What is particularly ironic about the proliferation of village atheism is the fact that the online atheist/skeptic community persistently tries to brand itself as being especially rational, critical, and objective. And yet, the widespread and vocal opinions of the village atheists directly contradict this aspirational branding.
All this prompts the question: how many people reject Christianity because the word 'God' makes them think of him?
Some years ago, a friend of mine told me how, after losing his wife to cancer, he encouraged his embittered young adult children to return to church. One kid asked, "Dad, if God answered all those prayers, why didn't he answer ours?"
Dementia in its various permutations impacts countless families and as it does, it raises a nest of extremely difficult questions about the nature of suffering and the goodness of God.
The existence of God is a topic that tends to elicit strong passions. People have their beliefs about whether God exists or not, but they also have their hopes. Many people hope God does exist, but some prominent voices express a hope quite to the contrary.
I informed my audience that I had taught the Apostles' Creed to my daughter. One of the students spoke for many when she insisted that children should be raised without "religious dogma". Instead, they should be free to "make up their own minds" about what to believe.
Is it worth debating people if you can't change their mind? Is a conversation only worthwhile if your interlocutor has an open mind?
In his new book Disarming the Church, biblical scholar Eric Seibert defends the second view: to follow the Prince of Peace, he insists, requires a radical and categorical rejection of violence.
Growing up, I was taught to think of the Bible as like God's hotel fire evacuation map for the human race. After spending the last fifteen years as a seminary professor, I can say without a doubt that the Bible is most certainly neither brief nor succinct.
Some people will be drawn to the book because they are troubled by the ethics of the genocide of the Canaanites. In the last fifteen years, the problem of biblical violence generally and the ethics of the Canaanite genocide, in particular, have exploded like a brush fire on a tinder-dry field.
