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Monday, June 04, 2007
Douglas Wilson and Christopher Hitchens have wrapped up their 6-week debate on Christianity Today's website regarding Christianity and its positive or negative influence in the world. Hitchens is a very intelligent man and shrewd debater, but Wilson handily won their exchange. Hitchens was ultimately unable to explain from whence he gets his moral belief system and how that morality is good and, say, a pyschopath's is evil (rather than the two people just having different beliefs). This is the problem for all those atheists who, like Mr. Hitchens, believe in right and wrong actions (though not necessarily the same ones as you or I) yet are unwilling to ascribe their morality to a supernatural source. If a person's moral being is defined completely by himself, and if said morality is itself a product of humanity's cultural and physical evolution, who is to say that the cultural mores of today are any more viable than those of 1000 years ago or of those that may come in the future? And if that is the case, what makes our "Judeo-Christian" cultural standards any more authentic (or good) than those held by much of the Muslim world (of which Hitchens is often a critic)? Atheists in such a predicament are, as Mr. Wilson mentioned, "like the minister in the story who wrote in the margin of his notes, "Argument weak. Shout here."

You can find the whole debate in my links to the left.

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Darius' book montage

The Cross Centered Life: Keeping the Gospel The Main Thing
Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God
Overcoming Sin and Temptation
According to Plan: The Unfolding Revelation of God in the Bible
Disciplines of a Godly Man
Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem
When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor. . .and Ourselves
The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith
Respectable Sins
The Kite Runner
Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak
Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak
A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/calvinist, ... anabaptist/anglican, metho
Show Them No Mercy
The Lord of the Rings
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
The Truth War: Fighting for Certainty in an Age of Deception
Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming
The Chronicles of Narnia
Les Misérables


Darius Teichroew's favorite books »