CADRE Comments

  We go together like rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong Remembered forever As shoo-bop sha wadda wadda yippity boom de boom ~Grease the Musical While I have no idea what it means to go together like “rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong,” there are certain people in history that are so closely associated that you can hardly think of one without thinking of the other. In the NFL, one might think of Joe Montana and Jerry Rice almost like a single person. If you are a fan of classic movies, hearing the name Ginger Rogers almost certainly brings to mind Fred Astaire.   In music, it is hard to say Darrel Hall without adding John Oates. They are connected in our collective minds. Thinking Biblically, there are similar groupings of people whose names flow off the tongue like they were meant to be together: David and Jonathan, Samson and Delilah, Cain and Abel (for bad reasons), Jacob and Esau, and on and on. One significant pair in the Bible from the period of the two kingdoms...

  “Skydaddy - A big daddy in the sky in whom most people believe, but no one has seen. He's a really nice guy unless you fail to submit to his will and/or doubt his existence, because then he will punish you forever. He's also kind of nazi about who you have sex with. But hey, a buddy is a buddy right?” – Urban Dictionary It seems as if I regularly run into people who won’t believe in a God that they cannot see. Oh, they will cover it with lots of other objections, but there is too much focus on the “Invisible Skydaddy” (one of the many demeaning terms atheists use to refer to God) to believe that a lot of it has nothing to do with the fact that he cannot be seen. Of course, it would be nice to be able to see God. Certainly, it is much easier to believe in something that you can see or touch rather than something that can be neither seen nor touched. But a scientifically-minded friend of mine shared with me the following illustration which he says he regularly uses when discu...

The truth : Even ancient thinkers recognized that the earth was tiny in relation to the immense cosmos. In any case, size doesn’t necessarily mean significance, as many theologians and philosophers recognized. ~ Dr. Michael Newton Keas Last time , I posted about a book dealing with science, history and Christianity that had graciously been made available for free both through Academia.com and Amazon.com by Dr. Michael Newton Keas entitled Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion . As part of that blogpost, I quoted part of the book’s introduction where Dr. Keas raised the supposed problem for God’s existence arising from the existence of an insignificantly small Earth in an almost incomprehensibly vast universe. He identified the myth: “Premodern scholars in the Western tradition thought the universe was small—a cozy little place just for human benefit. Modern science displaced this Church-sanctioned belief with a vast cosmos that revealed humans ...

Antarctica may be spectacular, but it most certainly is not a pleasant place to be. Sure, there are tours and cruises to Antarctica, but only a very few brave souls would be willing to spend a week on the frozen continent with only a backpack, a few supplies and some warm clothing – and no one would try it during the winter months. After all, Antarctica is 5.4 million square miles of virtually uninhabited ice that is, at minimum, inhospitable to humans. How bad is it? According to Universeonline.com , Antarctica is considered a desert, with annual precipitation of only 200 mm along the coast and far less inland. The temperature in Antarctica has reached −89 °C . There are no permanent human residents, but anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 people reside throughout the year at the research stations scattered across the continent. Only cold-adapted organisms survive there, including many types of algae, animals (for example mites, nematodes, penguins, seals and tardigrades), bacteria,...

"God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's also free to be bad." ~ C.S. Lewis This past week, we had two horrendous shootings in El Paso and Dayton. It saddens me to think of the evil that people can inflict on each other. Sometimes they do it in the name of religion, but there are multiple reasons (illogical though they may be) for someone to shoot someone, blow someone up or drive a car into a crowd that have nothing to do with religion; rather, they have to do with our sinful nature. Some will ask “where was God” during these events. That is the problem of evil in a nutshell. How can a perfectly loving, all-powerful God allow someone to hurt and kill innocent people? As I have written previously, the intellectual problem of evil has long ago been solved. C.S. Lewis’ ...

