Consciencebound

Excellent Podcast episode of For Good Reason. Cognitive Dissonance is extremely interesting and scary at the same time. We are all so prone to only accepting and believing things that agree with what we already believe and listening to this really makes you consider your reasons for what you believe.

You can listen to this episode here

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The doctrine of Hell in modern Christianity causes much consternation both with those who are not believers as well as with believers themselves. If you believe in a God that is loving and who cares for humans as if they are his children, it is difficult to fathom how he could send those people to an eternal torture chamber for simply not believing. It is also difficult to stomach the thought of loved ones who have died being tortured for all eternity. I remember as a believer that this caused me much anguish at various times when i was confronted with the death of someone that I knew who was not a “professing Christian”.

On the side of those who are not believers, the tension of a loving god and a fiery Hell is often given as a reason for unbelief. It makes the Christian God out to be a vindictive, unforgiving task master which is a huge turn off to many people. That is at least what the perception is.

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Gotta love Tim Minchin. He has quickly become my favorite comedian

I came across this site some time ago and just stumbled on it again as I was going through my bookmarks. What a great program. The site is called Closer to Truch and is a collection of very well made videos that are made for TV and cover topics on God, Cosmos and Consciousness. This particular program is about 30 minutes long and covers the vastness of the universe.

The host of the show paints himself as a seeker of truth who is humbled by the sheer size of the universe. I identify greatly with him in many of his shows on this site. I love nature and the more I learn, the more interested I am to learn more about it through science. I am humbled myself at not just the size of the universe itself but also the enormity of the amount of knowledge that there is to be discovered about it and just how small I am in relationship to it all. I look back over my adult life and see how much I have learned over the years and see that I am really no closer to having a “full knowledge” of the world then I was 20 years ago. With Socrates, I can say, Read the rest of this entry »

This is taken from James Mcgrath’s Blog and I thought it was interesting:

If we adopt a skeptical approach, we are less likely to believe things that are false, but will also probably not believe many things that are true but for which evidence is lacking. If we take a credulous approach, by believing everything, we may be certain that we have believed everything that is true, but we will inevitably believe many things that are false as well.

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Here is an 8 part youtube video series of a debate on evolution and intelligent design. I was pleasantly surprised by the exchange for the most part even though it is dated. The debate was in 1997 and so there has been a lot of development in this discussion since that time but it was still good and it makes you think. This is a 5 on 4 debate with 9 relevant and highly educated and very well prepared speakers. On the ID side you have William F. Buckley Jr, William Demski, Michael Behe, Phillip Johnson and David Berlinksi and on the evolution side you have Ken Miller, Bary Lynn, Eugenie C. Scott and Michael Ruse. In my opinion, the star of the debate is clearly Ken Miller but there was still many good contributions to the discussion on both sides.

Does faith actually give us information that we cannot get with our senses? Can we gain knowledge by faith? Or is it an assumption that we make about what someone told us that God has said? Or is it something that we throw up like a white flag of surrender when we realize that we don’t have enough information but we still feel like we have to defend our belief?

In the Bible we are told:

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Great article on the distinction between what we know and what we don’t know about evolution. There is a good quote from Stephen J Gould in this article talking about this as well. Many people point out that there are differing theories about HOW evolution happened and so it is therefore all up for grabs and only a theory that is very debatable. What this article points out is that that question is not IF evolution happened, but HOW.

Evolution is a Fact and a Theory
by Laurence Moran

This is a story from back in 2004 which I did not see at the time. Someone just forwarded an article to me about it the other day. It is a story about a disgruntled Colorado man who seemed to experience some pretty unfair treatment in his small Colorado town of Granby. His frustration culminated in building a steel and concrete reinforced bull dozer and destroying 15 buildings and many cars and finally by taking his own life. A video montage of this even is below or you can read a story about it which includes a lot more details here and a discovery channel story on it here. What I would like to comment on is this man’s feeling that he was guided by God or some higher power.
I am not trying to single this man and his crazy actions out as a representative example of believers in any way. Although I can sympathize with his frustrations, his actions are hardly condoned especially because his clear intention was to also take a number of people’s lives. I also know that many believers will think that this man is crazy and that God was most certainly not guiding him to do this. What I do think that it illustrates however is the way that humans can be clearly deceived by their own circumstances and by their own beliefs to think that God is on their side and leading or speaking to them and feel that they have clear evidence for this. The man who did this, Marvin Heemeyer, made audio tapes of his plans and his thinking before the event so we have some insight into what he was thinking.

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