Before I begin my extended book analysis of Dan Barker’s Mere Morality, I wanted to write a post in which I clarify a number of points I’ve made, both in my three-part series on John Walton’s Lost World of the Torah and my post on Morality and a Transcendent Standard. The responses I’ve received have…
In John Walton’s most recent book, The Lost World of the Torah, he attempts to correct a number of misconceptions people today, both Christians and non-Christians alike, have of the Torah. Or more properly speaking, he attempts to teach what the Torah actually was understood to be within its original, ancient Near Eastern (ANE) context….
Dan Barker, the former fundamentalist minister-turned-atheist, and now president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, has recently written his most recent book, Mere Morality, in which he attempts to not only explain morality through purely naturalistic means, but also argue that morality stemming from religion (or more precisely Christianity) is actually immoral and evil. Recently,…
John Walton’s most recent book, The Lost World of the Torah takes the reader through a number of misconceptions we in the modern world tend to have about the Torah and then explains how the Torah was actually understood within its original, ancient Near Eastern (ANE) context. The book as a whole is, in my…
More times than not, whether it be movies or novels, sequels are never as good as the original. Even when sequels end up being good, the original still is the one that stands out. The Star Wars prequels weren’t as good as the original trilogy; Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit was a mess compared to Lord…
Two years ago, in the spring semester of 2016, at the beginning of the Trump presidency, I began teaching a course on the Old Testament Prophets. One of the first books I had my students read and discuss was Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination. Now, at the time, like everyone else, the whole idea of…
We now come to the last installment of my extended book analysis of Dan Barker’s godless. In this post, we will look at Barker’s argument that Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead. Now, to be sure, the claim that Jesus rose from the dead certainly is one of the most extraordinary claims in history….
We are getting close to the end of by extended book analysis of Dan Barker’s godless. The next couple of posts will primarily focus on the final two chapters of his book: Chapter 15—Did Jesus Exist? And Chapter 16—Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? Chapter 13 is entitled “Bible Contradictions.” As the title implies,…
In my previous post, I looked at Dan Barker’s comments in chapter 12 of his book, godless, in which he discusses his view regarding the issue of what the basis of morality is. My critique focused on his Fundamentalist caricature of the Bible as some sort of universal, external moral code dictated from on high,…
As we make our way through Dan Barker’s book, godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists, we now come to his chapter 12: “For Goodness Sake.” The focus of this chapter is specifically the issue of morality and the question, “What is the basis for morality?” Truth be told, it is…