Blogroll Update

I've been wanting to get more religious sites into the blogroll for balance. I just added two. Atheists ought to confront the best counter-arguments available, and both of these writers are intelligent, informed, and Christian. It's too easy to stay inside the atheist echo chamber - you need to get out and challenge your assumptions regularly.

Victor Reppert writes the Dangerous Idea blog. He is friends with one of the philosophers at the excellent Secular Outpost blog, and they have been having a respectful back-and-forth for some time.

Professor of philosophy Edward Feser is more confrontational, as can be seen in his recent exchanges with atheist philosopher Stephen Law and scientist Jerry Coyne. Personally, I am turned off when the epithets start flying - I would much rather read a respectful exchange than one laced with invective on both sides. Still, Feser is very smart and very well-read, and I find that his criticisms are usually fair and on point. His own brand of AT philosophy ("Aristotelico-Thomism", nothing to do with the Appalachian Trail unfortunately) seems a curious relic from the distant past. By my triangulation principle, I have avoided reading his books so far, but I may eventually do it just to understand where he's coming from. Feser is a former atheist, proving that not all smart people move in the "correct" direction....

I also trimmed a few previous blogs. Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (funny, but not at all serious), Common Sense Atheism (Luke has turned his attention to Less Wrong and Facing the Singularity), and The Busybody (a religion blog that rarely deals with religion).