Category Archives: Articles

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Is Christianity Just a Psychological Crutch?

A friend once caught a taxi one Sunday morning after church. Seeing her Bible, the driver sneered dismissively. “Religion is just a psychological crutch,” he opined, “something for weak-minded people who lack the self-reliance to take responsibility for their own lives. People believe in God because it makes them feel good.” Realising he’d probably blown any chance of a tip, he attempted to recover with: “What’s a nice girl like you need religion for anyway?”

Psychology is everywhere. We’re told psychology can explain everything from what we do in the bedroom to our religious preferences: psychology can explain sects as well as sex. The claim is not a new one, however: it goes back to Sigmund Freud (d. 1939), the father of psychoanalysis. Freud believed religion arises when we project our fears into the sky (especially the fear of death) and invent God to give us comfort in the face of our mortality.

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Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God?

Modern Britain is increasingly pluralistic: many of us live in cities surrounded by hundreds of different faiths and belief systems. And that diversity raises lots of issues – not least how as Christians we relate to friends, neighbours and colleagues in other religions.

In the UK, the second biggest religion is Islam, one that is frequently on the front pages of the newspapers, often for all the wrong reasons. Now some people have suggested that one way to foster peace between moderate Muslims and Christians is to acknowledge that Allah, the God of the Qur’an, and Yahweh, the God of the Bible, are the same God — that Muslims, Christians (and Jews) can be pooled together under a label like “Abrahamic Faiths”.

I’ve been working among Muslims for over 20 years and I confess when I began sharing my faith with Muslims, that was my assumption — that Muslims and Christians worshipped the same God. But during those years of talking, sharing and studying, my views have changed. Let me explain why.

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Dialogue Without Diatribe

How can we learn to disagree without being disagreeable?

I was recently speaking at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where I’d been asked to address the topic “Does Religion Poison Everything?” During the lecture, one student at the back of the lecture room gesticulated wildly every time I made a point with which he disagreed. At the end of the talk, there was a time of Q&A and this student was among the first to raise his hand. He began by self-identifying as an atheist and then proceeded to ask a series of increasingly complex questions about moral philosophy. After the event was over, the student found his way to the front and continued his questions and we went to and fro for about half an hour across a range of issues: Can you be good without God? Do you need God for moral values? What does the good life look like? Finally the student shook my hand and said, “I’ve disagreed with almost everything you’ve said in the last 90 minutes. But this has been the most fascinating conversation I can remember and you’ve given me much to think about. Thank you.”

megaphone

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Science and God

“Science has buried God!” an atheist friend remarked to me. That’s a claim I hear ever more frequently in the media, online, or on the lips of celebrity atheists. A few years ago I had the chance to interview one of the UK’s leading atheists, Dr. Peter Atkins of Oxford University, who put it bluntly: “Science gives you the promise of understanding while you’re alive. Religion offers the prospect of understanding when you’re dead.”

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Is Christianity Dying?

Scarcely a month goes by without the media running a story that the church in the UK is dying. For example, British newspaper, The Telegraph, recently reported that “more than half of the population has no faith and the share of the population who say they are Church of England Christians has fallen to just 15%—the lowest ever recorded.” So is Christianity in a death spiral and can secularists look forward to a godless Utopia? Well, as ever, things aren’t that straightforward.

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Is God Against My Freedom?

One of my favourite movies is Braveheart. Who could forget that stirring speech made by Mel Gibson, playing Scottish hero William Wallace, as he motivates his troops at the Battle of Stirling Bridge with the cry: “They may take our lives, but they can never take our freedom!”

Freedom is a powerful idea and probably our culture’s supreme value. People want to believe they are free to choose their ethics, beliefs, values, and more. Our culture proclaims that choice is good, the more of it the better, and anything that restricts it is bad. And that’s a problem when it comes to God—surely, the protest goes, God is anti­-freedom. Don’t I have to choose between my personal autonomy and a belief in God?

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Can We Be Good Without God?

Some of what follows is drawn from chapter 8 of my book, The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist. If you enjoyed it, please do consider buying the full book, which is available both as a paperback and an ebook. It’s available online, or from all good bookstores.

