The Divine Conspiracy Blog

ABC Religion is blogging the 2010 Global Atheist Convention.

Check out this excerpt of The Rage Against God by Peter Hitchens.

Peter Hitchens lost faith as a teenager. But eventually finding atheism barren, he came by a logical process to his current affiliation to an unmodernised belief in Christianity.

Hitchens describes his return from the far political left. Familiar with British left-wing politics, it was travelling in the Communist bloc that first undermined and replaced his leftism, a process virtually completed when he became a newspaper’s resident Moscow correspondent in 1990, just before the collapse of the Communist Party. He became convinced of certain propositions. That modern western social democratic politics is a form of false religion in which people try to substitute a social conscience for an individual one. That utopianism is actively dangerous. That liberty and law are attainable human objectives which are also the good by-products of Christian faith. Faith is the best antidote to utopianism, dismissing the dangerous idea of earthly perfection, discouraging people from acting as if they were God, encouraging people to act in the belief that there is a God and an ordered, purposeful universe, governed by an unalterable law.

An atheist attends his grandmother’s funeral.

Reason on The ObamaCare Quagmire.

Even if Democrats extract the votes to put ObamaCare over the top, it will at best be a Pyrrhic victory for them. Regardless of the outcome, this monstrosity might cost the Democrats the Congress this November, ruin the party for a long time, and prematurely render Barack Obama a lame duck president for the rest of his term.

So why didn’t the Democrats pull back when they still had the chance? The reason is that both the Democratic Party and President Obama have mutually reinforcing blind spots that have rendered them incapable of seeing what’s crystal clear to every other sentient being in the country: This was the wrong bill at the wrong time.

Read the rest here.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer: Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship.

The rise of modern science and the proclaimed ‘death’ of God in the nineteenth century led to a radical questioning of divine action and authorship – Bultmann’s celebrated ‘demythologizing’. Remythologizing Theology moves in another direction that begins by taking seriously the biblical accounts of God’s speaking. It establishes divine communicative action as the formal and material principle of theology, and suggests that interpersonal dialogue, rather than impersonal causality, is the keystone of God’s relationship with the world. This original contribution to the theology of divine action and authorship develops a new vision of Christian theism. It also revisits several long-standing controversies such as the relations of God’s sovereignty to human freedom, time to eternity, and suffering to love. Groundbreaking and thought-provoking, it brings theology into fruitful dialogue with philosophy, literary theory, and biblical studies.

You can read an excerpt here.

You can read an interview with the author here.

This week’s CT cover story, The Mind Under Grace, by Darren C. Marks.

Was the recent runaway Prius a hoax?

Pledge of Allegiance in schools ruled constitutional.

Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with its reference to God in public schools doesn’t violate the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state, a federal appeals court ruled.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco disagreed with Michael Newdow, an atheist who sued a school district near Sacramento, California, challenging the use of the phrase “under God” in the pledge.

“We hold that the Pledge of Allegiance does not violate the establishment clause because Congress’ ostensible and predominant purpose was to inspire patriotism,” the court panel said in yesterday’s 2-1 decision. “For this reason, the phrase ‘one nation under God’ does not turn this patriotic exercise into a religious activity.”

The court reversed an injunction that had prohibited recitation of the pledge at the district’s schools.

You can read the 193-page decision here. (pdf)

When the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals first ruled the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional (2002), Jeffery Jay Lowder (Internet Infidels) supported the Court’s verdict, and I responded to the Lowder article here.

Here’s the second of a two part article by Edward Feser on scientism

As I argued in part I, scientism—the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—is either self-refuting or trivial. Moreover, consistently pursued, it leads to the “eliminative materialist” position that the human mind itself is a fiction—that there are no such things as thinking, perceiving, willing, desiring, and so forth. This position is not only incoherent, but undermines the very possibility of science itself—the very thing scientism claims to champion.

DER SPIEGEL on the euro crisis.

The euro is under attack like never before, as the promises on which it was based turn out to be lies. Hedge funds are speculating against Greek debt, while euro-zone politicians work behind the scenes to cobble together rescue packages. But fundamental flaws in the monetary union need to be fixed if Europe’s common currency is to survive.

More.