The Christian Atheist

The Ugly Hegel begins with his most famous pupil, Marx, whose practical outplay makes his ideology the most murderous and tyrannous in all human history. By their fruits you will know them, Jesus said, and when we set the historical record against Marxism and the Capitalist Western liberal democratic vision, "freedom is the victor," as President Reagan said in his famous Brandenburg Gate speech. W...

Like episodes 38 and 39, episodes 40 and 41 form a unit, written together but separated because of length and complexity. Please listen to both as a unit. Having seen both the good and the bad of Hegel, it is time now for the ugly, those philosophers I have termed the "prescriptive Hegelians." Hegel's inversion of value, the rejection of transcendence and embrace of immanence, which is the foundat...

In this podcast we conclude our analysis of what in Hegel himself set us up for the radical value-inversion that is causing the Western Implosion, and point to the progressive malignancy of the Progressive Hegelians, beginning in Marx. Bad Hegel is the value inversion of immanence denying transcendence, playing out in the following: 1) an emphasis on the collective over the individual; 2) a progre...

Episodes 38 and 39 were written as a unit, and divided only for time-constraint and for intellectual density. They should be digested together. Hegel's denial of transcendence is the fundamental wrong-turn that has shaped our contemporary scene. It was an inversion of value itself, as Nietzsche declared, the 'death of God.' In this episode we continue our analysis of where Hegel set us up for what...

Although we pointed out last time that there is a great deal to appreciate in Hegel's work, he remains the point of departure for two centuries of progressive thought that has produced catastrophic consequences on the world stage, and now actively threatens to destroy the foundations of the liberal Western tradition that has raised the human condition to its highest material affluence, virtually e...

Welcome to the Christian Atheist, Season Two! Let this Inaugural episode stand as a mission statement. It was the Incarnation that overwhelmed me in the person of my wife, Jenny, and allowed me to step back through the looking-glass to Christ in 2019. I love her today with, as Poe said, 'a love that is more than love.' That Incarnation is an even greater Mystery to me now than in 2019! May God's b...

A very Merry Christmas to all our listeners here at the Christian Atheist. Jenny and I pray that God's richest blessings are yours no matter where YOU stand before the Looking Glass!   If you'd like to support us, donate through Paypal at Romanschapter5@comcast.net https://www.youtube.com/c/TheChristianAtheist/featured  https://www.facebook.com/JnJWiseWords  https://wisewordsforyouroccasion.wordpr...

The Christian Atheist podcast will return in January 2022 with new episodes. Please listen to our Simple Gifts podcast throughout the month of December for classical Christmas storytelling, beginning with Dickens' A CHRISTMAS CAROL, and including "The gift of the Magi," and Eliot's "Journey of the Magi," along with "The Man Who Missed Christmas," "Why Christmas Trees Aren't Perfect" "The Other Wis...

One of the major goals of this series is to acquaint my listeners with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and his philosophy. We must know the enemy, as he is us. We have so deeply internalized Hegel's logic that we seem unable to see beyond it, and we are today reaping the consequences of confining ourselves within immanence. Once we see the cage, we can move beyond it. Hegel, however, is...

In our series on atheism I discovered that credal atheists represent a very limited threat to theism, both because their intellectual position is weak, being ungrounded, and because what most Enlightenment atheists really want and how they act tends to betray their credal stance. This sort of atheist is only about 5% of the US population, though significantly more in Europe. What our two-track Heg...

In a conceptually complex series of podcasts like our series on Defining Atheism, many thoughts don't "make the cut." Here are some of my thoughts left over from this 6 part series, making this the seventh! If you enjoy our content, consider donating through PayPal to romanschapter5@comcast.net   https://www.youtube.com/c/TheChristianAtheist/featured https://www.facebook.com/JnJWiseWords https://w...

We conclude our series on the definitions of atheism by propounding the Problem of Value for atheism, a problem as vexing as the Problem of Evil for Western theism. If you enjoy our content, consider donating through PayPal to romanschapter5@comcast.net   https://www.youtube.com/c/TheChristianAtheist/featured https://www.facebook.com/JnJWiseWords https://wisewordsforyouroccasion.wordpress.com   #t...

