Reader Chris sent me this item with the note, “I am loath to call this one interesting, but it’s right up your alley; Christians pushing for apologetics in college to stop the hemorrhaging. Then again, consider the source.”
Well, the source is The Christian Examiner, and the short article is called “College students need apologetics in face-off against atheist professors“. It describes a seminar, “Fearless Faith,” designed to arm students against the purported onslaught of godlessness that they face when they go to college. Christians are really paranoid about that, and I suppose the basis is that professors are far more atheistic than the public in general, though not even half of us, even at “elite universities” are atheists and agnostics. And, of course, we teach EVOLUTION, and MARXISM, making us even more suspect.
This has given rise to the execrable movie “God’s Not Dead,” in which a religious student outwits a professor who spews nonstop atheism at his students, and, at the end, the professor finds Jesus after being hit by a car (see the trailer here). It’s also spawned the Jack Chick tracts in which professors are portrayed as God-hating, Darwin-loving nitwits. A classic example is the famous “Big Daddy” strip. Here are the last few panels of that strip, in which the pwned professor gives up, and his lies about evolution are characterized as destroying belief:
In truth, most professors are believers, though many aren’t. But few of us impose our atheism on students as does Kevin Sorbo in “God’s Not Dead”, or even bring it up. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned my nonbelief in three decades of teaching. Yes, I teach evolution and tell students that there’s no evidence for creationism, and let them see how the evidence militates against one view and for the other. But I’ve heard of no professors that act like the pompous Christian-bashing professor of “God’s not dead.”
And it’s not just evolution-hating fundamentalists who fear the Atheist Professoriat. The real reason Christians fear college is because they know that it encourages doubt and thinking, and they know that those attitudes are inimical to accepting blind faith. Young people are leaving the Church in droves, and, as the Barna Institute found, three of the reasons that kids vote with their feet is that churches seem unfriendly to science, that churches are overprotective, and that churches are not friendly to young folks who doubt. To Christians, doubt is the enemy, and to professors, especially those of us in science, doubt is a great virtue.
At any rate, the Examiner reports that Fearless Faith is running a series of seminars designed to gird the students’ loins against heathen professors and their nefarious influence.
An apologetics training in response to an increasing number of grieving parents who have heard these words from their college students looks at ways students can speak respectfully, but firmly to their professors, many of whom are atheists.
The instructors at Fearless Faith are convinced a contributing factor to why 70 percent of young evangelicals admit to abandoning church is a lack of worldview and apologetics training for students in how to resist the influence of their atheist professors.
Frank Turek, founder of CrossExamined.org and author of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, offers the Fearless Faith seminar to address the fact that college professors are five times more likely to be atheists than the general public and may be hostile toward Christianity.Unprepared students who find the college environment frightening and toxic can easily fall into a crisis of faith.. . . Fearless Faith is a day-long seminar given at churches to teach students fearlessness about defending their faith. Students will learn how to respond calmly and respectfully when their faith is challenged, how to find flaws in common arguments for atheism, and how to defend the basic tenets of Christianity.
Analytical thinking and certainty about one’s own beliefs are necessary for this [Fearless Faith] approach.
“When your Marxist professor lectures on topics like socialism and cultural relativism, just take good notes and try to think of questions that expose flaws in his worldview,” Adams recommended. [Mike Adams is a Fearless Faith instructor.]
“For example, ‘Professor, isn’t putting Jews in ovens wrong regardless of the geographical location and time period of the people doing it? In other words, isn’t there such thing as a universal moral code?'”
This shows again the strong connection between Christianity and the claim that a universal moral code can come only from God. (This “moral law is one bit of “evidence” touted by National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins as evidence for a deity.) But, of course, the “moral code” is not universal, nor does it defy explanation by both evolution and secular reason. Faith Verus Fact takes us this issue in detail.
