Better late than never! Here is a collection of ODT’s best posts from the last year:
• Sye Ten Bruggencate versus a ham sandwich (Dec. 23)— I have to say, after hearing Sye Ten Bruggencate in several “debates” and learning more about this bizarre branch of Christian apologetics called presuppositionalism, I have to say he and his ilk make St. Augustine look like Friedrich Nietzsche. Case in point …
• John 3:16 revisited (Dec. 22) — How much did God really love the world? A quick revisiting of the story will show that either a) not all that much and quite possibly the converse of that or b) he had good intentions that somehow went awry as soon as the serpent showed up in the garden, an option that itself belies the very nature of an all-knowing, all-powerful God. …
• Anita Sarkeesian and violence against women in video games (Nov. 14) — More than a year has passed since I have commented at any length on feminism and the issue of gender equality because frankly, the blog/YouTube wars and constant bickering between feminists, the men’s rights crowd and those who are somewhere in between made my head hurt. …
• Affleck, Harris and the ‘liberal’ response to Islam (Oct. 10) — I’ve always thought of Affleck as a sharp and thoughtful guy, but based on this he seems to me to represent the kind of weak-kneed, truly bleeding heart liberal of GOP folk lore who has little understanding of the real world and just wants everyone to play nice and not criticize anything or anyone lest we be called racists or bigots. …
• Outfoxed again and again (Aug. 27) — I wouldn’t care whatsoever if FOX News just came out and said to their audience that they were a biased news organization with a clear agenda of castigating President Barack Obama, the Democratic Party and all progressives at every opportunity. At least that would be honest. …
• Debunking theistic evolution (Aug. 18) — A common misconception floating about among Christians is that scientists, freethinkers and others “believe” in evolution the same way they believe in God or divine providence, and sometimes we slip into the misleading language in this way to describe our perception that evolution is a real process. Of course, this misunderstanding is essentially based on skewed semantics, as the word, “believe,” can be used to mean both something that a person takes on faith and a disputed piece of information that a person chooses to accept against the alternatives. …
• On Sam Harris’ controversial essay on Israel (Aug. 5) — For all the intense criticism that has been hurled against neuroscientist Sam Harris for his recent essay, “Why Don’t I Criticize Israel?,” I think a lot of his naysayers, including Andrew Sullivan, P.Z. Myers, A Million Gods blog and others, missed the larger point. …
• Who deserves to sit at the ‘adult table?’ (June 18) — I really wasn’t going to comment on the recent disagreement that seems to have erupted among folks in the online atheist community. …
• Apologetic logic (April 15) — I’m glad this guy readily admits that believers’ “proof” in the afterlife amounts to nothing more than “clues” and “circumstantial evidence” because he sure did whiff on the rest of his argument, issuing one fallacy after another …
• The Abrahamic dilemma (March 6) — Twitter was all a-bluster this week with a hoax — what a surprise? — about Ray Comfort and the story of Abraham sacrificing his son for God. A person named Martin Roberts supposedly asked Comfort whether he would be willing, like Abraham in the Bible, to kill his son to show his devotion. …
• The failed Tea Party experiment (Feb. 12) — I’ve been writing about the Tea Party’s lunacies on here since the spring of 2009 (Here is my first substantive post about it). As I’ve tracked the trajectory of this experiment in political unrest, I think it’s safe to say the party is all but toast at this point, and here’s why. …
• God, capriciousness and the 1 percent (Jan. 5) — The writer over at Skepticism First has proposed an interesting argument against the existence of God by supposing that we imagine a world in which Hurricane Katrina in all its fury actually killed 1 percent fewer people. …