Having proposed a dialectical definition for atheism, we briefly explore the nature of Hegelian logic, concluding that it is inadequate for a final answer, but useful for understanding the nature of things in this world of becoming, where ideal limits are indicated but unattained. In order to properly understand atheism (the Antithesis in Hegelian dialectical terms) we must better understand theis...

While defining atheism as 'a lack of belief in a god or gods' fails in its attempt to define away the essential faith-structure of atheism, it does suggest another way of understanding the theist/atheist conflict. If we understand the "lack of belief" as active rather than passive in its import, we can understand this definition of atheism as 'living as if god does not exist.' So long as we can ma...

While I do not expect most of my atheist critics to acknowledge it (which is why this constant dance is necessary), I think it is well-established now that atheism is faith, as is theism, and that each time the atheist retreats from their faith-postulate that God (or god/s) does not exist, their position of retreat is agnosticism, not atheism. The advantage of agnosticism is that it is fully defen...

The second definition for atheism that we discussed last episode, that atheism is the claim that we do not have sufficient reason or evidence to believe in God, is meant to sidestep the problems we highlighted in the first definition for atheism, the assertion that God does not exist, allowing the atheist to neither assert the non-existence of God (which requires as Hitchens said, an “impossible”...

As I say in my Outro to the Christian Atheist podcast, "I am a Christian, with the searching and skeptical mind of an atheist. I don't want to believe anything that isn't true. I know both sides of the looking-glass [i.e., the Christian AND the Atheist], and I know them with open eyes. I choose Christ's side. I invite you to join me from wherever you stand before the looking-glass." When my wife,...

In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis quotes Lucretius: Had God designed the world, it would not be A world so frail and faulty as we see. These lines, Lewis says, present the strongest of all arguments for atheism. I agree, and I suggest that broadly construed they encompass the spectrum of arguments against divine authorship. I challenge this argument on the basis of the value necessary in applying i...

I send this letter back to September 11th, 2001, a watershed for our world and my personal history. Evil is insidious. It can destroy with a suddenness and violence that shocks and disconcerts, but it HAS a logic, too; reason, evidence and motivational justification can lead to great evil, as well as great good. Reason is a tool, and like all tools it must be directed by a will, by choice, by deci...

This letter goes back to my atheist self around the year 2000, after I had spent close to five years living as an atheist in the academic world. What advice can I offer that young atheist who is becoming increasingly disillusioned with his new faith community? If you enjoy our content, consider donating through PayPal to romanschapter5@comcast.net   https://www.youtube.com/c/TheChristianAtheist/fe...

I send a letter back in time to the moment I turn from agnosticism to atheism. It is a crucial moment in my life, and I won't turn back to God for 25 years. What would I say to myself at that moment, now that my faith in Christ is restored? If you enjoy our content, consider donating through PayPal to romanschapter5@comcast.net   https://www.youtube.com/c/TheChristianAtheist/featured https://www.f...

Jenny and I read together whenever we can. This week a presentation of two passages from C. S. Lewis that we found particularly important and moving while we traveled the US to see family. If you enjoy our content, consider donating through PayPal to romanschapter5@comcast.net   https://www.youtube.com/c/TheChristianAtheist/featured https://www.facebook.com/JnJWiseWords https://wisewordsforyourocc...

Ethics as an argument for God's existence seldom convinces the unbelieving, as it is conceived at the wrong level. Atheists know themselves as ethically concerned while at the same time denying God. That is, there is a fundamental disconnect between their ontological experience as ethical beings and the metaphysical explanation of ethics as dependent upon God. For them ethics is REAL based on thei...

In traditional ethical theory we have two broad systems of thought, deontology, which bases ethics in obligation to follow an ethical standard, and consequentialism, which tries to ground ethics in the value of the consequences of our actions. Ethics, I argue, is sui generis, unique. It is its own discrete field of value, standing outside the already unique human understanding of value discussed i...

Ethics addresses the question, how should I act? We begin by clarifying what it means to act in opposition to the deterministic notion of react. We discover that action is built on rationality, and involved the uniquely human faculty of imagination, the ability to structure a negation, and thus have both a past and a future. In this way, being spread out over the three temporal dimensions we can b...