Right Reason

The blog of Dr Glenn Andrew Peoples on Theology, Philosophy, and Social Issues

January 2010 stats

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On February 1, 2010

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Each month Scrubone (I strongly suspect that this is not the name his parents gave him) produces a ranking of the top (read: mopst popular) 200 blogs in New Zealand according to a bunch of fancy shmancy statistics. Why does he do it? Who cares, he does it, and the blogosphere should be very grateful. His blog is Something Should go Here, Maybe Later but gets referred to as halfdone because of the address. Many thanks Scrubone!

No sooner is the month over, the rankings for January 2010 are out! Efficient, no? In November and January Say Hello to my Little Friend ranked fifth in New Zealand. In January it ranked fourth, right behind my good friend Matt and Mads over at M and M who ranked third. Hey, there are two of them!

Also, I have just joined a fellowship of bloggers called Biblioblogs. It’s a list of blogs that cover, among other things, biblical studies. Oh, and John Loftus’s blog is there too. I’ll add their button to my site as soon as I have made a version that’s not ugly. Their ranking for January is out now too, over at Joel’s Free Old Testament Audio site. As a new member I’ve debuted at number five, which isn’t too shabby. In the number four slot, you guessed it, M and M. Again. There are two of them. What do you expect? 😉

As always, I have the readers to thank for any success or popularity that this place enjoys. Thank you, and please come back regularly. Bring a friend. Or ten.

When will Dawkins go after the left?

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On February 1, 2010

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As I noted recently, Richard Dawkins has been at his fairy tale telling best, claiming that when Pat Robertson blamed Haiti’s poverty and earthquake on a nonexistent pact with Satan, in spite of what Christians say and have said for centuries and in spite of what the Bible actually teaches, it is Robertson who is the true Christian here, representing genuine Christian teaching. You know, the stuff that Christians don’t teach.

Since Dawkins is a fair and even handed person who would never single out a religious crank as representative of Christians and not apply the same standard elsewhere, I now wait with bated breath for him to start claiming that all people of a politically left wing persuasion believe that the United States of America is behind all human suffering. After all, a famous leftist crank said it.

I’m waiting. Sick him, Dawkins.

Hat tip to halfdone for the clip!

Pro choicer advocates murdering pro-lifers

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On January 30, 2010

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I think abortion is unjustified homicide, but I’m talking about another kind of murder here.

“Operation Counterstrike” is a blog hosted at blogspot. Here is what the anonymous author advocates. He is commenting on the recent sentencing of Scott Roeder, the man who shot dead George Tiller, an abortionist who aborted very late term unborn children. Here is what this nameless person says:

Roeder’s conviction on a charge of first-degree murder is nice, but it is not justice.

Justice will be when right-to-lifers have to live as Dr. Tiller lived: behind guarded gates and bullet-proof glass.

Justice will be when right-to-lifers die as Dr. Tiller died: in their churches, by gunshot to the head.

Blogspot blogs have a feature that enables people to report inappropriate blogs, such as this one that, true to form, shows no regard for human life, advocating murder.

Please use this feature to report this blog. Once a few people report it and the administrators see what this person calls for, the blog wil be removed. Thanks. Let’s have this sort of thing cleaned up.

Go and do it now.

Richard Dawkins on Pat Robertson on Haiti

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On January 30, 2010

In atheism

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As many readers will know, shortly after the earthquake in Haiti that did so much damage and claimed so many lives, Pat Robertson (a somewhat notorious televangelist involved in what has been dubbed “Word of Faith” theology) said something (I suppose I should say that he said yet another thing) that Christians in general didn’t think much of. His claim is that in history, the Haitians of the time made a pact with the devil to obtain freedom from servitude to the French, and that because of this, they have suffered numerous travesties since then, including this earthquake. Here he is in action:

 

Unsurprisingly, the response to this from the Christian community has been fairly negative. Christian theology just doesn’t teach this. The idea that whenever something bad happens to a person or to a group it is the result of a wicked thing previously done by that person or group is not one that you can find in the work of any major Christian theologian in history, as far as I am aware (I am setting aside for now the obvious fact that in this case the people who suffered and died were not even the same people who allegedly swore this pact – a pact for which there’s really no evidence anyway). For that matter, it is not taught in the Bible either. In fact there are passages in the Bible that directly deny this view.

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Fasten your seatbelts

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On January 29, 2010

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Each month I’ve been getting annoying emails from my existing website host telling me that I’ve exceeded my bandwidth limit. Most of that is caused by the popularity of the podcast, which is nice. But the upshot of my wild, out of control runaway success (as well as the all too frequent downtime) is that I have to invest in some upgrades. I’m about to change hosting providers, so the ride might be a little rocky over the next few days. Sit tight and everything will be back to normal soon!

I walk the line

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On January 28, 2010

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A friend of mine made an interesting comment to me lately about this blog. His room-mate had read some of what is here (in fact he could be reading this right now!), and he told my friend something to the effect of “this guy says things that you have to be a tenured lecturer to get away with saying!”

It’s probable that he didn’t mean everything that I’m about to say, but that comment – and other quite different comments as well – make me think about the kinds of things I write about, and also about the reactions I get to them. I think it’s fair comment to say that as someone who wants people to realise that I am quite self consciously a conservative evangelical, and as a person who does not as yet have the protection of a secure teaching job, I take a few risks. If I do, then I don’t do it deliberately, but I probably do it. Warning, the following is a bit of a rant, but it’s something I’m a bit passionate about, and hey this is my blog, I’ll post whatever I like.

