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I'm an ex-Christian, but I think some part of me still clings to Christianity in a very loose, irrational sense, but I do not believe anymore and consider myself an Agnostic Atheist. I think spirituality is a personal thing and should be between the individual and whatever he or she chooses to focus on. In that regard, I respect others views regardless of whether or not I agree with them. I simply do not experience anything in my life that I would identify as God, but wouldn't ignore a grand revelation."
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Tagline: Analyses of God beliefs, atheism, religion, faith, miracles,
evidence for religious claims, evil and God, arguments for and against
God, atheism, agnosticism, the role of religion in society, and related
issues.
The question has been raised whether it is correct to ascribe "objective morality" to divine command theories of ethics, or more broadly, theologically grounded ethics. The point is made that if morality is grounded in God, it is grounded in a person, that is to say, in a subject. Isn't that precisely what we mean by "subjective morality"? This is a question I had asked myself, and had decided that a better term of art for theologically grounded ethics is "transcendent morality". Increasingly, I am inclined to think the assignation of "objective" is just as apt. The key is to identify what in theistic ethics ultimately grounds the good. The answer to that question, for most theists, is not the affective or , but rather the immutable nature of God. This location of the grounds of the good emerges consistently when the Euthyphro dilemma is pressed. the insistence that theologically grounded ethics be cast into the subjective pile of metaethical theories seems to me unfounded. The key is in what, exactly, the good is grounded.
E.J. Lowe and A. Rami, eds. (McGill-Queen's University Press: May, 2009), 262 pages.
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Truth depends in some sense on reality. But it is a rather delicate matter to spell this intuition out in a plausible and precise way. According to the theory of truth-making this intuition implies that either every truth or at least every truth of a certain class of truths has a so-called truth-maker, an entity whose existence accounts for truth. This book aims to provide several ways of assessing the correctness of this controversial claim. This book presents a detailed introduction to the theory of truth-making, which outlines truth-maker relations, the ontological category of truth-making entities, and the scope of a truth-maker theory. The essays brought together here represent the most important articles on truth-making in the last three decades as well as new essays by leading researchers in the field of the theory of truth and of truth-making. ~ Book Description
Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford University Press: July, 2005), 332 pages.
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Shafer-Landau defends
non-naturalist moral realism. Moral realism is the thesis there are
objective moral facts. In other words, it is the thesis that there are
moral facts, and they are not constituted by what any actual or
possible person (or any actual or possible group of persons) thinks,
feels, believes, etc. Shafer-Landau argues that these objective moral
facts are non-natural facts. The moral facts are sui generis, and in
particular they are not a sort of natural facts. His non-naturalism
also includes a thesis about moral language: that it cannot be analyzed
into the language of the natural or social sciences. In
explaining his position, Shafer-Landau emphasizes that it does not
commit him to the existence of strange, inexplicable moral stuff. His
position is that the moral facts are wholly constituted by non-moral
(probably wholly natural) facts, though they are not identical to any
non-moral facts. This rests on a form of property pluralism according
to which moral properties, though not identical to non-moral
properties, are realized by non-moral properties. Things have moral
properties that are not identical to natural properties, and therefore
moral facts (i.e. facts about which things have which moral properties)
are wholly constituted by natural facts but are not themselves natural
facts. ~ ctdreyer at Amazon.com
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The Case for Christ records Lee Strobel's attempt to "determine if there's credible evidence that Jesus of Nazareth really is the Son of God." The book consists primarily of interviews between Strobel (a former legal editor at the Chicago Tribune) and biblical scholars such as Bruce Metzger. Each interview is based on a simple question, concerning historical evidence (for example, "Can the Biographies of Jesus Be Trusted?"), scientific evidence, ("Does Archaeology Confirm or Contradict Jesus' Biographies?"), and "psychiatric evidence" ("Was Jesus Crazy When He Claimed to Be the Son of God?"). Together, these interviews compose a case brief defending Jesus' divinity, and urging readers to reach a verdict of their own. ~ Amazon.com
Ernst Mayr (Basic Books: Oct. 15, 2002), 336 pages.
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At age 97, Ernst Mayr is one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, and here he delivers yet another valuable addition to the field of evolutionary theory. Mayr, who was also a curator at the American Museum of Natural History for two decades, guides lay readers through evolutionary thought from the book of Genesis and creationist theory through Darwin's theories and "soft" evolution and on to more contemporary, inclusive concepts. He takes readers on a whirlwind voyage from the scala naturae (the Great Chain of Being, in which everything in the world was accorded a position in a developmental hierarchy) to Mayr's own work, which builds on Darwinian theory and environmental factors. No one but Mayr could explain evolution so well, and though the text is peppered with many scientific terms, overall the author is triumphant in his goal to teach "first and foremost... biologist or not, [anyone] who simply wants to know more about evolution." While many authors suggest their tomes are the authoritative source, Mayr remains humble, reminding readers that "many details remain controversial." And the combination of his expertise, his elegant prose and the sheer pleasure of so many enthralling facts (the 145-million-year-old Archaeopteryx is a near perfect link between reptiles and birds, for example) means that studying the fossil record has rarely been so absorbing. Appendixes answer FAQs and respond to various objections to evolutionary theory, while a glossary offers entries from acoelomate to zygote. ~ Publishers Weekly
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The Levant has been something of a mass producer of consequential events nobody saw coming. Who predicted the rise of Christianity as a dominant religion in the Mediterranean basin, and later in the Western world? The Roman chroniclers of that period did not even take note of the new religion — historians of Christianity are baffled by the absence of contemporary mentions. Apparently, few of the big guns took the ideas of a seemingly heretical Jew seriously enough to think that he would leave traces for posterity. We only have a single contemporary reference to Jesus of Nazareth — in The Jewish Wars of Josephus — which itself may have been added later by a devout copyist. How about the competing religion that emerged seven centuries later; who forecast that a collection of horsemen would spread their empire and Islamic law from the Indian subcontinent to Spain in just a few years? Even more than the rise of Christianity, it was the spread of Islam (the third edition, so to speak) that carried full unpredictability; many historians looking at the record have been taken aback by the swiftness of the change. Gorges Duby, for one, expressed his amazement about how quickly close to ten centuries of Levantine Hellenism were blotted out "with a strike of a sword." A later holder of the same history chair at the Collège de France, Paul Veyne, aptly talked about religions spreading "like bestsellers" — a comparison that indicates unpredictability. These kinds of discontinuities in the chronology of events did not make the historian's profession too easy: the studios examination of the past in the greatest of detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it.
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Life of Johnson (Oxford University Press: 1998), p. 624.
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I thought admiration one of the most agreeable of all our feelings; and I regretted that I had lost much of my disposition to admire, which people generally do as they advance in life. [Samuel Johnson replied] "Sir, as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration — judgment, to estimate things at their true value." I still insisted that admiration was more pleasing than judgment, as love is more pleasing than friendship. The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.