Social justice book reviews
For the past couple months, I have been writing a series of posts on Lutheran Creation doctrine; the LCMS doesn’t have an official stance on creationism (or so they say), so I’ve been following along with a series of blog posts on the Concordia Theology blog, and today, I’m looking at their post on young earth creationism.
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This week I am continuing in my study of the creation doctrine of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. I introduced this new series two weeks ago; I’m following along a series of blog posts on the Concordia Theology blog studying old earth creationism, evolutionary creationism, and everyone’s favorite, young earth creationism. Which one will the Lutherans choose? Or will they make up a new narrative? Stay tuned to find out!
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Many people think that marriage is a religious institution, and with this ideology, they believe it is right to bring their religious beliefs into the matter. This could be in the form of the belief in no premarital sex, cohabitation, or even kissing, or a condemnation of any type of homosexual marriage or romance in the first place. Usually we think of people with these beliefs as advocates for “traditional” marriage, but as it turns out, marriage itself isn’t quite traditional in any way.
As I write this, I’m getting married in exactly two weeks, so weddings and marriage are among the only things I’ve been thinking about! Read more
As you may know, a while ago my pastor-in-law informed me and my fiance that he had found this blog. The following conversation was interesting, of course, but it probably went about as well as it could have. I took this opportunity of openly talking about our beliefs to ask him a few questions, as well. I’d always been under the impression that the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod strictly taught young-earth creationism stemming from a literal interpretation of Genesis. This had actually been one of my biggest reasons for deciding I couldn’t accept its teachings or religion at all.
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Over the years, I have received a lot of emails and messages from other closeted atheists asking for advice. Most of these messages have been from atheists in high school, wondering what to do in regards to having this secret among Christian friends, parents, and church members. I decided that compiling my advice together could hopefully prove helpful for at least one of my younger readers.
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A couple of weeks ago, my fiance and I spent a day driving around to different bookstores. When I explore bookstores, I usually spend most of my time divided between the science section (specifically biology and evolution) and the religion section (there are sometimes atheism-related books on a shelf labeled “comparative religion”). As one might guess, I found James S. Spiegel’s little book, The Making of an Atheist, among the other atheist books. I picked it up thinking it might be Spiegel’s deconversion story only to see the other half of the title, How Immorality Leads to Unbelief. I was immediately intrigued. It’s common to hear people say, “you’re only an atheist because you want to sin!” but this was the first time I’d seen someone write a 130-page book on the idea.
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The first time I can recall ever hearing the name Antony Flew was in my college apologetics class. My crazy teacher, always trying to prove a point, had said something along the lines of “even this famous atheist, Antony Flew, changed his mind and now believes in God! That proves that God exists!” My inward reaction to this was twofold: I thought, “Well, then, he must not have been a very convinced atheist” and “That invalidates any atheistic arguments that this person must have had, because in the end he himself wasn’t even convinced by them.”
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David Hogsette’s E-mails to a Young Seeker is one of the most… fascinating books I’ve ever read. I first discovered this quirky apologetics book when I had to edit it as an assignment in a class at Grove City College—and not even a religion class, but an English class. Being the passive aggressive individual that I am, I decided that I had too many edits to be contained in one assignment, and I wanted my critique of the garbage presented to me at that school to be public. Read more
Possibly the most common argument for the existence of God is that it is untenable to maintain that the universe came from nothing. This can come in the form of the Kalam argument, the argument from fine-tuning, and even in this popular but ignorant meme: Read more
Why Evolution is True absolutely blew me away. Barely at all did I have to linger on a sentence or paragraph, waiting for its full complexity was understood. Jerry Coyne laid out the evidence for evolution in an impressively comprehensible way.
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