Monthly Archives: January 2014

_A Shot of Faith To The Head_: Bad Title, Great Book: Part 1—”Belief in God is Irrational”

Posted by Caleb Coy on

_A Shot of Faith To The Head_: Bad Title, Great Book: Part 1: “Belief in God is Irrational”

Evidence
Mitch Stokes is bold.  He begins his “shot” into our heads by challenging the notion that rational beliefs must be supported by evidence, a belief known as evidentialism.  This might at first sound like a bad move, as if to say to tell Sherlock Holmes that you just have to believe you know who stole the diamond, and that’s ok.  But retrace the steps of human reasoning.  Go quiz the philosophers (and even the scientists) on this issue.  We have always used reason as long as we have used writing, and earlier.  What is evidence, though?  And how does it factor into our reasoning?  Is it just a matter of things that are there for us to find, things that obviously point the way toward true things, so long as we are rational?  Simply put,
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_A Shot of Faith To The Head_: Bad Title, Great Book: Intro

Posted by Caleb Coy on

My brother bought it for me as a Christmas gift, this book I had never heard of, A Shot of Faith to the Head, by Mitch Stokes.  It was an accidental discovery, for him and for me.  I didn’t know it would become a book that I would want to hold on to, one that surprisingly bolstered a faith in the very existence of God I already thought was solid enough.
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Mining for Ore: A Poem Inspired by The Hobbit

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Mining For Ore

In the depths, diamonds and demons:
Mine at your own risk.

Chisel and plumb and plunder
As does the prisoner
To light and breath.

Touch nothing,
But look on.

Something hums and burns beneath.

Lift up your candle and call out,
For it has broken through.
Pray that you pried loose
What you can bear to see—
Bear it up alone
And alone you will sink.

Let the eye that opens be yours,
For in the deepest of halls
No headlamp or torch can discern
Sovereigns from scales.

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Book Review: _The Derision of Heaven_ by Michael Whitworth

Posted by Caleb Coy on

I am a little late in reading The Derision of Heaven by Michael Whitworth.  But as many friends recommended it to me, and I went to school with this talented writer and preacher, I knew I owed it to him.  So here goes.

Whitworth’s book comes at a time when many Christians worry that their “rights” are shrinking, that a huge persecution is coming, that the privileges that we have long held are going to soon be lost, and that we just won’t know what to do about it.  The Derision of Heaven, which takes applied scholarship and shares it in a very understandable, relevant language, points to the book of Daniel as a source of answers for the questions we might be having—not questions about what will happen through the reading of “secret prophecies”, but about what is supposed to happen and what it means when it happens.  Daniel’s book is about kings—all kings—and how God laughs at derision when they refuse to acknowledge his majesty (recalling the 2nd Psalm).  America included.

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“Bourgeois” by Lorde (Marxist parody)

Posted by Caleb Coy on

And we’ll never be bourgeois
(bourgeois)
We don’t own no Capital
Owning property and controlling the means of production in a loop of privatized investment and
……………..unevenly distributed accumulation just ain’t for us
We crave a rise of the proletariat
Let me be your comrade
(Comrade)
You can call me Trotsky
And we’ll labor, labor, labor, labor
Let us share commodity.