I forgot all about this debate.

These signs will be going up around campus, so I guess I’m committed. Or should be committed.

At least I insisted that “god” needed to be defined, so I’m going to be debating the nonexistence of “an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being.” The other side has to defend the absurdly difficult proposition that such a being exists in the absence of any evidence for it, so at least I’ve got that going for me.

I am going up against a philosopher, though, so I dread the haymaker deepities he’ll throw at me.

I’ve featured Michael Voris several times here — he was the front man for an organization called the Church Militant, a small mob of disgruntled TradCaths, and Voris does a YouTube show called The Vortex which is usually him complaining about the gays, the liberals, the Pope, that sort of thing.

Michael Voris has resigned. Can you guess why?

God Love You pic.twitter.com/SBRFDP9vKD

— Michael Voris (@Michael_Voris) November 21, 2023

I still don’t know. He rambles on about “demons” and “moral failings” and “horrible stuff” without dishing out any details.

Here’s another Church Militant weirdo who makes an empty statement on his resignation. Near as I can tell from this evasive complaint, Voris stopped praying with the staff a few years ago. Prayer is so important! No wonder he lapsed in some mysterious way.

We do know that he was “asked to resign for breaching the Church Militant morality clause,” so there was probably something sordid going on, like that he kissed a boy or donated to a social justice organization or, you know, didn’t pray enough. As much as I would be entertained by a tale of decadence and degeneracy, I suspect that his downfall was brought about by some simple thing that the rest of the world would find quaint, but that his insane community would have been horrified by.

In a totally unsurprising announcement, Ayaan Hirsi Ali renounces atheism and declares herself a Christian. I half-expected this to happen — she’s been working at the Hoover Institute with a lot of wealthy conservative Republicans, it was just going to take time to realize who was buttering her bread. I’ve read her autobiography, and it was clear that what drove her was in large part a resentment of the terrible Islamic authoritarians who controlled her life for so long. Well, now she’s come full circle and is identifying with a different set of terrible authoritarians.

As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear. I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun.

So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

Oh. So she has bought into the conspiratorial anti-woke nonsense, and the usual fear-based bullshit that is the foundation of most conservative thought. The communists are coming to get us! Our only hope is to follow a different authoritarian ideology!

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That phrase judeo-christian always sets off alarm bells in my head. Misrepresenting what atheism is about also doesn’t help.

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

It’s Jeeeesus. Good luck with that, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

By the way, nowhere in her long essay does she say a word about why Christianity is a good philosophy, other than that it’s a platform for fighting against Muslims and woke atheists.

You know they’ve been lurking there all along. Here’s Ray Comfort, using the ongoing war in Gaza to justify his loony beliefs.

After the horrific attack of Hamas on Israel and the devastating response, it would be easier to floss the back teeth of the lions at the LA Zoo at feeding time than broker peace between Israel and Hamas.

Anyone who could do that would certainly work a miracle. And so, some would say the stage is set for that one man of sin, the Antichrist, who will bring temporary peace between the Arab and the Jew.

Many Christians believe that Daniel 9:27 is a key prophetic verse that speaks of the Antichrist establishing a peace treaty with Israel, which he then breaks.

The twisty part of all this is that the ghouls want a peacemaker to emerge, but only because he will have to betray any resolution. That’s the important part. Their desire is to see the chaos spawning the apocalypse, leading to the extermination of non-Christians. Isn’t it nice that Ray Comfort has cause to find glee in a war?

Some of the philosophy students at my university have asked me to participate in a debate, on my campus, with a fellow named Perry Hendricks. I am like putty in my students’ hands, so I tentatively agreed, with the caveat that I’d like to see what proposition would be debated. The students have come back with their “specific” question. It is…

Does God exist?

I was in the middle of a meeting when that email flew across my view, so it was extremely difficult not to groan aloud and facepalm myself. Just too bleh.

My answer is no, of course, and I assume his will be yes. Are we done already?