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Inerrancy again – a blog about a blog about a blog about a blog

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On January 27, 2010

In theology and biblical studies

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Back in June 2009 I explained that I am not an inerrantist. In response to some initial (but, I think, quite mistaken) criticisms of my comments there, I said in November, “You heard me right the first time, I am not an inerrantist.” I then added some historical perspective to what I was saying with a blog post called “Errantly Assuming Inerrancy in History,” where I discussed the way in which a number of important theologians in history spoke about Scripture, which would be more than enough to make modern inerrantists uncomfortable. In a nutshell, in these blog entries I explained that I think that while inerrancy is false and that I do actually think the biblical writers expressed some false scientific assumptions and may have made minor mistakes on the finer details of history, geography and minor errors like citation errors, the message expressed in the Bible is the very word of God who is infallible, and every part of that message is correct.

Assuming it’s true that great minds think alike, it’s encouraging to see great minds agreeing with what I say, so I welcomed the chance to read Matt Flannagan’s thoughts here, where he summed up and affirmed my view that “one can affirm the authority of the bible, even the claim that it is infallible in what it teaches, without affirming that it is inerrant, in the sense of containing no errors.” Have a look, I think it’s definitely worth reading (naturally, the fact that we agree has nothing to do with it 😉 ).

To be fair, Matt himself did not, in that piece, deny or affirm inerrancy. My position, as I have always made clear, is that inerrancy is false at face value, and if it is qualified to the point where it starts to look plausible, then the one who holds it has to allow for so much error that it’s pointless to use the label “inerrancy” at all because it is misleading.

In spite of the positive response I have seen from very committed and very conservative Christians like me, the negative reaction has not stopped. In a sense I don’t mind this. Those who are firmly committed to a strict doctrine of inerrancy will, initially at least, disagree and react strongly to what I have said. This opens up the possibility of discussing the issue with them, and exposes the issue to a wider audience. That’s a good thing. But I do think that those responses often warrant a response, and at times some sort of corrective as well when they go too far in their critique and step into unfairness or misrepresentation, an inevitable feature of human disagreement it seems.

Recently Jeremy Pierce at the Evangel blog (hosted by First Things) blogged on a blog on a blog (and now I’m blogging on his blog). In a blog entry called “Basic Inerrancy,” he blogged on Matt’s article, who had in turn blogged on what I said earlier. Interestingly, although I took Matt to basically share my view, Jeremy says “I actually agree with much of what Matt says,” while saying of my piece, “There are so many things I disagree with in [Glenn’s] post that it was very hard to pull myself away from my desire to write a detailed response, but I didn’t have the time.” Ah well. But I want to draw attention to the way that Jeremy criticises the position I outlined.

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"Most of whom are still alive" – The Apostle Paul on witnesses to the resurrection

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On January 24, 2010

In apologetics, theology and biblical studies

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St Paul appealed to the existence of numerous living witnesses to Jesus of Nazareth, risen from the dead.

Mainstream New Testament scholarship on the Gospels is considerably more conservative than it was, say, forty years ago. For example, the greater number of New Testament critics seemed to agree as a kind of in-house duty that the Gospels were written very late in the first century – the later the better, and if you can find a way of saying that they weren’t finished until the second century, even better! The centre of what is “mainstream” has moved a long way since then. Now it is voices like N. T. Wright, Craig Evans and Richard Bauckham that are setting the pace. Much of the extraordinary scepticism and radical reconstruction of first century Christianity is now seen as simply unwarranted.

But I digress (I got distracted by a certain sense of satisfaction with the sea change that the world of biblical studies has seen). Even those with outdated and extraordinarily sceptical approaches to New Testament studies acknowledge the relatively early date of authorship of the letters written by the Apostle Paul. The first epistle to the Corinthians was composed in the mid fifties, around twenty-five years after the crucifixion. From reading through the letter you can see that one of the theological issues that the church in Corinth was struggling with was scepticism over the resurrection.

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On atheism – Here we go again

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On January 24, 2010

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David Gleeson over at exchristian.net wants to correct common misconceptions about atheism. Unfortunately he ends up perpetuating a major misconception of his own, and also messes up a little Greek. Commenting on the very first alleged misconception, he says:

1. Atheism is the belief that no gods exist.

This statement’s ubiquity is exceeded only by its utter falseness; not only is it misleading, but it is the complete opposite of the truth.

The word ‘atheism’ comes from the Greek prefix ‘a’, meaning without, and ‘theist’, meaning having a belief in a supernatural deity. Atheism, therefore, literally means “without theistic belief”. Atheism does not positively assert anything; rather, it is a statement of withheld belief.

Atheists, therefore, do not positively assert that gods do not exist. Atheists simply withhold belief in said gods because the evidence is not sufficient to warrant the belief. This is not to say that there isn’t sufficient reason to believe that certain gods do not exist. There is. But to categorically deny the existence of all gods would require a leap of faith that is anathema to a true atheist. Atheism requires no such leap.

I’ll start with the way that the writer gets his Greek wrong.

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A Survey on Church Experiences

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On January 23, 2010

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I got an email from a reader named Kristina. She’s a freelance writer here in New Zealand and she’s conducting a survey on church experiences, hoping to publish the result in one of the New Zealand Christian magazines. She’s asked me to pass on her invitation to take part, and here it is:

If you are a Christian, please fill in this simple survey to help gather information about our current Church experiences. The information is annonymous and will be used as research for an article that will be published:

http://www.surveybob.com/surveybob/s/ca717cef-badd-41ea-bbc6-99027342c39a.html

I’m taking part in the survey today.

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