The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they have committed abominable deeds; there is no one who does good. Psalm 53:1 - The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God,” They are corrupt, and have committed abominable injustice; There is no one who does good. In my last two posts, I have looked at the question of whether Christians have weaponized Psalms 14:1 and 53:1 (they have) but whether the Biblical concept of fool means stupid or silly (it doesn’t). But now I want to turn to the remainder of these two verses because the verses add additional information that Mr. Cline found objectionable in his article, Myth - Atheists Are Fools Who Say "There Is No God": Are Atheists Foolish? Are Atheists Corrupt? Do Atheists Do No Good? Mr. Cline kicks up a great deal of dust over the fact that Christians only like to quote the first part of Psalm 14:1 but not the remainder. Mr. Cline writes, Calling someone a fool simply because they don...

Psalm 53:1 - The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God,” They are corrupt, and have committed abominable injustice; There is no one who does good. The Hebrew word translated as fool in Psalm 14:1 and 53:1 There is more than one word translated as fool in the Old Testament. The word used in Proverbs 1:7, for example, is the Hebrew word ‘eviyl (and while I don’t see that it is in the etymology of the English word “evil,” the similarity is appropriate, as we shall see). According to Gesenius' Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon (Gesenius) , the Hebrew word ‘eviyl relates to opposition to wisdom and importantly includes the notion of impiety, i.e., lack of reverence; especially for God. But the word used in Psalm 14:1 and 53:1 is a different word which communicates a lot about what the two Psalms are communicating. The Hebrew word used in these two Psalms is “נָבָל” ( nabal ). While the primary definition of nabal is “stupid, foolish” according to the Gesenius , the word is more o...

Psalm 14:1: The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good. Last time , I wrote about the inappropriate weaponization of the phrase “The fool has said in his heart ‘There is no God.’” This phrase can be found in Psalm 14:1 and again in Psalm 53:1. Too many Christians use the word “fool” as a pejorative consistent with the current dictionary definition which defines “fool” as being “stupid” or “silly,” and apparently non-believers understand it in that context as well. While the Hebrew words translated as “fool” or “foolish” do not mean “silly” or “stupid,” they are not complimentary. In Old Testament times as today, being foolish is not something to be embraced. That, however, is not the way that the Bible uses the word “fool” in these two Psalms. In this post, I will focus on the broad usage of the term, and in the next I will focus on the Biblical word translated “fool” in both Psalms. Foolishness as the ant...

Does God say only fools do not Believe in Him? The last time I wrote, I closed out my post with the following: The Bible is a book filled with deep meaning on many levels, and in all sincerity I have grown rather weary of sparring with Atheists over the Bible when they are reading it like it has no more depth than Harold and his Purple Crayon . But what else should I expect from those who the Bible rightfully calls fools (and not in the shallow sense that most Atheists take that to mean)? For those unfamiliar with that reference, the Biblical passage I paraphrased was from Psalm 14 which states in the opening verse: The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good. So, what do I mean when I say that most atheists don’t take that verse in the sense that it was meant to be taken? On its face, it seems pretty apparent – only fools believe that there is no God. It is my contention that the prior sentence I just...

A few years ago, Mo Collins and Bob Newhart teamed up to create a very funny skit about a woman who visits a psychiatrist due to her fear of being buried alive in a box. Bob Newhart, obviously comfortable with playing the part of a psychiatrist after playing the same role for many years on the Bob Newhart show, gives Mo Collins some advice that she does not expect. Obviously, Newhart plays an awful psychiatrist in this clip, and it is fortunate that psychiatrists and psychologists generally exhibit more knowledge, skill and care than Newhart's psychiatrist in the skit. People afflicted with any number of a wide array of emotional and mental wellness issues will almost certainly not respond well to a directive to "stop it" as the best method for treating a person with deep-seated psychiatric concerns. While it is possible to make light of psychiatric issues, the issues themselves are quite real and require the care of a knowledgeable and caring psychiatrist or psyc...