Illogic Primer Quotes Clippings Books and Bibliography Paper Trails Links Film

Christians, Don’t Question Authority

Go In the face of a huge loss of faith in our leaders, Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort naysayers in the pews to steer clear of "conspiracy theories" and dissenting opinions. Apart from a lot of generic epistemological and conversational advice, QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross manages to learn and teach the wrong lesson from the early twenties. Captive to an elitist and partisan bent, the book fails to wonder why there has been such a loss of faith in authority. Worse, on the whole, the book discourages average Christians from “doing their own research” and questioning government sanctioned experts.

Jeff Yang on a Living, Breathing Constitution

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The vulnerability of birthright citizenship lies in the same thing that allows the U.S. Constitution to live and breathe and stay relevant to a changing world: textual economy. Along with the rest of the Constitution and its amendments, the 14th was deliberate with its sparse language and a lack of examples or contextual framing, in order to put exact interpretation in the hands of future generations.

Metaethics: A Short Companion

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The study of ethics is primarily associated with questions of morality: “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong.” The field of metaethics asks about what we mean by terms like “good” or “right,” and whether they represent real features of the world. 

In Metaethics: A Short Companion, David A. Horner and J. P. Moreland provide a primer on how to think about questions surrounding the concept of morality — its nature, status, grounding, underlying presuppositions, and philosophical commitments. From a stance rooted in moral realism, Horner and Moreland explore and evaluate the major metaethical positions on offer in the field, including expressivism, error theory, relativism, constructivism, ethical naturalism, and ethical nonnaturalism. They conclude by arguing for the rationality of a Christian worldview as a guiding metaethical position. 

The study of metaethics equips Christians to think deeply about the nature of reality, knowledge, truth, and morality. Metaethics: A Short Companion offers a clear and concise introduction to the key concepts and debates in metaethics, providing readers with a foundation for reflecting on their own ethical beliefs and practices.

The Essentials in Christian Ethics series, edited by C. Ben Mitchell and Jason Thacker, is designed to illuminate the richness and centrality of ethics to all of the Christian life. The series consists of short, introductory volumes written by renowned scholars in the fields of ethics, theology, and philosophy. Each volume explores a crucial element of Christian ethical reflection, approaching the subject from within the broader Protestant moral tradition.

Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Relationships? 

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You may have heard the claim that the Bible, when read correctly, is not against believers entering monogamous, faithful same-sex relationships. The arguments sound quite compelling.” Jesus never talked about same-sex relationships.” “Paul was only condemning exploitative relationships, not consensual ones.” “We don’t keep the Old Testament food laws, so why would we keep the ones on same-sex sex?” “If God is love, he can’t be against relationships of love.” And more. Have Christians through the ages just been getting this one wrong?

Carl Trueman on Evacuating the Definition of Marriage

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Gay marriage does not simply involve a minor expansion of the traditional concept. There was a time when gay writers such as Andrew Sullivan argued that allowing same-sex marriages would simply permit gay people to be part of a conservative institution. It is now clear that gay marriage did not merely expand the set of those considered to be married, but fundamentally evacuated marriage of meaning — or, more accurately, exposed the fact that it had already been fundamentally evacuated of meaning by the ready acceptance of no-fault divorce. It is no longer a unique relationship whose stability is important for its normative ends, but little more than a sentimental bond that only has to last for as long as it meets the emotional needs of the parties involved.

Patrick T. Brown on Climate Science as Cassandra

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To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve. 

Dangerous Affirmation

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Since 1968, the LGBT movement has made significant inroads into the Christian church. The affirming church movement has become mainstream through the erosion of mainline denominations. Queer theology has taken hold in many academic settings. The emergence of “gay celibate theology” is causing confusion in evangelical churches through its appeal to modern psychology and LGBT-lived experience. How did we get here? What does the Bible say about all of this?

Anika Collier Navaroli on Selective Free Speech

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Rep. Stansbury asked what Twitter has done and is doing to combat hate speech on its platform. Navaroli correctly declined to address current policies since she has not been at the company for some time. However, she then said that they balanced free speech against safety and explained that they sought a different approach: “Instead of asking just free speech versus safety to say free speech for whom and public safety for whom. So whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely.”

Martin Lloyd Jones on Faith as Thinking

Go Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them. ... Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else …

Sam Harris and Garry Kasparov on AI and Respect for the Deep Blue team

Go The reason I wrote the book is not to settle old scores or give my version of the match, but to say that we should not be paralyzed by a dystopian vision of the future – worrying about killer AI and super-intelligent robots, which is like worrying about overcrowding on Mars.