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Dr. Craig Evans and Dr. Bart Ehrman debate Jesus

February 1, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

Religion Soup: Ehrman/Evans Debate, Night 1

Religion Soup: Ehrman/Evans Debate, Night 2

Thoughts: I think that Bart Ehrman’s criticisms of the historicity of the New Testament in the first video are fascinating. I applaud him for bringing the topics under discussion into the public arena in the form of these and other debates. Would the discussion have reached the public arena, and made it onto my computer screen if Dr. Ehrman had remained silent? Perhaps, but I suspect Ehrman’s works have forced Christian scholars such as Dr. Craig Evans and Dr. Dan Wallace and Dr. James White to address these issues face on, and this is of great benefit to those such as myself.

Other resources: Dr. Craig Blomberg has some really useful materials relating to these debates here:

thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2008/03/26/interview-with-craig-blomberg/

Filed Under: Apologetics, Bible, Debates, History, Theology Tagged With: ,

New Testament Scholar Daniel Wallace: Is What We Have Now What They Wrote Then?

January 3, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

Filed Under: Apologetics, History, Theology

Christopher Hitchens, April 13, 1949 – December 15, 2011

December 16, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

New Atheist Christopher Hitchens has passed on.

Hitchens, who wrote for publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, Slate and Vanity Fair, rose to prominence for his divisive opinions, his unabashed atheism, his scorching critiques of popular figures like Mother Teresa Henry Kissinger, and, above all, his razor wit. (Reuters)

I personally admire Hitchens for having the guts to stand up for what he believed, even if I would disagree with him as his brother Peter Hitchens did (blog, Amazon book “The rage against God”).

Our condolences go out to his family.

From those I follow on Twitter…

  • C Michael Patton: Christopher Hitchens died today. #verysad vnty.fr/vFD9TU Prayers are with his family and brother.
  • Lee Strobel: Feeling grief at Christopher Hitchens’ death. I was among many who shared Christ with him; so sad he rejected Gospel.
  • Douglas Wilson: How to think about the death of the outspoken atheist.
  • Albert Mohler: The point about Christopher Hitchens is not that he died of unbelief, but that his unbelief is all that matters now. Unspeakably sad.
  • Rick Warren: My friend Christopher Hitchens has died. I loved & prayed for him constantly & grieve his loss. He knows the Truth now.
  • Joe Fleener: Christopher Hitchens has died. Let’s pray for his family & those who he’s influenced that they may repent & trust Christ.
  • Larry Taunton: I am truly saddened to hear that my friend and debating opponent Christopher Hitchens has passed away. Our thoughts are with his family.
  • Hugh Hewitt: I am at a loss of what to say about Christopher Hitchens except that he was towards me and my audience unfailingly gracious –and dazzling.

A small book by Hitchens and friend Doug Wilson is available here:

Filed Under: Apologetics, Atheism, Bible, Books, Debates, History, Morality, Worldviews

Hominid Hype and the Election Cycle

September 17, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Casey Luskin writes:

It’s that time of the election cycle again. You know, the time when the media starts regularly deploying the “evolution test” to decide whether a candidate is mentally impaired. Those who capitulate to the Darwinian consensus are deemed of normal intelligence and fit for office. Those who don’t are subjected to public mockery and humiliation.

Summary: Yeah, scientists are smart and everyone else is dumb. Now that we have that out of the way, we can look at Casey’s list of greatly celebrated then delegated fossil hoaxes.

  • Piltdown man — a fraud
  • Ramapithecus — touted as an ancestor of humans, then ‘paleoanthropologists soon afterward were lamenting, “Ramapithecus walking upright has been reconstructed from only jaws and teeth” with “his legitimacy sanctified by millions of textbooks and Time-Life volumes on human evolution.” In fact, those claims were overturned in the 1970s and 1980s when more complete specimens were discovered, showing the species was unlike humans, and probably an extinct orangutan-like ape.’
  • Homo habilis — later reclassified
  • In 2002, Sahelanthropus tchadensis was touted as the “oldest fossil human,” even though all that was reported was one skull and a few jaw fragments, which some paleoanthropologists have suggested might have belonged to a female gorilla.
  • Ida — introduced by the media as the “eighth wonder of the world” whose “impact on the world of palaeontology” would be like “an asteroid falling down to Earth.” Famed BBC broadcaster Sir David Attenborough got involved, making a documentary titled Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link, to explain why Ida is “the link that connects us directly with the rest of the animal kingdom.” Just a few months later, Ida’s reign came to a sad end after scientists inspected the fossil and determined that “[m]any lines of evidence indicate that [Ida] has nothing at all to do with human evolution.”
  • Ardi — Science journal’s “breakthrough of the year,” yet admitted that her bones were originally “crushed” and required over a decade of “reconstruction.” Other paleoanthropologists noted that Ardi was initially “crushed nearly to smithereens” and resembled “Irish stew.” Later, after cooler heads had prevailed, multiple studies found that Ardi was more similar to apes than humans, and concluded she was not a human ancestor. As Time magazine later reported, critical scientists regard “the hype around Ardi to have been overblown.”

Yeah, no wonder that we trust scientists like we trust clairvoyants. And human evolution is fact Fact, FACT — except when it is sham, Sham, SHAM. Global cooling Global warming Climate change hype… this is not science. It is philosophical and political hypemongering, coming from a secular priesthood trying its best to mirror and out-do the religious priesthood of the pre-Reformational Catholic church.

Listen to the audio presentation below:

Filed Under: Atheism, Creation/evolution, History, Intelligent Design, Politics, Worldviews Tagged With:

Britain’s liberal intelligentsia has smashed virtually every social value

August 16, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

From Melanie Phillips at MailOnline:

So now the chickens have well and truly come home terrifyingly to roost. The violent anarchy that has taken hold of British cities is the all-too-predictable outcome of a three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value.

