WTF?

William Lane Craig was on the BBC this morning (as I drafted this it was "this morning" - now it's a week later. The interview was on March 1.). He was arguing that people and institutions that don't want "Christian evangelical student groups" are wrong, because Christians are Good People. He also said that the problem is that atheists think of religion as a "question of taste, not fact" - akin to "vanilla ice cream is the best". Thus, he said sadly, they don't understand fighting over "taste". Dan Damon asked about the tendency among those with "strong tastes" to "line those who don't agree with them up against a wall". (Wow. I'd love to hear a US journalist ask something like that.) Craig insisted that this was impossible.

Yes. Impossible.

He claimed that Christianity is "prevented" from being "persecutorial" because of the moral stand of its founder. So - no problems. Relax. We Love You All.

WTF?

I mean, really. WTF?

Christian regimes have been among the most intolerant ever. Christians today shoot each other in lots of places, throw bombs at abortion clinics and shoot doctors, and denounce atheists as the worst of Satan's minions - Jesus may have been tolerant but his followers have rarely felt the need to follow that particular teaching.

In fact, Christians pretty much perfected "persecutorial" in the Inquisition and the witch trials, I'd say. Lane's lost his grip on history, that's for sure, wandering in his maze of apologetics.

You know - oddly enough, I'm reading God: The Failed Hypothesis and I just finished the chapter on The Uncongenial Universe. I thought Craig's name sounded familiar, and sure enough, there's Craig. There's Craig making claims based on General Relativity - claiming that everything has a cause, claiming that we know, based on everyday experience, that everything has a beginning. (That's the same everyday experience, Stenger points out, that tells us the earth is flat and the sun circles around it.) Further on in the book there's Craig claiming that "If we can in some measure be good, then it follows that God exists." And then, he trots out the old "the empty tomb proves the risen Christ" argument...

Yeah. Craig is a rigorous thinker, all right.