How Oxford and Peter Singer drove me from atheism to Jesus

[muriel_volestrangler]

135. My thoughts are that for someone who apparently got her PhD from Cambridge, logic or clear writing

are not her strong points.

"The premise of human equality is not a self-evident truth: it is profoundly historically contingent. I began to realise that the implications of my atheism were incompatible with almost every value I held dear."

We can't tell why her atheism was a problem. She seems to have a problem with "believing that universal human value was more than just a well-meaning conceit of liberalism". Why? Why can't we just accept that it is indeed liberalism that has assigned universal value to all humans? That's one of the major reasons (perhaps, fundamentally, the reason) that we liberals like liberalism. We can see, as she points out herself, that "societies have always had different conceptions of human worth". Those that held slaves, committed genocide etc. were worse than modern liberal society.

Is she struggling to say that she needs to believe that a higher power must want everyone to be liberal - that it's not good enough for us just to work, as secular humanists, to persuade everyone of this?

She seems to believe the story of Jacob in the bible was written by God. Otherwise, how can she tell that it lets us know what God wants? It's profoundly worrying that a historian will pick an anecdote from the middle of a book of obvious myths, legends, and attempts by the priestly authors to justify their power and decide that one is true - as opposed, say, to the bit about Jacob's relations being turned into pillars of salt, or a flood that drowned the world.

She is, frankly, gullible. Not good for a professional historian.