Spot the mistake in your own sentence!

Must have been deliberate.

Now please don’t go looking for mistakes on our website as retaliation. Please.

Whilst the self-sacrifice aspect may seem admirable, we have to put it into context. Consider the following metaphor: ten criminals, convicted of crimes such as murder, rape, theft, robbery, perjury and the like, are standing at the hangman’s noose. A man in the crowd without any criminal wrongdoing feels for their plight and volunteers to take their place, pardoning the criminals, and letting them go free. The innocent man is then hung until dead.

The idea of penal substitution is wrong on many counts because:
- It is not moral to punish the innocent for the wrongs of others.
- Giving pardon does not absolve the wrongdoer’s responsibility for their own actions.
- Substitution and pardon would confer upon its beneficiaries an unlimited permission to sin.
It is not just to leave the wrongdoer unpunished.

I don’t think Dawkins was trying to get a cheap laugh regarding the crucifixion story; he just seemed genuinely baffled that people thought penal substitution (in the form of torture and execution) was logically acceptable. Hopefully that made sense.

After several years of reading blogs I conclude that these sharp exchanges between people with different points of view almost always generate far, far more heat than light. Blogs seem to best for helping like-minded people to share information and to mildly revise one another’s thinking. Alan Jacobs (in an article on weblogs in May/June 2006 Books and Culture) said that blogs are ‘the friend of information, but the enemy of thought.’ I absolutely love blogs for getting news and opinion of all kinds, but the ‘dialogues’ are generally unhelpful. I’m sure everyone can point to one or two exceptions.

I’m always up for a friendly online discussion about beliefs, but I try to make it ‘personal’ contact as far as possible — so I stick to my blog and to Facebook. In both cases I’ve been part of some high-quality, friendly conversations where people have listened to one another and learnt a few new things. Like Luke, a number of these conversations over the years have significantly changed what I communicate about and the manner in which I do so.

In the case of my blog, my wife and I have found that we can set a pretty high bar for discussion by the way we write for and then respond to our readers.

The most helpful thing I’ve found is not to rehearse arguments but to focus on why we believe what we believe.

James, I tend to steer clear of massive online conglomerates, which I figure are most useful just for connecting like-minded people. Otherwise they tend to be far too time-consuming — there’s so much to wade through, and so many denizens to keep track of! +_____+

Always happy to thrash ideas out with you, James!

Cheers