“I began this essay by looking at Plantinga’s God, Freedom, and Evil, where we find a suggested form of a successful argument from evil. I made two adjustments to this form: first, by eschewing talk of the proper elimination of evil in favor of its prevention; and second, by bringing in the notions of good-making and evil-making properties. With these changes, I proposed a valid argument from evil. I then noted that, as the other premises seemed unobjectionable, the weight of the argument fell on premise (3), the proposition that “Every evil-making property (EMP) is such that its instantiation is not entailed by the instantiation of some greater good-making property (GMP).” I offered a subargument for this premise making use of the possibility of God’s existing alone, together with his perfection, to show that from the perspective of perfect-being theism, (3) would be true. But if (3) is accepted by perfect-being theists, then the argument from evil succeeds.” (tags: free-willalvin-plantingaplantingaargumentlogicaltheodicyphilosophyevil)
Small town pastor turns atheist, gets ostracised by Christians, turns to the Clergy Project and now helps run the Recovering from Religion organisation. (tags: ex-christiande-conversionclergyatheismreligion)
which is: “If we can apply an emotionally charged word to something, we must judge it exactly the same as a typical instance of that emotionally charged word.” Yvain is just on fire lately: read his LJ and LessWrong posts. (tags: equivocationworstphilosophyargumentrhetoricyvain)
Scott Atran argues that scientific study of religion is needed. Hard to disagree there, though I’m not sure scientists have refrained from studying it because they think it’s silly. Is there evidence for that? (tags: atheismnew-atheismreligionanthropologyscott-atranatran)
Gay atheist Alex Gabriel went to Soul Survivor, a charismatic Christian festival, and blogged about it (the link is to part one of the series). I went in about 1998, shit was so crazy (to my conservative evangelical eyes) but bits of it were inspirational, and indeed, Alex does find some good things to say about it, but mostly worries about people converting for the wrong reasons (i.e. no reasons at all). (tags: festivalconversionalex gabrielcharismaticchristianitysoul-survivorsoul survivor)