First of all, please understand that I’m not becoming an atheist. I’m about to restate an argument against the existence of God, one which I feel as if I “grasped” today. But that doesn’t mean I’ve adopted that argument. It’s my job, as a novelist, to try to understand how people think, even when they’re very different from me. I’d say, “I’m a professional. Do not try this at home,” but I don’t really believe it’s destructive to faith to understand opposing arguments. It’s vigilance and intellectual honestly.

Anyway, I think I figured out one reason why atheists feel morally superior to religious believers, even though history is not exactly overflowing with examples of atheists who were great humanitarians and moral paragons (no doubt there are some, but in general religious believers have been both far worse and far better than atheists).

To an atheist, anyone who says he believes in God appears to be complicit in cruelty. Continue reading In which Walker attacks another straw man →

It was a good weekend. I spent it pretty much alone, but for me that’s a feature, not a bug.

I spent most of Saturday concentrating on reading over the galley proofs of the new novel, West Oversea. It had been some time since I’d actually looked at the thing, and to my amazement I thought it was really good. There were plot twists I’d forgotten about completely, so I had the odd pleasure of surprising myself.

I’ve often thought that it’s too bad I can’t read Lars Walker’s novels, because he seems like the kind of writer I’d take to. Apparently that’s true.

Sunday started, as they generally do, with church. I don’t think I’ve told you that I finally made the big jump and started attending a different church. Not the one I blogged about visiting a while back, but a different church which I’d known about, but whose location I’d entirely mistaken. Turns out it’s convenient for me—miles closer than my old church. And the great thing is that they offer a traditional service (with Communion), so I don’t have to do praise songs anymore.

The difficult part is that this service is at 8:00 a.m., which means I have to get up at my normal getting-up-for-work time. The upside is that when I come home, about 9:30, I’ve got the whole beautiful Sunday in front of me. Continue reading Sunday thriver →

I’ve discovered a couple good blogs I hadn’t seen before. One is Salvo Blog (Signs of the Times). They provided this further link to a report from another good-looking blog, Mindful Hack, which examines the tale of Phineas Gage, a story you probably heard or read in college (I know I did), and demonstrates that it doesn’t necessarily mean what that guy in the tweed jacket with the arm patches told you it meant. Continue reading Links and fallacies →

Three saints to help you grow stronger in the Lord

I was born and raised in the South. I’m glad to be a Southern. I think y’all is a great word–not a stupid slang term like you’uns. The literature of the South is better than it is everywhere else. But I hate stories like this:

[Dad] must have been about thirty years old at the time, a young man, sitting in that room with all his elders, trying to be respectful. But finally he said, “This church doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to Jesus Christ. And I don’t think he would keep anyone from joining because of their skin color.” And the man who had chaired the search committee looked at my dad and said, “Son, I don’t know what kind of religion they taught you in seminary, but we’ve only got one kind of religion here, and it’s that good old Southern religion.”

Pastor Jim Somerville writes about his father’s brief stint as a pastor of a Presbyterian church in Alabama sometime in the ’70s. How could so many goats fill the churches in southern states back then? What blindness do we have today, if lies like racism can live freely among God’s people at any given time?

The Internet Monk, who is not a Lutheran for those of you in doubt, has a commentary in the Christian Science Monitor called, “The coming evangelical collapse.” The article is condensed from three posts available here. He opens by saying:

I believe that we are on the verge- within 10 years- of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity; a collapse that will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and that will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West. I believe this evangelical collapse will happen with astonishing statistical speed; that within two generations of where we are now evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its current occupants, leaving in its wake nothing that can revitalize evangelicals to their former “glory.”

To the extent that such a collapse makes evangelicals look less like Joel Osteen and more like Tony Evans, this could be very good. But it ain’t necessarily going to happen.

This will have to be a short post. My new publisher is finally calling on me for input in getting my book put together, so I can’t give my topic the word count it deserves.

But here’s tonight’s Provocative Thesis™:

All liberals are Christians.

Even if they’re atheists. Even if they’re Jewish or Buddhist or New Age or “Spiritual, Not Religious.”

They’re Christian heretics, but they’re Christian heretics. Continue reading On stopping swords, with swords →