The first essay in "The Residue" series explores how Christianity adapts to secularization, evolving from dogma to cultural symbolism while retaining residual authority despite declining belief. As church attendance dwindles, Christianity's influence persists through inherited practices and societal norms, indicating a shift from active conviction to ambient legitimacy.
Tag: epistemology
The Flexible Absolute
The post critiques the political use of "Christian values," highlighting its dual nature: one inclusive and warm, the other exclusionary and rigid. It argues that such vagueness benefits political agendas, allowing claims to remain unfalsifiable while evading accountability. Ultimately, it asserts that this flexible framework lacks true moral authority.
The God They Don’t Believe In
British politics currently faces a form of dishonesty regarding claims of the nation's Christian heritage, as highlighted by Reform UK's platform. The assertion that Britain remains a Christian country lacks clarity due to conflicting interpretations within Christianity itself. Politicians use Christian values as a cultural brand, providing a guise for nationalist beliefs rather than genuine theological discourse.
What Religions Know About Each Other
Religious institutions are often at their clearest when exposing invention, revision, and self-interest in rival faiths. The privilege they claim is simpler and uglier: the right to inspect rival revelation as history while presenting their own history as revelation.
Scientology and the Machinery Made Visible
Scientology is often dismissed as a pseudo religion, a fake faith too recent and too obvious to be taken seriously. That is a mistake. If an institution claims religious authority, grounds that authority in claims that cannot be publicly tested, and seeks the deference or protection religion is granted, then it belongs inside the criticism. What makes Scientology useful is not that it is uniquely strange, but that it makes the machinery unusually visible.
When God Changes His Mind: The LDS, the FLDS, and the Mechanism Made Visible
The LDS and the FLDS expose a mechanism religion would rather keep hidden: doctrine declared eternal until political pressure makes revision necessary, at which point capitulation is renamed revelation.
When Christianity Borrows Its Morality
Christianity likes to present its moral retreats as wisdom, growth, and deeper understanding. They are better read as concessions. Again and again, Christian institutions have abandoned old certainties only after secular moral reasoning made those certainties shameful. That is not proof of divine depth. IThat is not proof of divine depth. It is evidence that Christian institutions have repeatedly had to import moral correction from the wider world and then disguise the importation as insight.
The Philosopher’s God and the Luxury of Proper Basicality
Alvin Plantinga's properly basic belief argument is the most sophisticated philosophical defence of theism available. It is also, on examination, an elaborate system for placing God permanently beyond the reach of evidence.
The Convenient Miracle of Not Knowing
When a child is murdered, religion invokes God's plan. When the killer acts, it invokes free will. These are not two answers. They are one unfalsifiable system, and it is being deployed in the presence of dead children.
Forever Is Not Long Enough
The Abrahamic God is said to be omnipotent, omniscient and infinitely forgiving. He is also the author of eternal damnation. These attributes cannot coexist, and two thousand years of theology has not resolved that contradiction.