CelticBear’s Musings

A fantastic weekend for religious topics in other blogs!

Let’s start with Bad Astronomy and his latest regarding the current infallible Pope’s overturning of the previous infallible Pope’s attitude toward science.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/10/22/pope-of-wax/

The Pope recently used the myth of Icarus to characterize scientific arrogance, equating Icarus’ melting wings as a lesson to not reach too high. Phil Plait prefers to see the arrogance of Icarus as being an error of blind faith and lack of testing and research and acknowledging reality.

Things start getting really interesting over at Debunking Christianity:

Four Points Concerning The Problem of Evil, Christian Apologetics & The Bible

Discusses the problem of evil and Christian Apologetics. Here’s a couple of snippits:

Note that if God is perfectly good and has freewill then a freewilled being can exist in a state of perfect goodness. But if God has freewill then wouldn’t it be possible for God Himself to commit evil, or become evil? (Or do Christian apologists employ a different definition of “freewill” when it comes to “God?”) Conversely, if God does not have freewill then doesn’t that imply that freewill is not necessarily of ultimate value and that humanity has something even God lacks?

And this little tidbit:

I wonder whether Christian apologists have ever come to grips in a truly convincing fashion with the ways their God is portrayed (either in reality or metaphorically) in the book that they claim “reveals” the truth of their beliefs to humanity? For instance does the DEVIL threaten to cast people body and soul into hell? No. That type of imposed suffering is God’s design. Does the Devil get portrayed as wiping out every breathing thing on the planet except some ark survivors? Nope. That’s God again. Does the Devil command the destruction of everything that breathes in certain cities? Does the Devil send plagues, famines, poisonous snakes, and opposing armies to teach people lessons like the God of the Bible is portrayed as doing? Does the Devil strike husband and wife both dead if they lie about giving all of their earthly possessions to the church?

No wonder the Gnostics believed the Biblegod is actually the cosmic villain! I mean, think about it. Satan in the Hebrew tradition was not a fallen angel, but simply a servant of God’s. His name in Hebrew mean “adversary” which simply means tester. It was Satan’s job to simply test people. Throughout the Bible it’s God who slaughters, commands to slaughter, murder, commit genocide, do a HUGE list of terrible atrocities that are worse than anything found in Greek or Roman pantheon. The article linked above has a huge list of God performed atrocities from the Bible. Youch!

Then…

The Problem of Evil, Alvin Plantinga & Victor Reppert

Another interesting, but more philosophical approach to evil. A little dryer, but still very interesting regarding the messed up and blind approach apologetics have regarding “evil” and reality.

A quote:

I have even GREATER difficulty imagining that humanity (and every other organism on earth) have been placed in such a universally deadly situation in order that human beings might “hear the Word of the Christian God” and either choose to believe a book written by true believers, or die an everlasting death.

And then the article:

I Changed My Mind

Which is basically just one person’s emotional response to a chapter of the book “Why I Rejected Christianity” dealing with the argument from evil debate in Christian apologetics.