Eric Falkenstein (@egfalken) takes his contrarianism to the next level, as he describes his rational road to Christianity:
- Something created us
- Created things have a purpose
- The New Testament’s consistency with economics and psychology work as if our creator wrote it
- ‘As if’ assumptions are often true
He links to a PDF of his Rational Argument for Christianity.
Falkenstein is far too smart for this dreck to be what he really thinks. His subconscious has — likely correctly — assessed he’d be better off as Christian, but his consciousness can’t accept doing it for the real reasons, so we get this mess.
He has teenage kids. He better $#@!ing convince everyone around him that Christianity is right, else the kids are going to become Sanders cultists.
Kind of a rock and a hard place.
Do I choose the modern ideology that will eat my children like necrofasciitis, or do I choose the ideology that demonstrably loses to the modern one?
Christianity as given by Christ as opposed to cults and various sects has done more to free people than any other religion in history. The egalitarianism frees the slave. Anti-slavery activists have mostly been Christian throughout history. Concepts of private property give birth to dynamic robust economies. The focus on the individual gives rise to the concept of the ‘sovereign’ individual with unalienable rights.
The interesting thing is that there is no serious doubt that secularism is unviable, and will merely be a blip in human history.
The future is going to be religious, according to powerful demographic trends: Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century.
The only question is which religion.
The answer on current trends is obvious; and the only large scale rival is Christianity – so a lot depends on whether Western Atheists are prepared to reconsider their objectively, biologically maladaptive (ie. reproductive success annihilating) metaphysical assumptions.