The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog

TL;DR John Locke, poster child of the Enlightenment, wrote “The Reasonableness of Christianity” to address two still-relevant burning questions: A) What does it mean to be Christian?, and B) How should we understand the relationship between Christianity and reason? Locke’s approach was not an attempt to prove Christianity, but to set forth a worldview. I break this worldview into 4 components: An inclusive and uniting vision of Christianity Christian faith that is strengthened and confirmed by reason Rationality that is strengthened and directed by Christian convictions and morality A belief that personal happiness and societal prosperity are most likely to be realized through the application of Christianity and rationality The mission of this blog (The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog) is to foster understanding, hope, and harmony in some small way, by promoting and applying this Lockean worldview in a society in which both Christianity and rationality are losing their footho...

This is the full text of an email conversation with Tim Hull, a creator of the "How to Talk to a Mormon" video, containing Category 2 rhetoric against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (ie arguments intended to dissuade Christians who are not members of the Church from engaging with the Church or its members). See here for background. More discussion to come in future blog posts. Update 11/27/21: This is the second of a series of four posts on unhinged Category 2 rhetoric against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The third post in this series discusses the harms of this rhetoric, as experienced by my family. 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.

With religion on the decline in the West, I am sure by now all Christians have grown accustomed to fending off attacks on their faith, while increasing numbers are daily falling prey to the rhetoric and losing their faith. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, like me, are susceptible to the general secular arguments against religion and Christianity as well as more targeted arguments against our peculiar version of Christianity. Directed attacks on the Church of Jesus Christ fall into two broad categories with different target audiences:  Rhetoric directed toward members of The Church of Jesus Christ aiming to dislodge their faith in the Church and its teachings. This type of argument often has as a subject unsettling events from church history or attempts to discredit modern revelations and scriptures. These arguments may come from people outside the church, including from other religions, but the most vehement and persistent voices are often disaffected fo...

[Update added 10-5-21] I’m reading Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous - or rather listening to it on Audible . I mentioned this book as part of The Return of Civilization , as one of a suite of recent works that seem like they “admit the uniqueness and advanced development of Western Civilization … but neglect the central role of Christian principles in its development”.  After listening to most of the book I think my assessment is sort of right, but also sort of unfair. The acronym WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, and also calls out his thesis that people from this type of culture (my culture) are exceptional, or at least different from the rest of the world, both in terms of location (West vs. non-West) and time (Modern-West vs non-Modern-West). The best thing about this book (other than the cool acronym in the title, of course) is the cornucopia of p...

Hello all! Asher here - I want to preface this post with a note that here, as well as in all of my posts, I will be including a TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) summary at the beginning of my ramblings. If you’re like me, some days you’re just not cut out for squinting your eyes at a bunch of philos ophical and theological blabbering, and sometimes the Sparknotes version is all you can handle. That being said, I hope that this series on the problem of evil will be interesting and thought provoking; it’s something that any person of faith has stake in, and should be aware of. TL;DR   - I've found it harder to believe in God since I've considered the problem of evil, and I'm starting a series on posts detailing my journey to work that out. The problem of evil states that an all knowing, all powerful, all loving God cannot exist in a world like ours where evil abounds, or at least it's highly unlikely that God would exist in such a world, let alone create it. Many philosopher...