It’s a curious but telling that Christians feel the need to have such programs and seminars to combat what they see as the onslaught of atheism, while atheists don’t have similar programs to combat the onslaught of religion, which, in the US, is far stronger than the occasional lucubrations by nonbelievers. Atheists don’t need such programs because, in general, we are much more willing to examine our worldviews, and because we prize doubt far more strongly than do Christians. Doubt and lack of evidence for religious claims are, after all, what led many of us to give up God in the first place.
And here’s a video touting the Fearless Faith program:
It’s so true, education is a brutal onslaught against students’ religion. I sternly penalize any prayer in my classroom, because I consider it cheating to seek outside help.
For them college and university of higher learning just aren’t awash in Faith so to them without the constant reaffirming it is considered as a vampire to leech away their warm “godly” faith to the insidious and coldness of secularism etc. aud nauseum.
Such a reaffirmation society is what they want. For you and me regardless of our need or want or will to force it on us. A real version of Republic of Gilead. (They are secretly jealous of all those wonderful theocratic countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, Nazi Germany, Puritan Massachusetts.) They have many choices they salivate for some they can talk about others they have to be circumspect.
I can see why they are afraid, why they have created a parallel society of Christian based businesses, schools, universities so that the chain will be unbroken.
Just the fact that people lead happy lives without gods is enough to make the whole house of cards collapse, because they are taught that it isn’t possible. A book about a missionary who lost his faith describes how he realised the tribe didn’t need god, and it was the beginning of the end for his faith.
“Don’t sleep, there are snakes” Daniel L Everett.
Without followers they are just a lone person crying for others to follow the “true way” before “damnation” comes. And they are forgotten. So does the movement. For everyone we know, how many were started like that and were still born or aborted?
They may be “convinced” that the problem is the professors, but my understanding is that the data shows that it’s the encounters and discussions with the students, their peers, which actually have the most influence. The sense of being in a comforting bubble of consensual agreement is gone: nonchristians and nontheists are not only fine people, they’re often not afraid to point out major flaws in Christianity — if you’re donkey enough to bring the topic up on the assumption that you’ve got a better case. Hey, it’s been protected under the label of “faith” for a reason: it’s not reasonable.
That’s why I don’t really have a problem with an apologetics course like this one, one aimed at college freshmen who are going to be expected to encounter some pushback. That’s because it’s likely to end up pushing them in the wrong direction, if they take it seriously.
First thing they’ll notice, their professors aren’t bringing up religion or God. Real universities are not like Christian movies. So they’re going to want to use their killer apologetics on some target — and what’s better than seeking out the loud, obnoxious, outspoken campus student group of atheists? Yeah, that can’t go wrong! Let the discussions commence.
Alternatively, they’ll realize that they really don’t like getting into such debates and new friends shrugging or rolling their eyes over their expressions of piety isn’t worth going full God’s-Not-Dead on anybody.
If college students ‘lose their faith’ when faith is no longer expected then that says a lot about how firm the foundation really is.
That and embarrassment. The further students become educated the less likely they are willing to admit their faith to most others who do not follow that faith.
Professors (and scientists) are not pushing atheism on people. Quite the contrary. The majority are either silent about their atheism or silent about their faith.
I agree.
This whole “listen and take good notes, try to find flaws in your professor’s arguments and challenge him if you find them” is actually excellent advice.
Isn’t that what most professors WANT their students to do?
I’d say: bring it on! 😉
Professor Bunge said something like “if you agree with everything I’ve said you’ve not been paying attention!”
Christianity is all about questioning, from their point of view that which they want to eliminate and bring another thrall into the fold. But turn that same incisive and relentless questioning of them is forbidden.
We math teachers take exception! 😉
Why would you?
Wouldn’t you LOVE to engage in a discussion with that wiseacre student who thinks he found a flaw in the Pythagorean theorem? 😉
Surely you would expect some push back in classes where some new research is expected. (In graduate school?)
Sure, but I teach what is nowadays called “developmental” math. It used to be called “remedial” math, and before that, informally, “bonehead” math.
I usually refer to it as “math for people who weren’t paying attention n high school.”