The married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of the drugs laws and many more fundamental conventions were all smashed by a liberal intelligentsia hell-bent on a revolutionary transformation of society.

Those of us who warned over the years that they were playing with fire were sneered at and smeared as Right-wing nutters who wanted to turn the clock back to some mythical golden age.

Indeed, “The riots have been fuelled by moral collapse”…

When Labour came to power in 1997, it set about systematically destroying not just the traditional family but the very idea that married parents were better for children than any other arrangement.

Instead, it introduced the sexual free-for-all of ‘lifestyle choice’; claimed that the idea of the male breadwinner was a sexist anachronism; and told girls that they could, and should, go it alone as mothers.

This was the outcome of the shattering defeat of Tony Blair, in the two years or so after he came to power, at the hands of the ultra-feminists and apostles of non-judgmentalism in his Cabinet and party who were determined, above all, to destroy the traditional nuclear family.

Blair stood virtually alone against them, and lost.

One of these ultra-feminist wreckers was Harriet Harman. The other night, she was on TV preposterously suggesting that cuts in educational allowances or youth workers had something to do with young people torching and looting shops, robbing and leaving people for dead in the streets.

But Harman was one of the principal forces in the Labour government behind the promotion of lone parenthood and the marginalisation of fathers. If anyone should be blamed for bringing about the conditions which have led to these appalling scenes in our cities, it is surely Ms Harman.

And this breaking of the family was further condoned, rewarded and encouraged by the Welfare State, which conceives of need solely in terms of absence of money, and which accordingly subsidises lone parenthood and the destructive behaviour that fatherlessness brings in its train.

And finally a challenge:

When church leaders stop prattling like soft-headed social workers and start preaching, once again, the moral concepts that underlie our civilisation, and when our political leaders decide to oppose the culture war that has been waged against that civilisation rather than supinely acquiescing in its destruction, then — and only then — will we start to get to grips with this terrible problem.

Until then, within the smouldering embers of our smashed and burned-out cities, we can only look upon the ruins of the Britain we have so dearly loved; the Britain that once led the world towards civilisation, but is now so tragically leading the way out.

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2024690/UK-riots-2011-Britains-liberal-intelligentsia-smashed-virtually-social-value.html

Filed Under: Apologetics, Atheism, History, Morality, Philosophy, Politics, Worldviews

Why Are There Not More Riots?

August 16, 2011 by · 1 Comment

Much profound thinking from Justin Taylor:

C.S. Lewis, in his prophetic The Abolition of Man (1943):

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for these very qualities we are rendering impossible.  You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’.  In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.  We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Brad Green comments:

. . . A culture—the UK or otherwise—cannot generation after generation laugh at honour and virtue and then be surprised that a culture has produced people who have no interest in honor or virtue.  The most foundational question is not, “what caused these riots?”, but rather, “why are there not more riots?”  That is, a culture that systematically and repeatedly and thoroughly laughs at virute and honor should not be surprised when they look up to see traitors in their midst.  We cannot make “men without chests” and then be surprised to see them face-to-face.  May God help the UK, and all of us.

See also Theodore Dalrymple’s comments in The Spectactor:

I doubt there are many people who have never in their lives experienced the pleasure of inflicting some kind of pain on others, physical or mental, from sheer malice and delight in doing so. It is an urge that we overcome first by effort and then by habit.

It is one of the tasks of civilisation to tame our inherent savagery. But who, contemplating contemporary British culture, would recognise in it any civilising influence, or rather fail to recognise its opposite? It is a constant call to and celebration of degradation, not only physical but spiritual and emotional. A culture in which Amy Winehouse, with her militant vulgarity and self-indulgent stupidity, combined with a very minor talent, could be so extravagantly admired and feted, is not one to put up strong barriers against our baser instincts, desires and urges. On the contrary, that culture has long been a celebration of those very urges. He who pays the savage never gets rid of the savagery; and this is only the beginning.

Filed Under: Apologetics, Atheism, History, Morality, Philosophy, Politics, Theology, Worldviews

A Christian Terrorist in Norway?

July 29, 2011 by · 1 Comment

From here: www.ligonier.org/blog/christian-terrorist-norway/

Last Friday (July 22, 2011), a bomb went off in Oslo killing eight people and injuring many more. Soon afterward, a gunman went on a shooting spree at an island youth camp in Norway, killing 68 people. The gunman was arrested and later claimed responsibility for both attacks.

When interviewed by the police, Breivik claimed that his actions were intended to save his country and all of Europe from Marxist and Muslim infiltration. Because of his belief that it is failing on the issue of immigration, he wanted to create as much loss as he could for Norway’s Labour Party. The bomb, therefore, was placed near buildings occupied by Labour Party members, and the shooting occurred at a Labour Party youth camp.

Political terrorism has not been unusual in the twentieth and twenty-first century, but this attack hits home for those of us who claim to be Christian because Breivik has identified himself as one of us on his Facebook page. He claims to be a Christian. This has raised important questions in the minds of many. First and foremost, does Christianity promote such politically inspired violence? Some would say yes, pointing to the Crusades as an example. In the following article, however, Dr. Robert Godfrey says no: He rightly points out that it is a betrayal of Christ to “identify Him with the slaughter of political enemies. As Christians, we must seek always to advance Christ’s cause through truth joined by love and self-sacrifice, not through violence.”

Read “The Crusades” by W. Robert Godfrey

Filed Under: Apologetics, Atheism, History, Morality, Politics, Theology, Worldviews