I’ve devoted a fair amount of time writing to Ben, The Militant Christian. I thought our conversation could actually prove fruitful. Despite his blog name, he’s actually a very “liberal” Christian that appeared to have a genuine interest in science and reason. He started the discussion by trying to establish things that we agree on. A good sign, right?
Stop the presses! The conversation turned sour. Shocking, I know.
Kevin Lane wrote a comprehensive critique on my post On How I Became a Christian, called The Fruit of Believing a False Gospel and Refusing Answers, which I encourage you to read. This article is a response to his critique. As always, if you have an opinion, whatever it may be, you know where the comments are.
Kevin is a Christian with a keen interest in Christian soteriology—the study of religious doctrines of salvation—having studied the topic for the last seven years.
He is a retired Canadian Forces avionics technician, and worked on such machines as the CH124 Sea King aircraft. He is a published author, professional photographer and musician, blogger, and he is @TheWordBowl on Twitter.
Lastly, he is married to Joanne whom he can’t stop bugging at work 🙂
Kevin is a clearly a creative and smart individual. I doubt that he and I could ever be friends, but apart from his annoying usage of LOL and exclamation marks, Kevin is a nice enough guy. He is Canadian, after all. LOL!!!! Read the rest of this entry
Having a conversation with an apologist is always a challenging experience, especially in a comment thread on the internet. Over the last couple of days, I have been talking to Canadian Brian Mason, who’s Gravatar bio reads, “A Christian Apologist and Ordained Minister by God through the National Association of Christian Ministers”. As one might expect, the topics of discussion was varied, but we did end up focussing on slavery, which is an interesting topic, right?
Sadly, in the end, the discussion digressed, and—in my view—it is not worth the effort to wrestle it back to coherence. I lost motivation to pursue the argument at around the point when Brian started threatening me with hell. You know, that age-old apologist strategy.
Below is a full “warts-and-all” transcription of one of our conversations. Please excuse my spelling, and grammar etc. I did write a lot of it on a phone and in a rush! I can legitimately be blamed for one thing, and that is that I did write too much, after Brian requested more condensed comments. I just can’t help it.
Please comment if you have an opinion. I would love to get your feedback. Have fun reading, I think it’s a good ride. Read the rest of this entry
The trouble with words, other than their preposterous spelling, is that they are adept at adopting different meanings. It is important, as a consequence, that players—of conversation—share a uniform understanding of the words in play, lest the game digress into a farce of confusion, penalties, and false victories—an irritating state to be sure. Discussions of God certainly suffer from discorded definitions, and it’s worth the time to engage in dialogue that’s purely dedicated to resolution.
In the context of godly discourse, there are many important words. For now, I’d like to focus on just four: theism and atheism, gnosticism and agnosticism. These are basic terms, but they are frequently misunderstood, and each carries its own baggage of misconceptions. Read the rest of this entry
The Amber Restorative 