It definitely did this for me. As I’ve often mentioned here before, I attended an apologetics class when I was in college and the class itself was the coup de grâce for my weakened faith. Up until that point I sort of held out the thought that maybe there was a good argument for my religion that I simply hadn’t heard, that some smart person somewhere could show me. I knew the arguments from my small town preacher were no good, but in my college church there were professors of biology, chemistry, engineering, and so on. Surely *they* have some good reason for believing. Or so I imagined, right until those same professors of biology, chemistry, and engineering started teaching their apologetics class. Not only were their arguments the same bad arguments the preachers gave, they could be seen to be being actively deceptive as well. One told us how Einstein was a believer, which I knew as poppycock, at least in the sense that anyone in the audience would have considered a believer, and knew the learned speaker must have known that as well. Their willingness to be deceptive like this was a revelation to me. The small town preacher might just not have known any better, but these guys… And when the dean of engineering at my large state university told us that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics prohibited evolution, I knew, then and there, that the jig was truly up. They were just saying stuff to appease the crowd. Truth and accuracy were no part of the endeavor. The contrast to how scientists talk about actual science couldn’t be more stark.
For some students the class might have worked. If they didn’t know any science, and weren’t studying any themselves in college, the class gave them something to repeat to themselves whenever they heard something discordant with their faith. Some are just looking for something that is the mental equivalent of “La la la la… I can’t hear you”, and for those apologetics might be just the ticket. I think for lots of other students, though, apologetics can be like faith kryptonite.
Out of curiosity, was your “large state university” Iowa State?
Nope. Texas.
Upon leaving High School, I had a state scholarship that I used for three semesters at the local, Jesuit-run college. Although I had already “lost” any belief in Christianity, I was still a, “seeker” and took every philosophy course they had in that time. One “Brother” teaching an introductory class said, “…and then, there’s solipsism, which is the belief that everything is just a figment of your imagination- of course, NOBODY believes that!” I thought, “If no one believes it, why is he teaching about it?” He also passed on the classic, “urban legend” about people who don’t believe in free will, where the French couple allows their son to drown because it was “meant” to happen (funny how these examplesI got friendly with another, young brother who taught a class based on a completely nonunderstandable book by some dark, Catholic German philosopher- I got in the habit of having talks with him in his office after class (I wonder now if he had a romantic interest in me, they way he acted- I was pretty naive at the time) until one day I mentioned Zen Buddhism. He’d never heard of it.
As a general principle, details of any sort are the enemy of religion. Getting a religious person to explain any aspect of their faith in any detail is corrosive to faith. Apologetics is adding detail and explanation to things that work better left in the general fog of “things somebody somewhere knows”. I was able to hold onto my own faith for a few extra years, at least, based merely on the presence of university science faculty in my church. I thought they must have good reasons to believe, right up until I heard them say those reasons.
Yes; one of the most devastating methods of undermining faiths of all sorts is the Socratic method. Ask questions, and then ask more questions.
Since curiosity, clarity, and consistency are the triple threat of fuzzy, irrational, sloppy spiritual “knowledge” (as credulity, confusion, and compartmentalization are its foundations) then any genuine attempt to figure out what you believe in order to defend it is sooner or later going to run aground.
That’s why I think the most virulent strains of fundamentalism are the ones which eschew apologetics all together. Refuse to deal with doubters OR doubt. There’s no better way of saying “la la la I can’t hear you” than approaching all attempts at rational discussion with “la la la I won’t hear you.”
When I was a kid, way back when, I was told that I had to believe: it was required. As an aspie (even before herr Dr Asperger’s work), I found that I couldn’t “believe” unless I understood what it was that I had to believe.
No one would ever explain to me what it was: indeed, multiple sources differed, each to the others. At 15 yo, I gave up on calling myself an agnostic, and accepted ‘atheist’ as most definitive.
“First thing they’ll notice, their professors aren’t bringing up religion or God. Real universities are not like Christian movies.”
This kind of hyperbole seems likely to be ineffective at best, and could plausibly backfire when such students see first-hand that everything they’ve been told about college/professors was either wrong or a lie.
Reminds me of many school drug education/prevention and sex ed programs, now that I think about it.
