Say Hello to my Little Friend

Hi everyone.

I won’t be able to do any work on the next podcast episode over the next couple of days. I’m flying to Wellington, because I’ve made it through to the final stage of a job application to work in Treasury next year. That would be a fantastic move professionally, plus we really feel like it’s time for a change of scene, so I’d love for that to work out.

However, as soon as I get back I’ll get to work on the next episode, which, by the way, is to be entitled “What is presuppositional apologetics?” It’ll be a presentation of the presuppositional approach to the defense of Christian belief, a comparison with other approaches, and also a critique of some presentations of the approach. I consider myself very friendly to presuppositional apologetics, but as a “movement” (if it is one) I think it needs a lot of improvement.

In the meantime, for anyone interested, here’s a transcript of the presentation on hell that occupied three episodes recently.

Readers may or may not be familiar with Peter Singer, the Australian born philosopher (I use that term very loosely here) who teaches at Princeton, and who thinks that baby cows either do, could or should have more moral rights than baby humans.

I think he’s finally found the perfect avenue (not that it ended up being a very receptive audience). He recently appeared on the Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report.

Here it is, the second installment of my two part series on the moral argument.

Oh, and before anyone gets offended and writes to me about the parody in the blog roundup - stop and ask yourself: Are you a Windows user by choice? If so, then which of us is really worse, hmm?

 

 Episode 010: The Moral Argument 2 [56:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Thanks Dee Dee for bringing this story to my attention.

A former board member of the Lakewind Church in Tennessee has sued the church and its pastors, saying that he was injured when he fell after the spirit took him during a church service.

According to the complaint, Matthew Lincoln was participating in the evening service at the church when a visiting minister touched his forehead after Lincoln came to the altar.  “Mr. Lincoln received the spirit and fell backwards striking the carpet-covered cement floor . . ., causing him to sustain severe and permanent injuries.”  Lincoln alleges that the fall aggravated a pre-existing back injury, rendering him unable to work.

I find this to be (apart from hilarious) rather revealing. It wasn’t the pentecostal leaders who made him fell - right? It wasn’t peer pressure, his own silly expectations or the desire to look spiritual in front of his peers. Right? It was the Holy Spirit - Right Mr Lincoln?

So why is he suing the church? They didn’t make the Holy Spirit do this, did they? Why isn’t he suing God for the 2.5 million dollars he is seeking?

Here’s part 1 of a 2 part series ont he moral argument for theism. The argument is largely about meta-ethics, so the bulk of this presentation is devoted to explaining the meta-ethical issues: What are moral facts at all? And could there be any such things in a purely naturalistic worldview?

 

 Episode 009: The Moral Argument 1 [50:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This isn’t a real episode, just a message to othr podcasters out there about how to promote this podcast. I’m more than happy to do the same for your podcast/site.

 

 Promote this Podcast! [0:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here’s Episode 008, in which i discuss whether a truly secular version of liberalism can really embrace a proper liberal doctrine of equality. I argue that it cannot.

I’m also experimenting with lower quality mp3 files to save space, and t make it quicker to download. This one is only 64kbps.

I also have a cold in this episode. I hate colds.

 

 Episode 008: Eqiality and Secularism [56:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

William Lane Craig was recently in New Zealand for a conference on Molinism at the Victoria University in Wellington. While he was here he had a number of public speaking engagements, including this one, a debate with Bill Cook of the New Zealand Atheists, Rationalists and Humanists, at the University of Auckland. The topic of the debate was: “Is God a Delusion?”

Unfortunately I was not able to attend. From what I have heard, most of those in attendance, regardless of their view of the existence of God held a more or less shared view of who won the debate. But you can decide for yourself.

I just discovered this gem. It’s not quite as good as the South Park episode, “all about Mormons,” but it’s not bad!

OK, my hosting provider has just emailed me to let me know that I just exceeded my monthly bandwidth limit. That means I’m had a lot of downloads from this site. This is good and bad. It’s good because it means that more people than I realised are listening to this podcast (listening to it at my site has the same effect on my bandwidth usage as downloading it). I will never discourage that, of course. In fact I’d like to see my listener base increase greatly.

On the downside, this means I’m going to have to upgrade to a more expensive hosting plan. The benefits of hosting podcast files in space that you rent yourself are significant, so that’s what I did. But you know what I’m discovering? Hosting plans with decent storage and bandwidth limits aint dirt cheap.

Now (listening to my own show, I realise that I use that word a lot. I have cut out so many instances of it), I’m not even thinking about wimping out - not likely! I’ll just meet these costs as they arise. What I’ve decided to do, however, is to add a donate button to this blog. At the main blog site (www.beretta-online.com/wordpress) you’ll see some buttons on the right hand side. The one at the bottom is a PayPal donate button. If you have a paypal account (and you really should, it’s a fantastic way to make international payments online), you can click on that button, which will take you to the paypal site where you can make a $5 donation. Nothing is expected, everything is appreciated. If it were ever to generate a profit I would remove the button until hard times come again.

