[Originally this article and the followup article that "graded" this test were published in my column when I wrote as the Atlanta Creationism Examiner.] We all have our weaknesses. I'm a sucker for a good challenge. And I am especially susceptible to books with eye-grabbing, thought provoking titles such as The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You To Read. Naturally, I grabbed a copy from the shelf of the Roswell Public Library and added to my stack of books to check out and read. The End of Faith by Sam Harris was my other nonfiction selection. My reading interests do not often match that of the typical Christian. The subtitle promised to be “An Enlightening Anthology by World-Renowned Theologians, Historians & Researchers that Exposes and Challenges Misrepresentations and Age-Old Beliefs!” My beliefs are not “age-old” so I didn't feel particularly threatened, and dead center in the book, on page 223, I discovered Dan Barker’s essay No Stone Unturned, which proposed an intriguing challenge. Mr. Barker is a former minister, now co-director of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. His biography claims Mr. Barker's IQ is above the 99th percentile, which sounds...smart. Perhaps I'll be biting off more than I can chew. And perhaps not. Ominously, his essay is followed by this warning: This article was copied and distributed around the country in many different forms. A lot of readers sent it to their area ministers and priests. Only two attempts at accepting the challenge were made and neither one of them kept to the terms, preferring to pick and choose … [Read more...]
Atheists and miracles
Miracles are events that cannot be explained by natural or scientific laws -- suggesting that these inexplicable events may only happen because of divine intervention by a supernatural deity. Therefore, it never occurred to me that an atheist might believe in miracles. So when I watched an interview with Oprah Winfrey in which prominent atheist Dan Barker claimed that he had prayed in the name of Jesus Christ and as a result, a man was instantly healed of laryngitis, it frankly caught me by surprise. Even more interesting was my discovery that former pastor Jerry DeWitt's autobiography Hope After Faith contained multiple claims of divine intervention that ranged from the mundane ("magnetically" led to find an allegedly special triangle-shaped rock) to the truly spectacular (the spontaneous healing of a brain aneurysm allegedly caused by his prayers for a miracle in the name of the Christ.) Both Dan and Jerry asserted that remarkable phenomena occurred as a result of their fervent prayers -- in fact, they seemed to be bragging about it. Otherwise, why would they even mention that these alleged miracles took place, if these men didn't want us to believe something truly inexplicable had occurred because of something they had done? Yet when pressed to provide a rational explanation for such an incredible coincidence, if it was not an act of God, atheists can't explain what happened. Atheist scientist Jacalyn Duffin's involvement in the verification of an alleged miracle healing was just as impressive as Jerry DeWitt's aneurysm story because of the medical … [Read more...]
Benefit of the doubt
I realize that atheists aren't that much different than me...as documented in my very first book, Divine Evolution, I described how I very nearly became an atheist myself. In a chapter titled "Personal Experience", I talked about the time when I questioned whether the biblical Jesus was any more real than Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Therefore, I can understand how many people become atheists -- especially after struggling with serious issues such as the problem of suffering and death. As my friend Frank Boccia wrote in his essay on rationalism in regard to his experiences during the Vietnam War, sometimes good people were killed and bad people survived. Hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis also claim hundreds or even thousands of innocent lives per year. Bad things happen to everybody, sooner or later. The harder truth to accept is that everyone's days are numbered. We might see the sun rise in the morning, but we also might not. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. We're all going to die, eventually. And I'm obviously not just saying this in an effort to cheer you up... Probably the biggest difference between the average atheist and me (aside from belief in God, of course) is that I will freely admit that I believe supernatural miracles have actually occurred, even though it logically seems to be a point beyond dispute. For example, the creation of this universe from nothing -- meaning the Big Bang anomaly -- was a supernatural miracle. So was the animation of lifeless matter. Yet some people infatuated with science think there are "natural" … [Read more...]
Dan Barker’s miracle
Dan Barker is one of the world's most famous atheists, but he hasn't always been so well known. In fact, for over seventeen years he toiled in relative anonymity as a Christian evangelist, receiving virtually no fame or fortune in compensation for his efforts. Now today Dan runs the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), one of the most zealous and successful special interest groups dedicated to opposing religion in the United States. He now has millions of dollars at his disposal -- the FFRF currently boasts of holding $11.5 million dollars in assets on their balance sheet. Obviously, atheism pays a lot better than honest evangelism. Dishonest evangelism is something else entirely -- those "prosperity pimps" really know how to rake in the dough, but that's another story. At any rate, shortly after declaring himself an atheist, Dan was invited as a guest on Oprah Winfrey's television show AM Chicago to speak about what led from preaching to atheism. On the show Dan met future wife (and co-founding partner of the FFRF) Annie Laurie Gaylor, and soon they started on their journey down the road leading to fame and fortune. I've been familiar with the FFRF and Mr. Barker for quite a while now -- once upon a time, he was even a "virtual" friend of mine on Facebook. But I got dumped once Dan figured out that I wasn't an atheist. Only a few years ago, I took and then self-graded Dan's open Bible test -- a clever ploy of his obviously designed to create doubt and confusion in the minds of Christians. The "test" wants the Christian to focus on the relatively minor … [Read more...]
