The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog

My blogging efforts have given me an excuse to read more broadly and expand my understanding of the world. This has been very enriching for me personally, and I hope others can enjoy the content too. But with respect to the public-facing aspect of blogging, I feel inadequate in my understanding since I only began this part of my intellectual journey a few years ago and only in my spare time (which is not much). And I feel even more inadequate in my capacity to organize my thoughts into words in a way that will be meaningful to anyone but myself.  I am not a connoisseur of poetry, but I happened across a stanza from TS Elliott’s Four Quartets that almost perfectly describes my feelings about writing and even my motivation, and offers consolation in my inadequacies compared to much greater intellects who have written on the same topics so much more eloquently in the past. So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—  Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entr...

This is a review of the 2020 book History: Forgotten and Remembered by Andrew Zwerneman. In my process of trying to understand what is going on in the world I've written a time or two on the postmodernist / Critical Theory re-framing the study of history to open the door for an anti-Christian and anti-Western worldview. History: Forgotten and Remembered is the positive antidote to the negative I have hitherto dwelt on. Though Zwerneman clearly recognizes the problems - referring to history as "increasingly under siege," and recognizing "this assault" as "a symptom of the declining study of the humanities," the book stays optimistic and provides teachers (and, I'll add, learners like myself) a positive framework of how history should be taught and experienced, and a reminder that the postmodern way is not the only way.  Note: "Postmodern" and "Critical Theory" are my words; I don't think Zwerneman ever references either. ...

As I mentioned before , my interest in history and sociology was piqued around 2013 when I first read a couple now obscure books by Carroll Quigley from the 1960s. It was astonishing to me how different the tone was from anything that could have been published by a respected academic in 2013. (Partly, that he appreciated the societal importance of religious beliefs, appreciated The West, and wasn't afraid to talk about the positive influence of both.) I feel the same when I read, for example, John Locke, or Arnold Toynbee, or Eric Voegelin (who I only recently heard of and just started reading) - a glowing feeling like the Renaissance scholars must have felt as they unearthed the long-lost wisdom of the ancients. Only this time, oddly, it is wisdom possessed by scholars still alive in the 1970s and 1980s. It is wisdom long-lost only because this wisdom became unfashionable. A generation of academics deliberately buried this knowledge (what I called the History Coup ) and placed a c...

TL;DR: Synopsis and takeaways from an email conversation with the Christian apologists who created a YouTube video spreading salacious and disturbing misinformation about my religious beliefs. This is my 4th and final post on what I have called "unhinged Category 2 rhetoric" against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This rhetoric consists of absurd and salacious false ("unhinged") claims about The Church and its members intended for a mainstream Christian audience (See Part 1 ). The goal seems to be to inculcate in mainstream Christians an instinctual aversion to The Church, in order to counter the missionary efforts of The Church which are seen as a problem for mainstream Christianity. Unfortunately, these attacks lead not only to an instinctual aversion to the The Church, but also to its human members. The result can be (and has been for my family) deeply un-Christian behavior toward us (see Part 3 for the story) from mainstream Christians steeped ...

  TL;DR - Rather than answering the question “Why did God create Evil?”, Latter Day Saints need to answer the question “Does God have power to vanquish Evil?”. Scholar James McLachlan argues that the solution for the Latter Day Saint is that Evil, and all that associate with it, will shrivel away and dissipate in face of the loving goodness of the Kingdom of God which will eventually fill the earth. McLachlan places emphasis on the importance of community within LDS theology, and how obedience to eternal principles will lead people to join together. This raises a concern to me that too much emphasis is placed on human agency and individual power, which diminishes God’s role in the world which He has created. "St. Michael Vanquishing Satan" by Raphael Why am I starting this off with an epic picture of St. Michel spearing Satan? You'll have to wait and see! I want to base this post off of some comments made in response to my last post. Thank you to Stephen Lyndsay for these...

TL;DR - Latter Day Saints need to answer different questions posed by the Problem of Evil due to their belief about divine omnipotence and creation.  Hi all - just a few thoughts I’ve been having during a busy term of school! I recently made the decision to pursue studying a Latter Day Saint Theodicy as my Religious Studies capstone at Lawrence, and I received a grant to do some studies out at the Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship in Utah at the close of this term. In preparation, I’ve been considering how Latter Day Saints think about the problem of evil differently, and in discussing this with my capstone advisor, the issue of omnipotence seems to come to the forefront; specifically, the nature of omnipotence as we attribute it to our God.  Omnipotence is a complicated issue for a thousand reasons. Could God create a rock so large that he couldn’t move? Can God create nonsense objects, such as a circular cube? Are there states of affairs that an omnipotent being can...

This the third post in a series about what I am calling Category 2 rhetoric against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - rhetoric directed toward Christians who are not members of the The Church of Jesus Christ, to discourage them from wanting to learn more about The Church. These posts were inspired by a video I came across called "How to Talk to a Mormon," introduced in the first post . The second post was the full text of an email conversation with Tim Hull, a creator of the video. Update 11/27/21: The fourth post describes the reaction of the creators of the "How to Talk to a Mormon" video to my concerns about some of the claims in the video. Category 1 rhetoric is attacks directed toward members of The Church in an attempt to shake their faith. Category 2 rhetoric is an example of what is called  poisoning the well , prophylactically discrediting and ridiculing The Church and its members in the eyes of other Christians. Poisoning the well is some...