CADRE Comments

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason. During the discussion phase of his talk, we engaged on the issue of sharing with others the Gospel message and the idea that everyone believes themselves to be "good enough" to get into heaven. He used an illustration that I want to share with everyone because it does illustrate in understandable language one particular aspect of the limits of goodness that most Christians don't explain particularly well. As anyone who discusses Christianity with non-believers already knows, most people think of themselves as being pretty good. If there is a heaven, most people reason, God is going to allow the good people to enter and somehow punish the bad people (if by no other means, simply by keeping them out of eternal paradise). This idea appears quite sensible to most people because we all seem to have an in-born sense that Hitler or Stalin should not be spending eternity in paradise after being res...

I expect that most readers who are the least bit attuned to popular movies will have seen and can remember the movie Independence Day starring Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman. For the rest of you, let me assure you that Independence Day wasn't the type of movie one would expect to find featured at an art house. It was more of a typical guy movie with lots of explosions, ground-breaking (at the time) special effects and huge crowds at the box office. (The movie grossed a whopping $817,400,878 world-wide, but like most highly popular movies didn't garner any Academy Awards other than the typical "Visual Effects" award.) Interestingly, I think that the reaction to the film by the audience makes a point that many skeptics don't grasp when reading certain Bible passages. For the small minority who spent the 1990s in an cultural isolation chamber, Independence Day centered around the arrival of several huge alien spacecraft which hung over major cities aro...