HAW! HAW! HAW!*
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*This is what atheists say in Jack Chick comics. They were all over my high school.
Just using the term apologetics should be a clue to those who need to defend faith from reason.
And there is this:
“This Classical Greek term appears in the Koine (i.e. common) Greek of the New Testament. The Apostle Paul employs the term apologia in his trial speech to Festus and Agrippa when he says “I make my defense” (Acts 26:2).”
Yep, you’d think the religious could come up with a term that doesn’t have the connotations “apologetics” does.
I do agree there. “Apologetics” does _sound_ very weak. They really should think of a more positive term, not that I want them to follow my advice of course…
cr
The word (from what I understand) is just the defense remarks at trial. Think Plato’s _Apology_, which is a dramaticization of what Socrates said at his, for example.
sub
“Professor, isn’t putting Jews in ovens wrong regardless of the geographical location and time period of the people doing it? In other words, isn’t there such thing as a universal moral code?” Hmmmm. Isn’t owning people as slaves wrong regardless of the geographical location and the time period of the people doing it? And yet the Bible expressly sanctioned it, and even Popes owned slaves. How was it that this supposedly “universal moral code” had no problem with slavery for the first 17 or 18 centuries after the founding of Christianity, and yet every sane person now believes that slavery is a monstrous evil. This fact underscores the problem that religious folks have with college: students are likely to learn that morality has NEVER been universal, and has evolved and will likely continue to evolve. Maybe someone needs to buy the author of the article a copy of Pinker’s “Angels of our Better Nature.”
Exactly. God ordered genocide, sex slavery, killing of women and children, etc, etc. I wish Christians would get their stories straight. If someone brings up these OT atrocities on a Christian website, most often the answer is “Things were different then.”
“Things were different then.” I’ve also gotten “that was OT”.
My standard reply: “You mean God was different then? Less moral?” Which always seems to end the conversation.
You don’t have to go back that far. The catholic church held slaves in the so called magdalene laundries in Ireland till 1996! The catholic church has not apologised for this yet and I doubt they ever will.
Accurate, no hyperbole. The RCC is disgusting.
Yes, but that’s those dirty papists, who aren’t even Real True Christians.
Frank Turek! That name sounds familiar. He debated Christopher Hitchens twice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7WBEJJlYWU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDCDTaKfzXU
I watched that debate (in the sense that I had to forward through many of Tureks parts when the headdesk frequency approached critical levels). It was glorious how Hitchens slapped him around.
I remember that throughout the debate I kept asking myself: How in the world did Turek ever manage to go through university. Apparently he earned a PhD somehow which typically requires at least some level of critical thinking skills.
It is not that Turek is one of the “sophisticated Theologians” who are talking about concepts so nebulous that nobody (including themselves) understand what they are talking about. How can he not see how ridiculous he looks.
His doctorate is from Southern Evangelical Seminary. I can’t say for sure, but I doubt there is much critical thinking going on there.
It is accredited, amazingly.
The problem isn’t limited to religious qualifications, pathetic though they usually are. There are plenty of other dubious areas where people claim all sorts of unlikely expertise. In the UK we have Ben Goldacre writing a regular column called’Bad Science’, in which he exposes all kinds of suspect practices and charlatans. In one such expose he succeeded in obtaining membership of a nutrition college for his dead cat, and showed that a well known TV nutritionist relied on such qualifications
http://www.badscience.net/2007/02/ms-gillian-mckeith-banned-from-calling-herself-a-doctor/
Excellent blog**, and I admire Ben Goldacre’s persistence in hunting down woo, fraud and BS. Also very readable – ” I mean, I don’t sign my dead cat up to bogus professional organisations for the good of my health, you know.”
cr
** I assume Ben doesn’t share Prof CC’s aversion to the term
Oh, and apropos of comments in a recent thread about what would happen to the Creflo A Dollars after (if) religion is removed – they all turn into Gillian McKeiths, that’s what happens. 🙁
cr
Big fan of Ben Goldacre. His books, though, really made me angry, and it’s great how the AllTrails project is progressing.
