Today I learned (link in French, sorry), that on December 23rd, 1951 the diocese of Dijon had Santa Claus burned in effigy, in front of the cathedral. Children of local Catholic orphanages were made to attend (so freakin cool). According to the episcopal press release celebrating the event, Santa was condemned “as usurper and heretic.” Added the document: “In truth, lies cannot awaken religious sentiments in the child, and are in no way an educational method.” Amen! I wish I had learned about this... Read more

Fellow Patheosi Hemant Mehta, the “Friendly Atheist“, covers a new atheist book: How “God” Works: A Logical Inquiry on Faith. When I saw this on Twitter, I naively thought: “A ‘logical’ inquiry on faith! Nice! Maybe we’ll finally see a serious treatment of the Cosmological Argument, or the question of existence, or causality, or an attempt to wrestle with the contradictions of materialism, or the problem of grounding morality without transcendence!” Yeah, no. Instead, we get this: Millions of people pray to God... Read more

Most moral philosophy proceeds by way of thought experiments, like the (in)famous trolley problem. Virtue ethicists, who believe that morality is about strengthening certain virtues and weakening certain vices within the individual, have little patience for those sorts of thought experiments. They point out that they’re almost always incredibly contrived, and bereft of the context that would allow a virtuous person to make an informed and moral decision. A good example is Elizabeth Anscombe’s well-known paper Modern Moral Philosophy. She describes as... Read more

Some background: while most conservative Christians have applauded the so-called “New Homophile” movement of celibate gay Christians, some of them take exception to the fact that some of them sometimes think that their “gay identity” can be a source of spiritual gifts and vocation. One of the prominent in this camp is Austin Ruse, who wrote a (frankly) disastrous column on the issue, lambasted by Damon Linker among others. In the wake of this, Ruse wrote a much more measured and... Read more

The ontological argument is the red-headed stepchild of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. Plantinga’s and other contemporary versions, like everything having to do with modal logic, seems to confirm Wittgenstein’s indictment of philosophy as a language game. For all that I have tried to rescue it, Anselm’s really seems like the caricature of it (Aquinas certainly seemed to think so, and he would know better). Most of the time, when something a philosopher writes looks obviously stupid, you’re... Read more

Of the three “great religions of the Book” two of them claim that their Sacred Scripture was directly dictated by God to a human being. It is an article of faith of Orthodox Judaism (according to Maimonides) that the Torah was directly dictated to Moses by the Lord. It is an article of faith of Islam that the Koran was directly dictated to the Prophet Muhammad by the Archangel Gabriel. (This is why those books can only be read authoritatively in their original... Read more

A recurrent theme in the whole simmering “New Atheist” controversy is the question of the impact of the moral worldview on civilizational flourishing; in other words, the historical question of whether Christianity (or “religion” in general) has been “good” for the world, and the speculative question of whether an irreligious world will be more, or less, morally enlightened. By a strange unwritten convention it seems that almost all these discussions always sidestep what seems to me an obvious and topical point of... Read more

It doesn’t take me more than ten seconds to cry if I think about the Catholic Church. I cry with awe and stupefied joy that God has given us such an impossibly amazing gift, this great machine for redivinizing, recivilizing, the world, which produced all this architecture, art, knowledge, science, universities, saints, heroes, epics, poor houses, hospices, hospitals. One of my favorite Christmas hymns is the French classic “Il est né le divin enfant”. The Church also produced this, and generations upon generations of people,... Read more

As you know (oh yeah! still beating that dead horse!) one of the most frequent arguments in favor of the Santa Lie–and one that drives me singularly batty–is the idea that the Santa Lie creates “whimsy” or “magic” in kids’ life. Part of why it drives me batty is because it’s so self-evidently absurd–kids get plenty of whimsy and magic out of regular old stories, but you never see kids playing at Santa, precisely because it hasn’t been delivered as... Read more