Parchment & Pen Blog

We’re familiar with relativism’s slogan, “That’s true for you but not for me.” Well, in the worldview neighborhood, emotivism is just around the corner.  This philosophy of life is centered on feelings or emotions, entirely or partially eclipsing truth from consideration.  In ethics, emotivism stresses that statements like “Murder is wrong” don’t express moral truths; [...]

You may not remember the Phil Donahue Show. I myself didn’t really pay attention to it. Besides having other things to do, I found Donahue’s political correctness too irritating when I did stumble across it. Last year, I saw an intriguing video clip of the show.  Donahue was hosting the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, [...]

In a First Things editorial entitled “What Should We Do About the Poor?”[1], the editors discuss alternatives to addressing poverty.  Though this essay is about twenty years old, it still offers sage advice for assisting the genuinely “disadvantaged poor.” The editors mention the traditional “conservative” approach—namely, to stop giving out money in order that the [...]

A while back, my Calvinist friend Michael Patton here at Parchment and Pen told me that he generally preferred the company of Arminians over Calvinists.  A well-known evangelical Christian statesman (who will go unnamed) related his negative experiences with what he called “the Reformed Mafia.”  Trevin Wax recently echoed this concern in a blog post [...]

We’re familiar with the famous atheist psychologist Sigmund Freud, who claimed that human beings fabricate a father figure to get us through life’s difficulties.  In his Future of an Illusion, Freud viewed religion as weak-minded and pathetic: “Religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all other achievements of civilization: from the necessity [...]

(Paul Copan) The former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca once said: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”  This simple advice has wide-ranging application—whether we’re settling personal disagreements, planning our schedules, or trying to build bridges with non-Christians. One area of bridge-building has to do with the creation-evolution “debate.”  In my [...]

I. A Reality Check Here’s a true-false quiz: 1. Mary and Joseph had to travel as quickly as possible to Bethlehem because Mary could have given birth at any moment. 2. The Bethlehem innkeeper was fully booked, and so Mary had to give birth to Jesus in the barn/stall nearby/behind the inn. 3. Initially, this [...]

Recently Hector Avalos has responded to a particular argument in my book Is God a Moral Monster? (Baker).  In it, I follow biblical scholar Jerome Walsh’s interpretation of Deuteronomy 25:11-12:[1] If two men, a man and his countryman, are struggling together, and the wife of one comes near to deliver her husband from the hand [...]