Excellent rebuttle, Mr. Spencer. I agree with your assessment of Mr. Derbyshire’s review – while very readable, it is filled with “inconsistancies”, and, if I may be so bold, factual errors. I’d like to point out two major ones.
The notion that religion in general and Judeo-Christianity in specific is the source of world conflict and strife is bogus upon examining the evidence.
Vox Day, the WorldNetDaily columnist has noted that the Encyclopedia of War, a peer-reviewed compendium of all of the known wars since 2380 BC, shows that only 7% of all wars ever fought had any religious component at all, and that if Islam were removed from the equasion that number drops to 3%. Also, exactly NONE of the major war philosophers/tacticians cite religion as being important in either the preparation or conduct of warfare (Surely Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Marcus Aurillius, or Nathan Bedford Forrest would have noted any connection between religion and war.) Can we safely say this argument is err, umm… “B”-slapped?
His second major factual error is Christianity as a slave religion. In fact, most of the early non-Jewish adherants were urban and educated. An article found here ( http://www.tektonics.org/lp/nowayjose.html ), written by James Patrick Holding should show why Mr. Derbyshire should re-educate himself before discussing religion. The NT world was a dyadic society, in which claims such as the ones made by Christians would have been checked out by those with the wherewithall to do so especially in light of the fact Christianity violated at least 17 social factors that should killed the religion in utero. The fact that Christianity spread rapidly shows that word reached urban centers that Jesus indeed rose from the grave – which wold have been the only evidence strong enough to overcome those 17 social strikes against it.
As I noted in the comments on his article his definition of “faith” is defective; he defines faith as belief in something without proof, a straw man common among skeptics ignorant of the Biblical use of the word pistis, which means “trust based on evidence or prior trustworthiness”. Pistis is the word most often translated as “faith” in the NT (240 times).
Again Mr. Spencer, excellent rebuttle. God bless.
Tom Bryant
Religious Studies major
Clemson University