The meat of any discussion has to be how that question will be answered, and I don’t see any hint of what approach will be taken, or what the epistemology of any answer will be — it’s just way too broad. I know how I’d approach the question, but I suspect we could easily end up talking past each other.

So now what? Do I say the topic is either ridiculously broad or too subjective and say forget it or go back and revise it, or do I just bull my way through the pathetic question, leaving no survivors?

I’m asking you, the readers, what you think I should do. You know what I think of debates, the only thing that persuades me to do this one is that it’s the students and it’s local.

Wow, a novel argument from a creationist. Ken Ham posted this on Facebook yesterday. Stand in awe before his logic.

Atheists who argue that we are just animals are almost always wearing clothes. Do animals wear clothes? No. So instead of making a consistent argument that we are only animals, atheists are instead confirming a literal Genesis 3 where we wear clothes due to sin and shame! God gave Adam and Eve cloths after sin. This works with many other things: Why do we have a seven-day week–the Bible. Why does logic and reason exist–the Bible. Why does knowledge exist–the Bible. Why is marriage defined as a man and a woman–the Bible.
This list can go on for hours! But in an unbeliever’s worldview, they lack the very foundational basis for such things.

We also wear eyeglasses. Do you know any animals who wear glasses? Checkmate, atheists!

I don’t understand how the seven-day week preceded the Bible, though. Did Jesus have a time machine?

If the Bible is the source of logic and reason, why is it that the most fervent believers seem to lack both?

Smug twit

I’ve never had any respect for Alister McGrath, but apparently he thinks I’m a credible source on atheism. He has a book titled Coming to Faith Through Atheism, containing 12 essays about how people returned to religion after a dalliance with atheism, driven by how much they disliked Dawkins and the New Atheism. That sounds incredibly cliched — it’s practically a joke how often theists claim that they used to be an atheist, but then they saw the light.

Fine. More pedestrian pablum from a conventional Christian who doesn’t like Dawkins. I even have some sympathy with the thesis that Dawkins has become a detriment to atheism. However, an argument against one particular flavor of atheism is not an argument for the ridiculous Christianity McGrath favors. I also mildly resent that he cites me (and Ashley Miller) some kind of supporter of his ideas.

Yet it wasn’t just that Dawkins and others set out to make religious faith a badge of shame. The “New Atheism” encouraged a discriminatory rhetoric of denunciation and demonisation directed not primarily against religious ideas, but against religious people. Many were alarmed at this trend. The feminist atheist blogger Ashley Miller distanced herself from those who suggested that “people who are religious aren’t worthwhile and are certainly too stupid to be respected”. The debate ought to be about assessing ideas, she insisted, not about publicly ridiculing religious people: “We dehumanize people who disagree with us instead of arguing about ideas.” It didn’t exactly help with the public face of atheism.

Today, the “New Atheism” is generally regarded as having imploded, increasingly (though perhaps unfairly) being seen as the crystallisation of the cultural prejudices of old white Western middle-class males. Many of its former members, disenchanted by its arrogance, prejudice, and superficiality, have distanced themselves from the movement and its leaders.

Of course he’d think it unfair to view the failure of the New Atheism as a result of the cultural prejudices of old white Western middle-class males, since he is one, and his stodgy Christianity is the epitome of Western middle-class bullshit. His religion is not an improvement on atheism!

What he doesn’t acknowledge is that neither Ashley nor I have abandoned atheism, which is something rather different than the peculiarly assertive, aggressive style of Dawkins’ atheism. We aren’t Christians! It’s a little rude to pose two people who oppose his position as somehow backing up his new book.

Why didn’t he link to my assessment of Alister McGrath?

That’s McGrath. Incoherent and contradictory, vacuous and vapid, and bumbling along, triumphantly making fallacious arguments that he thinks are irrefutable.

Jebus, but I love “sophisticated theology”. It makes its practitioners look like such hopeless dolts.

I’m still a bit assertive and aggressive, and I still categorically reject McGrath’s weird beliefs.