The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog

I should really call this the "silver lining" of hypocrisy, rather than a defense of hypocrisy itself. But it is true that I am mildly encouraged by the fact that we live in a society that includes outrageous hypocrites. Let my explain by illustrating the hypothetical alternatives. As I see it, there are two.  The first hypothetical hypocrisy-free society is a celestial world in which everyone lives transparently virtuous lives, with Truth understood and every action consistent with that Truth. I hope that you and I will find ourselves in such a society after the Resurrection, thanks to the grace of Christ. But given the nature of mortality I would suggest that my second hypothetical is more plausible. That second alternative to hypocrisy is world of complete relativity. In that world, morality is an aesthetic preference that varies from person to person based on nothing more than internal tastes and desires.  From this perspective, I prefer to see a state of affairs where hy...

It can be difficult for people with different religious beliefs to have rational discussions about their faith. For one, it is natural and human to get emotional when deeply-held beliefs are challenged. Additionally, we may feel that holding true beliefs is a prerequisite for salvation. When the stakes of our rhetoric seem this high, it may be tempting to take shortcuts in our efforts at persuasion. But if we argue from false premises we are not following the example of Christ, and if we argue from an incomplete understanding our efforts will likely backfire.  Previously , I wrote about a very bad example of faith-related disagreement in which an Evangelical pastor grossly mischaracterized the beliefs of my church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter "the Church"), in a video titled “How to Talk to a Mormon.” Today I want to highlight a very good example of inter-faith dialogue. Well, actually both of these cases are Evangelicals writing about the Chu...

A meeting of the Royal Society in London This discussion was originally included as part of  Physicalism and Transcendence , but it made more sense to pull it out as a separate post. Physicalism, similar to materialism, is the belief that the physical world is all there is. As in, there can be no transcendent religious experience, no eternal soul, no God, no afterlife. Turning a blind eye to the fact that half of all Americans have had a religious or mystical experience, academia has adopted physicalism as the dominant paradigm for at least 100 years or so. That attitude has trickled down through the university and education systems into the rest of society, where faith has been in steep decline in recent generations. The rise of physicalism among scholars English historian Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) had an interesting hypothesis for how physicalism rose to prominence among scientists and scholars. He suggests in  Christianity and History  (1949) 1 , that it was so...