of you who will be joining me there, see you later, and for the rest, farewell.

Take care.

The time off gave me a chance to review a few things, and I’ve implemented a new comments policy that I think will be easier to maintain going forward. There’s a link for it at the top of the page. Basically it says that if someone submits a comment it doesn’t necessarily mean I should or will publish it. I’m generally in favor of free speech, but everything in its place. The comments section is the place for comments that enhance the quality and value of the blog by making some kind of substantive contribution (for or against my remarks). The discussion forum is the place for everything that may or may not meet the quality standards of the comments section. I think that strikes a reasonable compromise between my desire for free speech and my desire for high-quality comments, don’t you?

Y’all take care and be good while I’m gone, k?

Note that this policy applies to all commenters, no exceptions. We will discuss facts and issues here, and we’ll discuss personalities, insinuations, recriminations, and other diversionary tactics on the forums.

Yours for a more static-free connection to the truth.

DD

Take care and behave yourselves while I’m gone, ok?

I’m in a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, I’m all for free and open discussion. On the other hand, I’m not sure that blog comments are the best venue for extended dialog. What’s a blogger to do?

Well, for this blogger, the answer is the new Evangelical Realism Discussion Forum. It’s a standard web-based board, so if you’ve got something on your chest and you want to get it off, have at it. There is currently one (1) forum available at the moment, but I’m willing to open up more if there’s a demand for it.

I’m a bad comments moderator and I’ll likely be a bad board moderator as well, so everything is likely to be pretty wide open at first. I’ll leave it up to you folks whether we want moderators or not (and if so, who). But the main idea here is to provide an alternative to comments as the primary venue for extended discussions. In fact, if I think a discussion would be better suited to the boards, I may politely request the participants to take it to the forum (and if that doesn’t work, I may move the discussion there myself).

The general rule of thumb is that if you have a comment about a blog post, leave it in the comments. If you have a comment about someone else’s comment, then it could go either in the comments or on the boards. If you’re commenting about a comment on a comment, then it definitely belongs in the boards. Post to the boards and then leave a link.

Cheers, and enjoy the boards.

I strongly encourage the expression of sincerely-held beliefs and ideas, even if wrong, so that they may be discussed and critiqued. I strongly encourage thoughtful critiques of any and all beliefs and ideas so presented. I strongly encourage tolerance of the manner in which these ideas might be presented, since not everyone is a skillful writer (and those that are, haven’t always had their morning coffee yet).

I strongly discourage discussion of the character, abilities, motives, or personal ancestry of individual commenters, as tempting as such comments may be at times. I discourage the posting of comments that make frequent use of the pronoun “you,” as in “you always…” or “you never…” or “you are just so…”, when directed at a specific individual.

Please think before posting. My goal is to address the ideas themselves, and to demonstrate which ideas are most consistent with real-world truth. Personal attacks are a distraction (and indeed, one way to defend a weak idea is to present it as offensively as possible, in order to side-track the discussion into a mere flame war, and thus protect the bad idea from direct analysis).

It is not necessary to win any one argument. Truth is consistent with itself; the evangelical realist need only persist in directing people’s attention to the truth, and over the long term the burden of maintaining a falsehood will weigh more heavily on the untruthful person. We ought to have the confidence of our convictions, and rise above personal foibles. And if we have guests whose thinking is misguided, we should welcome and encourage them, because where else are they going to go for better guidance?

I know that I myself am not as good at that as I should be (Challenger Grim comes to mind—I really regret losing him). But I originally named this blog Evangelical Realism because I saw a need for a place where realists could reach out to the misguided, and encourage them to adopt a better world view (to borrow an oft-misused term). I want to show how the ideas of realism make more sense and are more consistent with real-world truth than fantasies, intuitions, superstitions and hearsay are, and how realism actually improves one’s quality of life.

I could do better. We all could do better. I invite everyone to join me in trying.

Thanks also to PZ Myers for repeating the list on his blog Pharyngula. We’re seeing a nice bump in the stats right now thanks to these two mentions, and I appreciate it.

If you’re reading this via a newsreader, here are the new URL’s.

• http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/?feed=rss2
• http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/?feed=comments-rss2

Also new, and I hope you’ll all bear with me on this: I’m going to put a few ads in the sidebars, just to help pay the bills. Given the topic of conversation around here, I expect a lot of the ads will be for religious books and web sites, which isn’t entirely bad. I’m always looking for new topics to post.

Axial tilt: it’s the REASON for the SEASONs.

Cheers.

I guess if you can’t address my evidence, you can at least try and assassinate my reputation behind my back. Christianity in action folks.

(Horvath’s comments are attached to this post, by the way.)

I’d like this encyclopedia to include entries for all of the various apologetic arguments used to defend Christianity, so feel free to suggest topics that ought to be included.