New blog

By Weekend Fisher -
A new blog may be of interest to some in the on-line Christian community:

Heart, Mind, Soul, and Strength is a blog which I'll be writing, covering topics ranging from apologetics to Zen. Most of the content will be outside of the normal editorial content of this blog, hence the new blog. Drop by and give it a read. The site is still under construction; links to my favorite sites around the blogosphere will be coming shortly.

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How Many Children in Bethlehem Did Herod Kill?

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A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about the Gospel of Matthew’s account of the slaughter of the innocents. Therein, I argued that some of the skepticism about the account was unjustified. One argument I made was that the number of children killed in Bethlehem would likely have been no more than 20. Though obviously an act of great evil, the killing of 20 children would be much less likely to be noticed by historians of the time than the slaughter of thousands as later traditions speculated. In response to the post, Peter Kirby asked a few questions. He has patiently waited my response, continuously delayed by work, family, and the completion of my Acts article . Two of the questions had to do with how the amount of 20 was determined. Others with the omission of the account by Luke and the reliability of the tradition recounted by Macrobius. Peter also mentioned that there were other reasons to doubt the story's historicity beyond just the silence of other sources. I ...
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The Bogus Gandhi Quote

By J. P Holding -
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I first made this post in 2012, and since then I've made a sort of mini-career out of tracking down bogus quotes like this one (including a video version below). It's a sort of fun microcosm of the way information is mishandled in the Information Age. ** I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. – Mahatma Gandhi A Christian can probably expect to get this quote thrown at them at least once in their lifetime, and waved in their face many more. I had it put to me recently, but my experience with this sort of thing immediately led me to wonder -- is it real? The evidence at this point seems to be no. The first signal of a problem was that anywhere I found it, no source was given. That's often a sign that something is being passed around uncritically. Whether online sources or books, no one seemed to have a source for this quote. A second warning was that the quote has been given more than one context. As ...
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Where did Jesus say "It is better to give than receive?"

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Do you say this of your own accord? (John 18:34, ESV)

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One of the most well-known events in Scriptures is Jesus' exchange with Pontius Pilate at his trial as described in John 18. In verse 38 of that chapter, Pilate asks the question that may be the most ironic in the history of the world, "What is truth?" A less known but equally intriguing saying of Jesus from an apologetics viewpoint can be found in Jesus' response to an earlier question in the same trial. It is a question that is not often quoted, but on those rare occasions when it is quoted, Jesus' response is often overlooked as not particularly important or relevant to today's world. However, it is my experience (as well as the experience of many people who have truly spent time studying the Scriptures) that little, if any, of what Jesus said in the Bible lacks significance across time. To best understand the response, it's important to see the response in context. The situation is this: Jesus has been arrested following His betrayal by Judas I...
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On the Prior Probability of the Resurrection

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Recently a friend on Facebook argued that Christians have no business declaring the Resurrection of Jesus to be the most probable ( a posteriori ) explanation for the relevant facts, since they are unable to first pin down the prior probability of the Resurrection independent of those facts. I think that's a reasonable enough objection and deserves a reply. After all, posterior probability by definition is a function of both likelihood on the evidence and prior probability. [1] Clearly, then, one cannot determine posterior probability without some idea of the prior.   My friend went on to say that the prior probability of a hypothesis is typically established as a ratio of previous instances of the event and total opportunities for the event to have occurred: "Normally we determine the probability of X by how many occasions of X we have seen out of how many opportunities for X there have been. Is the resurrection of Jesus some kind of exception?" This amounts t...
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Resurrection harmony

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The purpose of this argument is merely to establish that the events described in the four canonical Gospel resurrection accounts can be construed as a coherent event. Atheists are always harping on the many differences in the accounts. They seem to feel that these amount to insurmountable contradictions, marking a totally contradictory story. But I will argue that we can pull together the events described in all four Gospels to create a unified harmony which shows that there was a single coherent event taking place.This may not mean that call differences vanish away, but most of them can be explained by the process of eye witness testimony and story telling based upon the accounts of eye witnesses. There may be a couple of loose ends, but I will argue that these are not important when one considers the over all agreement and ensuing harmony, (for harmony table click here) * my model: (1) women go to tomb find stone moved, immediately  they suspect the Romans or Sa...
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Do God's Omniscience ,Omnipotance, and free will Contradict?

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An atheist guest comes knocking at the door of the comment section with a string of canned arguments we've answered a million times, hurled lake a gauntlet as though we have never see it before: God is asserted to be all good, all loving, all knowing, all powerful, in possession of free will and having imparted free will to human beings as well as being eternal and uncaused as well as outside of space and time while acting in a time sequence of events within space and time. Sorry, one simply cannot make rational sense to reconcile all these asserted properties. They contradict each other in various ways making the whole package incoherent by it's own theistic definitions. Here is an old answer I put up on Metacropck's blog in 2011, again in 2013: Atheists think it is. I've seen many a knock down drag-out fight, multiple threads, lasing for days, accomplishing nothing. I wrote that dilemma off years ago before I was an internet apologist, ...
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Can someone explain this to me?

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This was a post on the Debunking Christianity blog. It's by Loftus and then when I answered some another atheist comes in: Loftus: I find it odd that otherwise intelligent people can misread so badly what Beversluis had written about C.S. Lewis. I think it's because many Christians hold Lewis in some sort of iconic status that any criticism, even a mild one, and even if correct, is seen as a personal attack on their hero. 9:17 AM, June 26, 2008 Blogger J.L. Hinman said... I couldn't stand Lewis for a large part of my Christian life. I only began to finally gain some respect for him as i began going to graduate school and actually learned enough to realize that he knew a great deal more than I did. The problem is that skeptics can't understand faith. Probably they are too busy being skeptical about it. So faith is transitory. I grows. Growth means change. so when faith changes skeptics think it's been lost. Its not lost it's just changed. 8:59...
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1500 Year Old Bible Found Predicting Islam! (except not really)

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So, back around 2000, some smugglers were caught smuggling antiquities around Turkey, and a quite interesting text was picked up while raiding them (or so the story goes), written in gold(ish?) ink in Syriac on leather. Now it's mid-December 2015, and more importantly Christmas time, and more importantly than that it's time to generate some hits on websites y'all! So let's see just how much anti-Christian conspiracy we can wring out of this curiosity! Or maybe get some web-hits out of pouring cold water on the feverish fires of anti-Christian conspiracy. Y'know, whichever. Option 2 sounds more fun, so let's go with that. • SO IS THIS A 1500 YEAR OLD BIBLE?! No, because it isn't a "Bible". It's one text. Which would still be pretty interesting, but don't be fooled by hysterical claims of it being a "Bible" (except in the sense of it being a book, loosely speaking). There are actual collections of scriptural texts that are 1500...
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Could Quantum Tunneling Explain the Universe?

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The Kalam Cosmological Argument presents an argument for the existence of God from the existence of the universe by posing a series of three dilemmas, each of which builds upon the other. The three dilemmas are as follows: (1) The universe had a beginning or it did not have a beginning. (2) The beginning of the universe was caused or it was not caused. (3) The cause of the universe was personal or it was impersonal. The three dilemmas present the three questions in "A or not-A" styles. Thus, it is not possible to choose some other intermediate ground on these issues. Either the universe had a beginning or it didn't -- there is no middle ground. It is only if the question is answered in the affirmative that one would move on to the second question. I think that most people now acknowledge that the universe had a beginning. While there remain models for a beginningless universe, most scientists that I have read seems to agree that the universe is expanding and it is acceler...
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