Ben Joiner's Blog

I watched bits of the two part finale of the Harry Potter movies during a recent memorial day marathon.  I had previously only seen two of the movies until recently watching one other.  Some things bugged me. The main thing is, why are the wizards racists against the humans?  The humans are by far the superior culture.  It's not even close.  It's a joke.  The wizards have slavery.  SLAVERY in 2010?  As best I could tell, they don't have democracy.  At least they have banking, but it isn't investment banking.  They literally haven't developed capitalism.  They don't make investment plans for greater productivity.  They just reuse the same tired magical spells from a billion years ago.  That magic is nothing but a weakness.  It's holding them back and they are stuck in the past.  All their answers are ancient, just like the Chinese in the Middle Ages. What do they even learn at Wizard school?  Do they even...

I wonder how often this happens.  A church service is held that is neither educational nor an exhortation to goodness.  Rather, the service is put on by certain professionals going through the motions to earn a living.  Humans are fantastically inflexible in their religious tastes.  Most people connect religious belief to deeply held social relationships.  Furthermore, modern religions (after 500BC) deal mostly with the deeper existential questions.  Where did it all come from?  What is the purpose of it all?  Given this, how then should we live?  And finally, where will it all end up?  These are the big questions and people usually don't change them.  Religious demand is incredibly unmoving. Therefore you can do exactly what I am wondering about.  You can do a service that is neither educational nor an exhortation to good deeds, and people will still come.  You will still get paid.  Therefore, money is made by co...

Predestination and Free Will: taking the Bible literally When it comes to the classic question of predestination and free will, the Bible presents us with a strange situation. It teaches us a set of truths that don’t seem capable of all being true at the same time. In fact, the Bible does this with other questions. So what are the Biblical truths I am speaking of? Truth 1: God wants everyone to be saved. Truth 2: God chooses people to be saved. Truth 3: Only some people are saved. Each of these are truths taught by the Bible. But it doesn’t seem that each of them can be at the same time. What people do to resolve this is pretend that the Bible doesn’t actually teach one of them. They simply take the passages that teach the one they want to reject and pull out every trick in the book. This way they can make the passage say something other than what it clearly says. So let’s take a look at how this basic idea ...

Christians and the Right have it wrong on abortion.  They are not the only ones  who have it wrong.  But they do have it wrong.  Let me be clear.  I am a Christian too.  I think abortion is wrong.  I support banning it.  Let's get to the specifics. The conservative right tries to argue against abortion as though this is not a religious issue.  This is exactly where the problem lies.  This is absolutely a religious issue.  100%.  End of story.  Get over it. A cow that is slaughtered for hamburgers or a sheep for mutton has a larger and more developed brain than a baby in the early stages in the womb.  You cannot scientifically claim that these animals which are murdered by the thousands daily have less of a thought life than a fetus.  Speaking for myself, and probably for pretty much everyone else, there is nothing evil about killing cows for food.  I am literally eating a hamburger as I am writing this...

Social science shows that most people convert their religious views when the social capital (important valued relationships) within a group outweigh those outside of the group.  So if your friend from high school is suddenly in some wacky church with weird beliefs, then he or she probably made a new group of friends or started seriously dating someone.  Or if your youth group friend goes off to the military, he or she may come back as an atheist.  Research shows that it's the social life that caused the change. Even when people do convert, they convert in such a way as to maintain as much of the old religion/beliefs as possible.  Baptists will become Pentecostal or Seventh Day Adventist, but not Hindu or Muslim.  This only makes sense because they are still valuing what it previously meant to them.  They just want to make room for the new thing too. This is huge when you come to think about it.  Cult groups like Jehovah's Witnesses have a lot of ru...

An older question that is always worth returning to is God's omnipotence and the paradoxes this creates.  Can God do logically absurd things like create a square circle?  But doesn't being a circle mean that it isn't a square? This is a theology debate from the 1200's. William of Occam and the Antinominalists said yes, God can do the logically absurd. Thomas Aquinas and the Nominalists said no. The issue is whether God's will takes precedence or does God's intellect take precedence?  Can God will things only in accordance with God's intellect?  Or does God's intellect conform to whatever God happens to will? Can God create a rock too big for Him to lift?Can God do logically absurd things like create a square circle?  But doesn't being a circle mean that it isn't a square? This classic theological debate is sometimes hijacked by atheists to argue that God cannot exist.  They say things like this to theists.  In my personal...

Can we know anything for sure? Let's talk about the fundamentals of epistemology. Here's the Stanford Encyclopedia definition. “Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. “ But is it even possible? Can we ever know anything? If so, what can we know? Let's examine this question first by defining some additional terms. As we define terms, we will begin to understand the subject. Plausible A belief is plausible if it is consistent with known facts. For example, blaming society's problems on the rich and powerful is more plausible than blaming society's problems on mole men from the center of the earth. We may love that episode of superman. But the oppression by the rich and powerful is plausible because it is known to have happened before in history and the other is not. Probable This is a very common concept, and I only bring it up to make the distinction from plausibility. Whi...