The Pre-Religion, and Pre-Human, Roots of Morality

PRE-FACE
The main body of my book, Dialogue with a Christian Proselytizer, is a Socratic dialogue between two characters: a Christian proselytizer and a skeptic. The skeptic does not discuss atheism, but instead tentatively accepts—for argument’s sake—the Christian’s premises that there is a Creator of sorts, that this said-Creator has made some sort of communication [...]

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Obama’s Christianity: why it might be sincere, why it might not, and why it might not matter

What to make of Barack Obama’s professed Christianity? My own conclusion is that although there are valid reasons to believe that he might well be a Christian (as religious faith is a complex area with many shades of gray), as well as valid reasons to believe that he might not (that his public declarations about being Christian could be for political reasons only), the best answer may be that it might not matter, given Obama’s determination that when it comes to public policy, religious values must be translated (as he writes in The Audacity of Hope) “into universal, rather than religion-specific, values … subject to argument and amenable to reason.”

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