Think of it like the collection plate at a poor church you’re just visiting. No obligation whatsoever, but if you like what they’re doing, you might wanna help them out a little.

We now return you to our regular programme.

A few episodes ago in my podcast I made a reference to the fact that Helen Clarke’s Labour Government was seriously talking about the possibility of allowing accused people to be re-tried for the same offense. I used it as an example of how extremely totalitarian the views of our Prime Minister really are. I would never have thought - at the time - that such a sinister move would ever find wide support. I noted an extraordinary outlandish point of view, and moved on.

Today I confess to being somewhat gobsmacked. As my friend Madeleine over at M and M has noted, this is now a reality in New Zealand. Somehow the label “Communist Re-trial” didn’t appeal, so it has been called the “Criminal Procedure Bill.” And it’s not just the Left that supported it. It gained enough support in parliament to be passed last night.

As Madeleine explains, given the normal practice of one accusation, one trial:

So we are left having to accept that once a court has heard a case, weighed the evidence and ruled, that’s that. Allowing the state to keep having a go because despite the court’s assessment, the state “know” this person is guilty (or worse because of trial by media, the public “know”) is to give the state far too much power and to give society far too much uncertainty in the justice system. Whilst it may succeed in increasing the chances of nailing the guilty it equally runs the risk of allowing the state to run trial after trial after trial with its vast resources against the innocent.

Labour undid hundreds of years of jurisprudence on human rights formulated by far greater legal and ethical minds than any of them possess in one sitting last night. Just remember that next time you decide that someone guilty got off after listening to the 8 second soundbite on the news or reading the 600 word article in the Herald; if a judge and 12 of your peers who heard all of the evidence, got to see the body-language and hear the tone of voice of the witnesses ruled the other way, maybe they were in a better position to assess the case. If the police failed to build their case then tough. If anything, knowing they can have a second crack will encourage them proceed with a lower standard of evidence.

Well said.

The Bill, which will become law soon, also allows a guilty verdict to be reached by only 11 of the 12-person jury.

Seig Helen.

And here it is, episode 7, the final part in the three part series on hell. This is the longest episode that I have ever done, and it is the longest I ever plan on doing. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to become a pattern, but I wasn’t about to dp a fourth part, so i had to fit everything into this one.

As always, your comments and questions are welcome. Drop me a line - podcast at beretta-online.com - You can even send your comment or question as an audio clip, and I’ll play it on the show.

 

 Episode 007: Hell part 3 [59:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Researcher’s at Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School predicted in August 2007 year that John McCain would win the Republican nomination for the race to the White house this year - and they were right?

Rather han engaging in political analysis, the researchers took the much more obvious route of asking New Zealand schoolgirls who was the hottest option.

Dr Green, a Wellington-based senior research fellow in the business and economic forecasting unit at Melbourne’s Monash University, said a Princeton University professor, Alexander Todorov, found that snap judgments of competence, based on a quick look at pictures of candidates’ faces, had done a good job of predicting the winners of congressional and senate races.

With Professor Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School and colleagues Professors Randall Jones in the US, and Malcolm Wright in Australia, Dr Green extended this research to US presidential primaries.

….

The researchers provided no other information to the people they surveyed than colour photographs of the candidates. They deliberately asked people with little knowledge of the candidates: university students in Australia and New Zealand and high school girls in New Zealand.

It’s perfectly understandable. He’s so dreamy.

Here’s part 2 on my series on hell. In this episode, I look at some key arguments against annihilationism and for the doctrine of eternal torment, and why those arguments fail.

As this episode ended up being longer than expected (there are plenty of bad arguments to cover!), I’ve decided to present a third episode in this series, where I will cover the remainder of the main arguments for the traditional view. But at least this time I managed to squeeze in my regular “This Week in History” segment.

The next episode will be a little shorter.

 

 Episode 006: Hell part 2 [47:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We’ve made it to five episodes! This one is part two of a biblical and theological (mostly biblical) discussion about hell, the doctrine of eternal punishment in Christian theology. It’s a two part presentation. In this part, I present my position on the subject, a view called annihilationism. In the next show I’ll be looking at argument against my view and in favour of a more traditional view of hell as a place of the eternal torment of the damned.

As I promised in the Episode, here’s a list of some prominent Christian thinkers who hold (or held - some of them are dead) to an annihilationist point of view:

• John Stott
• Michael Green
• Clark Pinnock
• Philip Edgecumbe Hughes
• John Wenham
• Dale Moody
• Edward Fudge
• Graham Scroggie
• Edward White
• Basil Atkinson
• E. Earle Ellis
• Homer Hailey

That’s what I came up with in 2 minutes. Now, come on in, the water’s lovely!

 

 Episode 005: It's one hell of an episode! [55:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download