It is not without great significance that, as Christian philosophers and theologians wrestle with a recent great assault on faith in America made by a group of so-called New Atheists, economists wrestle with what many are calling the worst financial crisis during the past seventy-five years. In an essay published in The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 2007)
Read MoreIn his 2006 book, The God Delusion, which is a militant attack against belief in God, the British atheist-scientist, Richard Dawkins, suggests that “. . . the greatest of [the Founding Fathers of the American Republic] might have been atheists. . . . [T]heir writings on religion in their own time leave me no doubt that most of them would have been atheists in ours” (38-39). With such a palpably false statement one could only hope that Professor Dawkins is a better scientist than he is an historian.
Read MoreMarc Cooper is an Associate Professor of Journalism in the prestigious Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at University of Southern California. He is an award-winning journalist who serves as a contributing editor to Nation magazine and is director of USC
Annenberg Digital News. His expertise includes ethics, Investigative Journalism, and Political Journalism. In a May 4, 2010 article which he contributed to The Los Angeles Times, Cooper stated:
At first, it was called Decoration Day. It was established as a time for the nation to decorate the
graves of the war dead with flowers and to remember these fallen ones. Three years after the
Civil War, on May 5, 1868, Maj. Gen. John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic
declared that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30. Some have suggested that this date was selected because flowers would be in bloom nationwide. By the end of the 19th century, Memorial Day (as it is now more frequently called) involved annual ceremonies conducted throughout the country on May 30.
A Wisconsin federal judge has ruled that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Barbara B. Crabb decided in favor of the Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation. Annie Laurie Gaylor is co-president of the Foundation that claims a
membership of 15,000 freethinkers, agnostics, and atheists. Following Judge Crabb’s ruling Ms. Gaylor said, “It’s an invasion of the freedom of conscience of Americans to have their president direct their prayers or tell them to pray” (qtd. in Johnson). If what Gaylor opines is the case then U.S. Presidents (as well as numerous other government leaders) have been guilty since the beginning of the nation.
In his book, Satan and the Problem of Evil, Gregory Boyd defines dualism as “the belief that there are two ultimate powers running the world, one good and one evil” (421). More precisely, metaphysical dualism holds that the coexistence of good and evil is eternal and is built into the very nature of things.
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