Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Here : “It is a great irony but evolution appears to discriminate against atheists and favour those with religious beliefs,” said Michael Blume, a researcher at the University of Jena in Germany who carried out the study. “Most societies or communities that have espoused atheistic beliefs have not survived more than a century.”

In a common atheist narrative, religion was a means of social control. Societies developed their own priesthoods, and those priesthoods promoted whatever views of the gods that would maintain them in power. When confronted with cases of brilliant, original thinkers who were theists, such as Augustine, Aquinas, Averroes, Maimonides, Descartes, Leibniz, and so on, these people are likely to respond, "As brilliant as these folks were, they just weren't quite able to escape their cultural milieu." But the Greek monotheists utterly discombobulate this narrative. Heraclitus, Xenophanes , Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were clearly brilliant, innovative thinkers. But by independent thought they developed a monotheism, remarkably consonant (although certainly not identical) to the one developing in Israel, in direct opposition to their cultural milieu. Socrates even went to his death for calling into question the old gods. So, naturally, this bit of history is sim...

Here . When two intelligent philosophers, one a theist and one an atheist, try to discuss the idea of God and naturalism intelligently, one of the atheist ideologues chimes in to chastise the atheist philosopher for even attempting the intelligent discussion.

"How can you worship a god who would send an innocent person, his own son, in fact, to suffer for the sins of others?" I've seen this one many, many times. It overlooks a belief of no minor importance: "one in being with the Father." Atheists may think the idea of the trinity is a load of nonsense, but they can't just ignore it and accuse Christians of believing something other than they do believe. The being crucified in the Christian story is God Himself. Once that is accepted, the complaint above evaporates like the morning dew.

Yes, the title is a pleonasm. But this one is particularly bad: "Oh, so you believe in God. So which God do you believe in? The Jewish one, or the Muslim one, or the Christian one, or the Hindu?" All of these religions describe a single source of all being, and ascribe to that source things like divine simplicity, eternal existence, divine conservation, and so on. They also all contain the idea that this ultimate source of being exceeds our powers of description. Then, when these traditions do try to go any further, and they wind up with somewhat different images of God, the atheist making the above argument claims, "Ha! I got you: different Gods!" This fellow ought also to think the following are true: If Ptolemy says the sun goes around the earth, and Copernicus says the earth goes around the sun, then they must be talking about different suns. If an ancient writer described a whale as a fish, he must be talking about a different animal than a mod...