Dan Barker @ OU

Dan Barker spoke tonight at OU in Dale Hall. He was brought in by CFI. His lecture was titled “How to be good without God.” Here are some of the highlights and my brief responses:

-> “What we need and what we want is the basis of morality.”

This makes ethics arbitrary: our wants and needs can change. Also, he applied morality to animals and plants… how can this be done if it is defined by human wants and human needs? This seems arbitrary as well.

-> Good is the reduction of harm.

Why? Where does this definition come from? Also, defining harm seems to presuppose a definition of goodness. I don’t see how this isn’t viciously circular.

-> Sticking a needle in a baby is generally bad… unless we are doing so to give the baby a necessary or beneficial shot.

Basically, this is a greater good argument. Sticking a baby with a needle is bad unless it is done for the purpose of accomplishing a greater (or perhaps sufficient) good. If a person has a sufficiently good purpose that can be accomplished by something normally considered evil then it is justified… What then about the problem of evil? Can God have a sufficient reason for allowing/purposing evil to exist? When asked about this, Dan did not deny this possibility. I wonder how he can then continually bring up/mention/argue the problem of evil while admitting that a good, all-powerful God can create a world that will contain evil.

There were plenty more absurdities espoused by him tonight and certainly many more within all of his lectures and debates; however, these are the ones that most stuck out to me. I might post more later.

Marcus Borg is the most important Christian theologian

I’m taking a class: Comparative Religion. It is mostly a survey class. We are currently studying Christianity. I recently received the study guide for the test, in which this list of terms is found:

• Gospels
• Epistles
• Translation process
• Incarnation, crucifixion, ressurection
• Pentacost
• Trinity
• Atonement
• Roman domination
• Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots
• Canonization of new Testament
• Issues of authority of scripture
• Ecumenical Councils: Nicea, Ephesus, Chalcedon
• Roman, Eastern, Protestant
• Eucharist
• Baptism (believers versus infant)
• Suffering Servant
• Eschatology
• Gender Issues in Christianity and Feminist theology
• Jesus Seminar
• Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity.

One of the first things that stood out to me in this list is that Marcus Borg is the only person referred to directly. Luther, Calvin, Aquinas, Anselm, and Augustine are all missing. And you can certainly forget about Zwingli, John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, John Wesley, Charles Spurgeon, Athanasius, Irenaeus, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, the Apostle Paul, C.S. Lewis, Karl Barth, Philip Melanchthon, B.B. Warfield, Charles Hodge, John Knox, Cornelius Van Til, R.C. Sproul, J.I. Packer, Tertullian, St. Francis, John the Baptist, Pelagius, the Apostle Peter,  Laelius Socinus, Arius, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Alvin Plantinga. None of these made the cut… but Marcus Borg did.

It is John Calvin’s 500th birthday this year, and he happens to have been one of the theologians in an insignificant event know as the Protestant Reformation; he hasn’t been mentioned once in class. Yet we talked quite a bit about the Jesus Seminar. This is an imbalance at best!  Unfortunately, it is no surprise that an extremely liberal “Christian” was the only one to make the list. Awful.