As for Ms McKeith, the acronym that always comes to mind when her name is mentioned is TAPL – “That awful poo lady”!
When I was growing up (Nazarene), the big scare was the evil rock music. Our youth group was dragged to several “Shatter the Darkness” presentations that warned against subliminal messages, backward masking of satanic prayers, and possible demonic possession if we listened to anything but Amy Grant. It’s nice to see that they’ve branched out a bit.
To me, the most curious thing about CrossExamined is the explicit political messaging attached to the goddy parts. Jebus is being packaged and sold as a good Republican capitalist, no doubt. So the white protestant parents to whom this toss is marketed are getting a 2-for-1 special on apologetics.
Also raised as a Nazarene. Saved by sci-fi novels (the ideas they contained!) and going to college (after which there were far more interesting things to think about than evangelical BS).
“…and possible demonic possession if we listened to anything but Amy Grant.”
Oh man that takes me back!
You are more tolerant than me I reckon – I am not sure I could be cool in the face of willful ignorance. If benighted students attend university they should be open to the enlightenment, not closed to anything upsetting their own particular blinkered godliness.
“Professor, isn’t putting Jews in ovens wrong regardless of the geographical location and time period of the people doing it? In other words, isn’t there such thing as a universal moral code?”
Then why does the US, the most Christian of the developed democracies, still allow the death penalty, while our more secular/less religious peers have outlawed it as primitive, barbaric, and, yes, against basic, fundamental human rights (another concept the Bible is unaware of)?
Because their morals are defective, weakened by decades of Communist influence?
See, there is a Universal Moral Code, and We know what it is, those spineless pinko fellow-travellers aren’t doing it right.
cr
These folks don’t seem to realize that sometimes faith just implodes from within and collapses due to its own internal structural weaknesses, rather than goes due to being “assaulted”.
Often faith-building programs like this are effectively the equivalent of putting some scotch tape and chewing gum on a house of cards.
Some religions have the advantage of their worldview being more internally cohesive and coherent than others (Catholic Thomist philosophy and Vedanta Hinduism come to mind), but fundamentalism isn’t really one of them.
Why, yes. That’s what good students do. Then they listen to the answers and think about them.
Since a lot of secular humanists have serious issues with things like Marxism and cultural relativism, this part of the “defending of the faith” isn’t necessarily about faith at all. Too many Christians seem to confuse atheism (including gnu atheism) with the kind of pop postmodernism we rational skeptics have been complaining about since the 80’s. It’s as if they have one box labelled “Liberal Ideas” and they shove everyone they don’t agree with into it.
Frankly, overblown versions of cultural relativism in some ways bother me MORE than Christianity. Now watch their little heads asplode.
This is exactly how it is for many. The world is parsed into Good and Evil. If you hold all of our views, you’re part of the Good. If you don’t hold all of our views, you’re working for Evil. Relativism is evil. Evolution is evil. If you hold either of these views you have embraced Evil. What is the point of making distinctions among people in the Evil camp? What good will it do you to reject relativism but embrace evolution? Hell is your destination either way. Either way you are a tool of Satan. In fact, it just shows how wile Satan is that he gets some people to only reject enough of the Truth to damn them, but not so much that they stand out as obvious moral or intellectual freaks.
I think the label Marxist is an indicator of what the real issue is with young people leaving the church. Using that epithet illustrates how out of touch with reality the guy is. So out of touch that the young people are put off. Either embarrassed, confused or scornful and they just don’t relate to the guy.
Oh, great. Now I am going to be thwarted in my attempts to convert Christian students into godless atheists while teaching them about the materialistic Krebs cycle.
Every succesful science lesson is a lesson in materialism – but covert!
‘So you see, only 1 ATP molecule is made per turn of the Krebs cycle, so THERE IS NO GOD!’
How many simultaneous ATP molecules does it take to prove God?
Even neutrinos, dark matter and dark energy though untouchable, are still material. Or are they? We really need to settle on some of the items we use rather freely with them.
