Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Professor Ehrman teaches Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of MISQUOTING JESUS and HOW JESUS BECAME GOD, both NY Times best sellers. Ehrman's most recent book is THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY, which discusses the long period in Christianity's history between the conversion of Paul (some time before AD 36) and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in AD 312. Here are two brief  paragraphs from Ehrman's discussion of Paul's post-conversion missionary activity.    It is difficult to know for certain how Paul conducted his mission on the ground. He was moving to cities that, so far as we can tell, he had never visited before, and trying to convert strangers to the faith. He apparently succeeded a good deal. But how did he do it?    We should not think that Paul staged 'tent revivals' like a traveling American evangelist in the nineteenth or twentieth century. There is no reference to any such undertaking...

I write today in the line of my Jamesian interest in the varieties of religious experience.  Terry Heaton, once executive producer at the Christian Broadcasting Network, the man responsible for getting Pat Robertson's The 700 Club on the air throughout the 1980s and early '90s, has a new book out. I haven't read it (and don't plan to) so I speak here only from mediating sources. But the book seems to be a memoir, a reflection, and at least in some part a recantation.  It is called The Gospel of the Self: How Jesus Joined the GOP. There's an interview of Heaton on Vox. After discussing one of the editing decisions on which Robertson overruled him, Heaton says: "I knew that Pat’s rationale for all of this is that you don’t want to do anything on TV that will interfere with anybody’s faith. But I think you can take that to an extreme — and that’s what we did. We always showed people getting healed, overcoming the odds. The strong impression that the vi...

Back in 2010, the fellow portrayed here, Ken Pulliam, made a fascinating point. Pulliam was the proprietor of a blog with the autobiographical title, "Why I De-Converted from Evangelical Christianity." Presumably he stopped adding new posts when he came to believe that he had said all he needed to say about that de-conversion. One of the posts of this blog in particular intrigues me. It is dated June 18th of that year. I'll provide a summary in a second but if you'd like to read the whole thing, here's a link: http://formerfundy.blogspot.com/2010/06/defense-of-ethical-intuitionism-part.html Summary: Pulliam ceased to believe in the existence of the God of evangelical Christianity because he came to believe that the God depicted by that tradition would be a highly unethical being, if He existed. And that inference takes most of the point out of postulating His existence. In order to reach such a conclusion, one needs an Archimedean "place to st...