Tag Archives: evangelicalism

Steven Pinker Embraces Scientism

Posted on August 9, 2013 by Santi Tafarella

At The New Republic, Steven Pinker comes out swinging against those who direct the pejorative term “scientism” at atheists and agnostics. Pinker thinks that, just as gays turned tables on the bigots and came to embrace the pejorative term “queer,” atheists … Continue reading →

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Anti-Gay Marriage Watch: What’s Your Argument Again?

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Santi Tafarella

Notice that the below commercial in support of excluding gays from civil marriages in Minnesota actually offers no direct argumentative supports for the position at all. Watch: ___ In the intellectually bankrupt culture surrounding the anti-gay marriage movement, it’s taken to be acceptable to … Continue reading →

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Critical Thinking as a Spiritual Path: Prepare Ye the Way of the Truth?

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Santi Tafarella

Yale Divinity School graduate, and former evangelical, Jonathan Dudley, explains, in a recent essay, how lay evangelicals tend to evaluate expert testimony (and so arrive at ridiculous conclusions): Lay evangelicals evaluate the arguments made by “experts” in a manner different from many non-evangelicals. … Continue reading →

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John Ashcroft Watch: Will Michelle Bachmann Let the Mighty Eagle Soar Again?

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Santi Tafarella

Given Michelle Bachmann’s penchant for weird displays of public religiosity, do you suppose, were she to win the White House in 2012, that she might bring John Ashcroft back into the public eye, and into her cabinet? You remember George … Continue reading →

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Josh McDowell Seems to Hate the Internet (Because It Breaks The Evangelical Apologist’s Monopoly over His Traditional Audience)

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Santi Tafarella

Addressing the International Christian Retail Show at the Colorado Convention Center recently, the widely known evangelical apologist and Noah’s ark hunter, Josh McDowell, made the following observation (presumably with his brows knitted together in grave concern): The Internet has given … Continue reading →

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Michelle Bachmann’s End Times Prayer

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Santi Tafarella

Ladies and gentlemen, the likely Republican nominee to be the next President of the United States:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      . At Salon, Alex Pareene asks a good question: If Michele Bachmann is a true Christian, she should rise bodily to Heaven during … Continue reading →

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Hell Apologists Watch: Albert Mohler wants people to awake “in the morning” and go “to sleep at night with the fear of hell never far from consciousness”

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Santi Tafarella

Here’s Albert Mohler, President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and evangelicalism’s leading “intellectual” (at least according to Time magazine), lamenting at his blog the fact that literal hell belief no long terrorizes the psyches of most people living in western countries: … Continue reading →

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YEC Watch: Are Albert Mohler’s YEC Views “Thought Crimes” Or Crimes Against Thought?

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Santi Tafarella

Albert Mohler, the man Time magazine once (weirdly) called America’s “reigning intellectual in the evangelical movement”, is a young earth creationist. And in a recent blog post he offered the following complaint against those who have concluded that the earth is old and plants and … Continue reading →

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Turn or burn? Among the young, is Evangelical Christianity losing its hell bite?

Posted on March 27, 2010 by Santi Tafarella

Is human imaginative sympathy and love slowly conquering fundamentalist dogma? Perhaps, and it might be because the world is getting smaller, making it more difficult to live an insular existence and project dehumanizing traits onto others.  This yesterday at NPR (in … Continue reading →

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I Break Their Nose?

Posted on November 19, 2009 by Santi Tafarella

Is that in the Sermon on the Mount—or Mein Kampf? Oops, the video doesn’t embed. Watch on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kayRXtITyw&feature=related

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Who is Servetus the Evangelical? Alvin Plantinga?

Posted on November 14, 2009 by Santi Tafarella

We’re about to find out because, at his website, he has announced that he will drop his pseudonym, and reveal his true name, on Thursday, November 19, 2009. The rather well know biblical scholar, James Tabor, says of Servetus the Evangelical: … Continue reading →

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Can an Authoritarian Tree Produce Good Fruit? Thinking about John Calvin’s Geneva

Posted on November 3, 2009 by Santi Tafarella

After Disneyland, the happiest place on Earth? Here’s the historian Will Durant, from his book The Reformation (1957, pp. 473-474), on what John Calvin’s Geneva was like in the 16th century: Calvin himself, austere and severe, dreamed of a community … Continue reading →

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“What is called resignation is confirmed desperation” (Henry David Thoreau)

Posted on June 2, 2009 by Santi Tafarella

Escaping from freedom into the ecstasy of resignation and submission (1967): Or another way to look at it: “Atheism is a ferocious system, that leaves nothing above us to excite awe, nor around us to awaken tenderness” (R. Hall).

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Racism: Where Young Earth Creationism and Afrocentrism Meet

Posted on May 2, 2009 by Santi Tafarella

In the New York Times today is an article on the overwhelming evidence that our first human ancestors were from either southeast or southwest Africa, and they resembled the San Bushmen. In other words, they were black.  More than a … Continue reading →

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Glenn Beck Friday: Creepy, Maudlin, Hysterical Populism on Display

Posted on March 17, 2009 by Santi Tafarella

The clip below is illustrative of how religious emotionalism is easily translated, by a charlatan like Glenn Beck, into political emotionalism. And notice the Nazi-like volkish essentialism at work here. Implied by Beck is the notion that all true Americans can tap their inner … Continue reading →

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Holocaust Denial v. Young Earth Creationism?

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Santi Tafarella

In terms of a perversity of soul, Holocaust denial says something far darker about a person than young earth creationism. Young earth creationism is incorrect about the age of the earth and the fixity of species, but it is not … Continue reading →

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If You Ever Hit Me, I Swear I’ll Leave You—Even If the BIBLE Does Not Give Me Permission To!

Posted on February 3, 2009 by Santi Tafarella

Where is that passage in the BIBLE that says, “Thou shalt not, under any circumstances, STRIKE or batter thy spouse. It is an abomination unto the Lord”? Ah, there isn’t one? Okay. But isn’t there a passage somewhere in the Bible … Continue reading →

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