We have energy and matter nothing else. Most of the spectrum we are blind to. Maybe out tech can’t yet see it all yet. What is occult today is gnosis tomorrow I always say. Confuses the bejesus out of ’em too.
Talking of confusing the bejesus out if ’em, I always thought Krebs was Spongebob’s boss. 🙂
Energy is not a stuff, as explained first by Maxwell 150 years ago or so.
What you might mean is radiation or fields, which are material in a usefully extended from the sometimes-used sense. What they all have in common is *possess* energy as a property.
We used to sing a song in church with a verse that went:
They still sing it in the churches I used to attend. Even after the discovery of cells life still seemed mysterious. So long as the key component of cells was some mysterious “cytoplasm”, religious people could assure themselves that cytoplasm involved some kind of magic that only God could be involved in. Reducing life, even mundane metabolism, to chemistry really is a radical shift in world view for many people. You might be surprised at the conversions quietly taking place in your class.
And this required, to be finalized, a recognizing of the fact that things could be very small indeed. No ancient civilization had *any* idea about the sizes of cells, never mind their components. As far as I can tell, the Indian atomists, who got the closest, held *maybe* that the least bits of stuff were the size we now know to be about an order of magnitude larger than some bacteria. This allows one to think that little things therefore are moved around by immaterial stuffs or forces, because one cannot see the wee parts.
Brownian motion…
But water molecules, which space probes look for on every planet to see if life is possible, are made of three atoms – the holy trinity. Checkmate, atheist.
Wait a second, there, boss–two of the three atoms are *identical*, which would be a heresy in any church I know of.
There is only one Molecule and He is ATP™
This is base conspiracy theory, cf. Chick’s “The system”. As Sastra notes, pushing that will get them in deeper dodo.
Same with the Godwin argument. (Never mind that “Gott mitt uns” was the support base.)
As usual it is a pleasure to hear apologetics try the impossible, because they are so oblivious to the impression they give!
“Conspiracy Theory” is the wrong way to say it. “Conspiracy Ideas” not Theory unless proven. Why we need to stamp out the common miss use of theory. Confuses things.
Apologetics I thought meant they were apologizing! Silly of me. (Silly use to mean having to do with religion!)
Reblogged this on Nina's Soap Bubble Box and commented:
I used to think that apologetics was what they did to try to bridge to the non-believers, but it’s actually their last line to keep people as believers
While the Jack Chick tract is plainly nutso, this news item seems to have some parallel.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339561/Christian-astronomer-sues-university-said-appointment-huge-public-relations-mistake.html
Yes an inevitable problem rising in a polarizing environment can cause this. A danger to us all if we don’t straighten it out.
“Professor, wouldn’t it be wrong to murder your son no matter who told you to do it?”
The Abrahamic religions, man. Bastions of moral relativity. But they keep thrusting their bad sh*t on us. Project and deflect. Ain’t workin’, votaries. People are onto you in droves.
+10^10^100
This is what happens when a belief is given, rather than being reasoned into. People know what’s true without knowing why, which leaves them susceptible to anyone who can give a quasi-coherent critique.
Yes. And that’s exactly why they lose their faith once they’ve left an environment where it’s constantly reinforced and never examined.
Bingo!
Decades of indoctrination in Christianity from birth to college age
vs
4 weeks of College
Results:
“Dad, I don’t believe in God anymore.”
(*channeling Dawkins*):
Education. It works, bitches.
^^^
Cross Examined . Oh I get it. Very clever title for the course. (not)
I don’t know about where you live, Jerry, but we have seminars on how to combat religiosity, here in Portland.
“FEARLESS FAITH”
COURSE SYLLABUS
1: “Intelligent Design of the Index Fingers and Aural Cavities”
2: “Biomechanics of Finger-to-Ear Linkages”
3: “Vocal Harmonics in the Key of ‘La'”
4: “Translating ‘La-La-La’ to ‘I Can’t Hear You'”
5: “Breathing Techniques For Sustained Vocalizations”
Perfect!
At least 5. would be useful to some music students!
