Phill Sacre

Tag: Christian

  • Review: The Atheist Who Didn't Exist

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    I’ve just finished reading “The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist” by Andy Bannister. The book is subtitled “or the dreadful consequences of bad arguments”, and that’s a pretty good summary of the book: examining various arguments made by writers such as Richard Dawkins (who else?) and the like to see whether they stand up. The point…

  • Is Evolution becoming a religion?

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    This other day I read Nick Spencer’s article “The big fat lies of evolution” (you’ll have to read it to understand the title). He talks about the way a layperson – not a scientist – casually used an evolutionary mechanism to explain obesity. He concludes: But the use of this narrative [i.e. the evolutionary narrative], by someone…

  • Is Atheism Rational?

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    … or indeed, irrational? Last week I read a very interesting interview with the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga called Is Atheism Irrational? I’d recommend reading it – particularly the last section at the end, which I found fascinating. It’s to do with the belief in naturalism or materialism – i.e. the belief that the natural world…

  • Secularism: What does it mean to you?

    Secularism: What does it mean to you?

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    Phill Sacre
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    The title of this blog post is taken from an article I read yesterday. The Guardian basically asked a few different people what secularism meant to them, and published their responses. To be honest, the article doesn’t encompass a huge range of beliefs (most of the people there seem to be atheist / humanist in outlook),…

  • The Church is wiser than our secular society

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    One of the articles that seems to have been doing the rounds on Twitter lately is “Our secular society is wiser than the Church” by Oliver Kamm (most recently I saw it tweeted by my friend @pandammonium). I often read articles online without responding to them, but sometimes one annoys me sufficiently that I feel…

  • Toynbee Strikes Again

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    Phill Sacre
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    I don’t usually write about such things on this blog, but this article by Polly Toynbee has got me quite annoyed. Her article is full of misinformation and slightly odd logic (something she’s been guilty of before, but we’ll leave that for the time being). It baffles me how someone who is so vitriolic can…

  • Positions on Scriptural Authority

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    A few days ago, after the news about women bishops had broken, I had a very interesting discussion on Facebook about the decision. One of the interesting things to come out of that was the positions that people had on Biblical Authority. It seems that this is an area where people have major disagreements: do…

  • Atheist Delusions: The Review

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    Recently I mentioned that I was reading through “Atheist Delusions” by David Bentley Hart, and I said I would write up a review of it when I’d finished reading it. Well, I’ve finished reading it now, and really enjoyed it. Quite a lot of the book deals with the same kind of things I’ve been…

  • Secular Society: A Good Thing?

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    Phill Sacre
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    I’ve been thinking a bit about the whole ‘militant secularism’ thing recently. If you’ve missed what’s happened, you must have been living under a rock. Or, paying no attention to the news. Either way, there’s been a whole lotta bloggin’ going on about it! This is the news article which kicked it off, although also…

  • QI and Quirinius’ Census

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    I was watching QI XL last night, and the topic of the Bible came up (you can still see it on the iPlayer at the time of writing – at 20 minutes in). Now, it should be pointed out before we start that Stephen Fry has been known to be wrong before – he is not infallible!…