A long overdue posting of Dr. Peter Payne's response to Ozair on this subject
Dear Ozair,
My name is Dr. Peter Payne. More than three years ago Scott Cherry passed along to me your paper on rape and pedophilia in the Bible. At that time I wrote this letter for you which I asked him to share with you. ...Did he? Either way, he has only now decided to post it here. In two or three parts I will respond to what you have said. What I had to say about point #1 below turned out to be long enough that I decided to send it by itself and send you my responses to the rest of your paper in a couple of subsequent emails. Since your paper focuses on the question of whether the Old Testament condones rape and pedophilia, I won’t respond here to why a good God would at times command the killing of everyone found in a town, and at times command command what initially may seem like genocide. (I could address that topic at another time.) Since early in your paper you raise the question of the character of God in the Old Testament, that is what I will address in this email. In a subsequent piece I will address texts you cite in support of your claim that the OT God condones rape and pedophilia. *All biblical quotations will be from the English Standard Version translation.
A long overdue posting of Claudine's response to Ozair on this subject
Dear Ozair,
My name is Claudine. A long time ago (3½ years!) Scott Cherry shared with me some of his fascinating correspondence with you about a few passages in the Old Testament books of Moses (and the Qur'an) that were stimulating intense discussion. Well, way back then I wrote this letter for you but Scott chose not to post it until now, especially focused on Deuteronomy 22:28-29.[1]
I understand your difficulty with those bible passages because like many, I share in some of your thoughts. I thought that you may like to hear from a Christian woman on the issue of what seemed to you as rape and pedophilia in the Old Testament.
Nothing can be understood if we don’t understand the beginning: In the beginning...God’s creation was perfect, but a big problem happened: Man disobeyed God. Man decided to listen and trust another voice than that of his creator even though God had warned him it would lead to death. Every other problem humanity has ever experienced stems from that.
By Roland Clarke
Most politicians in North America including educators, judiciary, media, as well as many businesses have bowed to pressure tactics from the LGBTQ lobby as noted in my previous article, "What does the rainbow signify?" Such capitulation is indicated by public displays of Pride logos and flags. More recently, however, there has been a growing push-back especially from Muslims and conservative Christians objecting to pro-LGBTQ inclusive sex education in schools which basically indoctrinates children, covertly or overtly. Shannon Douglas writes from a secular perspective for Woke Watch Canada on the Canadian Gender Wars. He reports on “the many…parent protests across the country...Thousands and thousands of them awakened to woke, keeping kids home from Pride Events.” (Click on the title bar to open the full article.)
A Solution to the So-Called Euthyphro Dilemma
by John Shaheen—
*John wrote this as a pre-med senior at UM-Dearborn (Biology) who graduates this weekend. He has also been the student president of Ratio Christi all four years, as well as a co-founder and Vice President of Faith & Reason in his final year.
Despite having been written over two millennia ago, the Euthyphro Dilemma remains one of the most famous and persistent problems in philosophy of religion. It is still being discussed in published literature today and taught in nearly every intro philosophy course. In its original form, Plato writes of a dialogue between Socrates and Euthyphro (Plato et al., 2017). Socrates asks Euthyphro whether moral goodness (piety) was defined by the gods choosing it, or were the gods just cognizant of a standard that existed outside themselves? This question has been reposed over the centuries to apply to a more orthodox, monotheistic conception of God. While many thinkers have merely accepted and defended one of the horns of the dilemma, others have contested that it is a false dilemma and proposed other options. William Alston, Paul Copan, and William Lane Craig are a few names that have defended the coherence of a third option (Alston, 2001, Copan & Meister 2008, Craig & Moreland, 2012.) Furthermore, they defend that an argument for God’s existence can be crafted from the existence of objective moral values and duties. This argument require that their theistic explanation is the best account of morality that is currently available. The Euthyphro Dilemma, if successful, undermines this project. Here I will argue that the Euthyphro dilemma is unsuccessful in this regard, hence the moral argument cannot be criticized from this direction.
Why Darwinism Does Not Compromise Swinburne's Design Argument
*John is a pre-med senior at UM-Dearborn (Biology). He has also been the student President of Ratio Christi all four years, as well as a co-founder and Vice President of Faith & Reason in his final year.
In discussing design arguments, Richard Swinburne differentiates between two different variants in this family of arguments. The first variant he describes as arguments from spatial copresence (Swinburne, 1968). These arguments intend to infer the existence of a deity from some observed physical arrangement in the world (that can be recognized at one moment in time) that would be improbable to have occurred naturally. Darwinian evolution has become a formidable barrier to this form of argumentation, so Swinburne presents an alternate form that avoids this objection altogether. I will argue that his route of argumentation is the best way to avoid the implications of Darwinian evolution.