http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2007/11/antony-flew-bogus-book.html

I think you are trying to soft-pedal your own doctrine when it comes to hell. Saying we wont “be with God” sounds a lot nicer than saying “you will be tortured in screaming agony forever and ever and ever.” But I want you to look at that, because that is what Christianity teaches. Its not really fair for you to sugar coat this, either for your sake or mine. This is what *your* religion teaches. And again, I would point out that if it were the case that God had made the rules clear, then you (and he) could reasonably expect people to have to play by them. But again I ask you — how can I fairly be held accountable to a system of rules I don’t believe exists?

I don’t mean the moral rules, I mean the rule that says “accept Jesus or go to hell.” That’s the rule I don’t believe in – not, mind you, that I accept it as valid and simply don’t want to do it. I don’t believe it’s valid in the first place. I think it’s a human fiction.

If I’m wrong, God can easily set me straight. That is not so hard. Every town in America can make clear to everyone what their speed limit is. But I believe, after due study, that the Bible that asserts this rule is a human creation. Of course, I may be mistaken – but the price for being so mistaken is torture, according to you. You say this is just?

And none of this is at all the same as saying I don’t believe in ethics or morality, and nowhere have I asserted that I am a social constructivist. It is a fallacy common among conservative religionists that one must believe in absolute moral truth, based on what is called divine command theory, or else pure social constructivist relativism. There are many, many other ways to construe ethics (and there are many problems with divine command theory as well). The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has some nice articles on this if you are interested.

For me, I find all the justifications about hell just fall away if we apply what I call a “parental theology.” The idea is simple: we take the universal Christian metaphor of God the Father, seriously. What behavior would we call good and just in a father?

Does a father demand perfect and complete moral perfection in his children or else cast them forever from his presence, claiming “you have chosen this?” Would he ever have any reason to hold such a standard? Is it reasonable for him to say “if you tell one lie, in your life, ever, you are rejecting me for all eternity”? Would it ever be reasonable to assume a child *knew* that’s what they were choosing? Or worse, would a good and just father actually torture his child (or allow his child to be tortured) for any single imperfection? Lets make this concrete: what would your child have to do before you felt justified in pouring a pot of boiling water on his/her head?

No, Sara, I’m sorry — I understand the Christian rationalizations of hell, but they don’t hold water. This doctrine alone is, for me, enough to reject Christianity. It is inhuman.

And that is what I mean by tearing people down. Drawing a distinction between an individuals worth and his just desserts based on his actions is academic when hell is introduced. If you have utter worth as a human, how bad must you have to act in order for that worth ti be “overcome” and therefore be sent to hell?

Richard

http://www.daylightatheism.org/2007/11/the-exploitation-of-antony-flew.html

The author of the article interviewed Flew at his home and he did seem very unsure of what he believes or does not believe at this point in his life. He also seemed unaware of the way his “conversion” is being championed by the religious right.

It all came across as exploitive of an elderly gentleman, to me.

Every movement has its famous jerks. Dawkins is one for atheism. Franky Schaeffer is one for Eastern Orthodoxy. Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, etc. all have theirs.

I watched a couple of videos on youtube and such of Flew, and he is really old and seems to lose his train of thought once or twice. However, he still came off as extremely inteligent, extremely skeptical, and extremely competent in his capacities to me.

However, he does not ascribe to any “revelation” from God. He says that he believes that inteligent design is stronger than it has ever been, and be buys it. I don’t recall his reasons at the moment, but he basically eliminates Islam from consideration. He has a very high regard for the apostle Paul as a philosopher and thinker, and for the Bible as enjoyable literature.

He is very skeptical of any “revelation theory”, i.e. God reveals himself as the Bible says or Allah revealed himself to Muhammed, etc. But, I think he said that Christianity is the most plausible of them in his opinion, mainly because of Paul.

Paul is so Gospel-centered in all of his writing, that I am baffled (not sure right now if it is slightly baffled or very baffled or somewhere in between) that a person could praise him as a philosopher and disagree with something so central to everything we know about him.

At the risk of coming off as a jerk myself, Dawkins came off as a jerk to me in the video that I watched. He bashed Flew because he says Flew’s conversion (from Atheism to Theism) was based largely on biology. And he bashed biology as a possible avenue of adding anything valuable to the atheism-theism landscape. And he bashed Flew because he said that Flew brought up the theory that Charles Darwin converted to Christianity very late in his life.
All without giving reasons.

So my take on the video was that Dawkins came out and said, Flew is incompetent, biology is stupid, and Flew is nuts because he was talking about the Darwin conversion theory- all without giving reasons for those things.

The video that I watched could very well have been an excerpt- possibly the introduction or conclusion. And Dawkins could very well have given his reasons for his statements before or after what I saw.
Regardless, he could have and should have shown a lot more respect. Anybody deserves more respect than he gave Flew, but a person whose inteligence is as highly regarded as Flew’s at least was at one time, if it is not still regarded certainly deserves more respect than that.

And I watched a video by Mark Driscoll that seconds what Sara was saying about the differences between Jesus and religion, and wrote a blog about the video and my subsequent thoughts:

Driscoll’s video:

My blog:
http://bigham.wordpress.com/2007/11/07/jesus-vs-religion/

http://richarddawkins.net/article,1831,n,n

original article found here http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04Flew-t.html