That Jack Chick comic captures the pedagogy of our universities as accurately as the biblical passage claiming “In the beginning … the earth was without form, and void” captures the cosmology of our universe.
WHAT? Are you crazy? GET OUT of OUR university!
This reminds me: Who’s Your Daddy?
http://foo.ca/wp/chick-tract-satire/whos-your-daddy/
“Students will learn how to respond calmly and respectfully when their faith is challenged,”
I think I could almost see that as a plus. So long as ‘calmly and respectfully’ includes not disrupting the class with obnoxious or irrelevant or tendentious questions.
cr
And actually listening to the answers!
Yeah, and the only time in about 10 years of higher education I ever heard a professor discuss the existence of God was in Philosoph 101. It just never came up.
My biggest response to reading your post is “what a waste.” What a waste of those students’ time spent learning this, for two reasons: first they’re spending time learning bad content, and second, the odds of this material ever being relevant to a class discussion is close to zero. You might as well take a jousting class just in case your professor shows up one day with two horses and some spears.
Though I imagine the people who attend this class may cause a fairly large number of professorial facepalms. The facepalm won’t even be about the badness of the argument. It’ll be “John…this is an organic chemistry class. When I asked for questions and comments, I meant questions and comments about the lecture…”
“For example, ‘Professor, isn’t putting Jews in ovens wrong regardless of the geographical location and time period of the people doing it? In other words, isn’t there such thing as a universal moral code?'”
The answer to that, surely, is: ‘Well, isn’t killing the Amalekites, and not just their men-folk but all the Amalekite women and children,too, and their domestic animals – isn’t that wrong regardless of the geographical location and time period of the people doing it and regardless of their having been told to do it by God? Not to mention the slaughter of the Canaanites, male and female, leaving only young females alive to be enslaved. In other words, isn’t there a such a thing as….’
Programs like “Fearless Faith” are great news for atheism. The thing that originally got me into evolution was the Creationist propaganda arguing against it – and the thing that made me finally question the truth of religion was how readily such lies were spread about by my fellow Christians. Let them lie about aggressively atheist professors – when students find out what a heap of crap they have been sold, they’ll start to question the other stuff too. Much better that then getting them to go to special Christian colleges or avoid university.
Many ardcore fundamentalists aren’t just afraid of Christians losing their faith due to what they might learn at secular universities….many fundamentalists are worried about what young Christians will learn at many Christian colleges!
Example:
“The title of this post mentions “Christian Colleges,” but I’m really interested in helping those of you who are going to a specific type of school–those which are Christian in the sense that they market themselves as Christian and have vague ties to various types of Christianity .I’m not so much speaking about the bible colleges a lot of you are attending, or schools with distinctly evangelical or biblical approaches like Liberty or Moody.
Here’s the issue–If you go to a regular old secular institution, you know what to expect… Students in these schools face intellectual challenges to their faith, to be sure, but it’s way more out in the open. But when you head off to a Christian school, you probably assume that the professors are there to strengthen your faith. Seems like a safe bet, right?
We’ve come to find that you just shouldn’t assume this kind of thing about schools like this. Why? Because when you’re sitting there in class, and the teacher begins to make statements about the truth of Christianity (or more commonly, about the Bible specifically), it’s way harder to think through what’s going on when the professor claims to be a Christian. And it is very common for these schools to promote ideas that directly challenge and undermine your ability to trust scripture. So instead of being an open, frontal assault on your faith (like you’d get in a secular environment), you get a sort of sneak attack. After all, aren’t they on our team?”.
http://youngadults.ccphilly.org/going-to-a-christian-college-these-are-for-you/#sthash.V4TnHWQZ.dpuf
I ran into a new dodge from an apologist prof on his blog. The historical truth of the gospel is irrelevant to to the truth of Christianity! Christianity would still be true even if Jesus never existed, was never crucified, was never resurrected!
Kinda takes your breath away.
Amazing! It tells me this person probably had an epiphany that was against the viability of Joshuah/Jesus as real! Someone must be whipping their ass over it. Why else would they in effect throw out the “Gospel Truth”?