A few years ago, I was having lunch with an old friend in a vegetarian pizza restaurant in London. Now I’m no fan of vegetarian food—I think I’m persuaded by the argument that the word “vegetarian” is derived from an old German word that means “bad hunter”. However, my friend, Garth, had just started dating a devout Buddhist, so he was not merely eating vegetarian, but vegan.

Halfway through the meal, I looked up from my lentil and sawdust pizza to see Garth surreptitiously produce a small plastic container from his pocket: he opened it and shook out the contents over his pizza.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Tuna,” he hissed in a whisper.

“Tuna?” I said.

“Shhhh!” Garth hissed. “Not every vegan takes the liberal approach that I do. Besides,” he added, “I don’t know what all the fuss is. So I eat fish. Big deal. Fish doesn’t count as meat, does it? It can’t be meat if it lives in water.”

“You claim to be a vegan and you eat fish?” I asked.

“Yes. And prawns, crab, shellfish, lobster, that kind of thing.”

“Strangest vegan I’ve ever met,” I said.

“Duck, too,” he added.

“Duck?!?”

“Well, they live in water don’t they.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said, “ you’re claiming to be a vegan—telling your girlfriend, your colleagues, and your family that you’re a vegan, subjecting your friends to vegan restaurants—all the while chowing down on anything that moves. Why not just come clean and admit you’re an omnivore like the rest of us: it’s the hypocrisy that galls me.”

“Hypocrisy?” Garth said, looking genuinely offended. “I thought you’d be more, well, progressive. And besides, who says that you get to define what the word ‘vegan’ means? Who died and pronounced you King of the Dictionary? I say ‘vegan’ to me means ‘occasionally eats meat when there is a vowel in the month’. How dare you tell me your meaning of the word trumps mine.”

EvilMeter

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27 Places / 3 Questions

At this time of year, our deck is one of my favourite places to read. I love the view of our garden and the rambling, overgrown pathway that leads into the small woods that lie at the rear. I love the sound of the wind in the trees and the patterns of sunlight cast by the leaves. And I love the feel of the warm wooden boards of the deck beneath my feet. It was sitting there in the sunshine one weekend, idly reading a newspaper, that my eye was drawn to an article on the front page: “Twenty-Seven Places to See Before You Die”. Always drawn to a potentially good travel piece, I turned to the article. There, accompanied by some stunning photography, was laid out a collection of beautiful locations—Yosemite Valley, Cape Tribulation, the jagged peaks of Torres del Paine; even the English Lake District.

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God and Father Christmas

In recent years, atheism has enjoyed something of a resurgence, especially with the rise of the so called “New Atheism”. That term was first coined back in 2006 to describe the group of media-savvy atheists—men like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens—whose books attacking religion in general and Christianity in particular have sold by the truckload. Yet despite its popularity, much of contemporary atheism thrives on poor arguments and cheap soundbites, making claims that simply don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Like a cheaply made cardigan, they’re full of loose threads that quickly unravel if you tug them.

Let me illustrate with an example from New Atheism’s founding father, Richard Dawkins, whose books have sold millions of copies. Dawkins thinks religion isn’t merely wrong, but insane, that those who believe in God are quite literally deluded. Faith in God is as crazy as belief in—well, let’s allow Dawkins to speak for himself:

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Holy Proof

Today I’m giving space to Sheridan Voysey, whose new book Resilient: Your Invitation to a Jesus-Shaped Life launches on Wednesday (don’t miss the free giveaways here). Resilient is a book of 90 readings tracing the theme of resilience through the Sermon on the Mount and beyond. Here’s an excerpt.

“But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:44–45)

In his book The Evidence for God, Loyola University philosopher Paul Moser offers a fascinating case for the existence of God. His basic argument goes like this:

If there is a God, this God would need to be worthy of worship. (We may worship lesser gods like Thor or money, but that doesn’t make them worthy of worship.) To be worthy of worship, a God would need to be loving—even to the point of loving his enemies. And if there was such a God, this God would want his creatures to love each other too, as love always wants love shared.

Moser then asks if there’s evidence for such a God in human experience. As humans clearly have a selfish bent, what accounts for their loving acts toward others? Why does our conscience often feel pricked when we’re selfish? How can people like Wade Watts or Martin Luther King Jr. radically love their enemies? Moser suggests these experiences are evidence for the God of Christian belief. And, Moser adds, as we respond to his invitation of relationship, God transforms us into his loving character, proving his existence even more.