CADRE Comments

My focus today is on people who have conversations with God. I allude there to a fad author of some years back named Neale Donald Walsch, who sold millions of copies of books in which he recorded his alleged interactions with divinity. Walsch was a New Age sort of crank, but Christians have cranks of similar tendencies among their own ranks. 

The variations within the ranks are legion. They range from the sublime (Charles Stanley saying that some vague "inner rustling" told him to not hire someone) to the ridiculous (Joyce Meyer saying that God told her to make fruit salad for her husband, smile in the shower, and keep her eyes open during sex). However, they all have this in common: They boldly claim to hear from God without any sort of evidence. Deuteronomy had some strict tests for those who claimed to hear God's voice. The penalty for being wrong was a shower of stones. I have asked whether Meyer would be so quick to claim God was giving her such messages if it meant …

https://metacrock.blogspot.com/2018/11/phenomenology-and-epistemic-judgement.html

I am defending my experience argument against atheist philosopher Eric Sotnak

The last time I argued about the Jesus myth Idea I was told that there is now a serious renowned Bible Scholar who supports the Jesus myth idea, his name is Thomas Brodie. I have not been able to obtain his works as yet but I did cone across an article on a blog by someone named Tom Dystra, who argues for Brodie's work[1] .Dystra takes Brodie's side against Bart Ehrman, I will discuss his arguments about Brodie and Ehrman.
Ehrman’s key point was the existence of multiple independent witnesses to the historical Jesus.  He considered Mark, Q, L (Luke’s special material), and M (Matthew’s special material) all to be independent witnesses, and he even cited the Gospel of Thomas and later sources such as Papias, Ignatius, and 1 Clement. Brodie argues that none of these are genuinely independent witnesses.  All of the New Testament sources are actually dependent on Old Testament texts and each other, and later sources are dependent on the New Testament. As for the Gospel of Thomas, d…

If you've been a Christian for any length of time, chances are you know someone for whom a Chick tract was instrumental in their conversion. The little things are everywhere: On bus station benches, inside public restrooms, and handed out on street corners. They are ubiquitous, and as the company's puffery states, they get read. That they do get read (and believed) is also one of the greater tragedies of the modern church.

No, I don't mean what can be extracted from them in terms of the salvation message, though there are countless more reliable and more beneficial sources that could have come from (like, um, the New Testament), and unless you are a very sort of strange Calvinist, you won't think that God could only have moved a person through a Chick tract. Jack Chick, however, once claimed to have been inspired by Chinese Communists who also used cartoon tracts to persuade people. That he thought of this as a good role model is in itself disturbing. He didn't only…