We now come to the point of Dan Barker’s book, Mere Morality, where it essentially devolves into an exercise in over the top condemnations of the Bible and Christianity based on really bad biblical reading and interpretation. It certainly feeds into the common narrative and stereotype many people have regarding the Bible and Christianity, but…
After his elaboration on his belief that morality and culture are a result of evolutionary forces, Dan Barker then addresses the issues of Reason, Law, and Rebellion. If you remember, Barker borrowed his image of what it takes to discern what is moral from the image of a man with an angel on one shoulder…
ANNOUNCEMENT: Today my new book, Christianity and the (R)evolution in Worldviews in Western Culture came out. It is available on Amazon.com. I thought I’d share a section from chapter 10. On September 11th 2001 the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda high-jacked four planes. The passengers on Flight 93 were able to overpower the high-jackers, but Flight 93…
In my previous post on Dan Barker’s book Mere Morality, I responded to Barker’s attempt to draw a distinction between “religious values” and “human values,” as well as his claim that morality is solely a social issue. In this post, I am going to address Barker’s comments regarding his own “trinity” of what constitutes morality:…
In my previous post, I began to walk through Dan Barker’s book Mere Morality and noted, among other things, that he tries to claim that our sense of morality is a result of biological evolution and that the underlying standard to determine whether or not an action is deemed “moral” is what he calls the…
Recently, the former fundamentalist preacher turned atheist Dan Barker has come out with a book entitled, Mere Morality, in which he essentially makes two arguments: (A) Morality is the result of evolutionary forces, and (B) The morality found in the Bible is, in fact, horrible and immoral. In fact, this topic of morality was one…
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…