RE: Is God a logical contradiction?
August 4, 2019 at 3:10 am
(This post was last modified: August 4, 2019 at 3:15 am by Fake Messiah.)
(August 4, 2019 at 2:01 am)Belaqua Wrote: He makes no ad hominem attacks. Ad hominem is a logical fallacy when you declare that a person's argument must be incorrect because of something about the person himself.
And he does makes attacks on Dawkin's, Hitchens, and some other personas instead of what they said/ wrote.
(August 4, 2019 at 2:01 am)Belaqua Wrote: For example, here is some of what he wrote about Hitchens' book:
And, of course, you had to find something that's not in the David Bentley Hart's book
Quote:He conflates the events of the first and fourth crusades (but
what’s a century here or there?).
So did he put one Christian massacre in the first crusade when it happened in fourth?
Quote:He actually believes that there were theological
scholastic disputes regarding the number of angels that can dance on the head of
the pin.
[quote]
WOW!! He really got him! So Aquinas in “Treatise on the Angels” makes theological to existence of angels, number, nature, how they move, what they know, and what they want but not how many can dance on top of the pin - so far off: I mean that's desperate.
[quote]
He repeats as fact the long discredited myth that Christians destroyed the
works of Aristotle, or of Lucretius, or systematically burned the books of pagan
antiquity (the very opposite of what did in fact happen)
lol "very opposite". Let's see what Hitch says in the book
Hitchens Wrote:To come last to Baghdad. This is one of the greatest centers of learning and culture in history. It was here that some of the lost works of Aristotle and other Greeks (“lost” because the Christian authorities had burned some, suppressed others, and closed the schools of philosophy, on the grounds that there could have been no useful reflections on morality before the preaching of Jesus) were preserved, retranslated, and transmitted via Andalusia back to the ignorant “Christian” West.
This is true. When Christians discovered Aristotle's works they were not written in Greek and stored in clay jars, but written in Arabic and housed in the libraries of the great universities at Baghdad, Cairo, Toledo, and Cordoba. And why do you think it was like that? Because Christians were preserving it? Not just that but Arabs and Jews introduced to Europe Euclid's mathematics, Ptolemy's astronomy and optics, Archimedes' engineering principles, the medical science of Hippocrates and Galen, and other classical treasures.
Quote:He speaks of the traditional
hostility of “religion” (whatever that may be) to medicine
If religion is not hostile then why are Christians forbidding stem cell research? But again Bentley doesn't really say what Hitchens says about religion and medicine. It's not like he took Hitchen's exact words from his book and showed it was not true, but rather oversimplifies it in a crude way.
Quote:He
asserts that Myles Coverdale and John Wycliffe were burned alive at the stake, though both men died of natural causes.
Yeah they were "only" accused as heretics and left to die in shame and loneliness. He did make a mistake.
Quote:He knows that the last twelve verses of
Mark 16 are a late addition to the text, but imagines this means that the entire
account of the resurrection was as well.
Yeah how dare he dismiss the whole books on blatant lies.
And so on.
EDIT I Don't know what is wrong with QUOTE tags. They keep appearing at the end and mess everything up
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"