Thank God for the Fallen -- Memorial Day

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I took my two oldest boys to the Memorial Service at L.A. National Cemetery. The ceremony was the most meaningful Memorial Day I have ever celebrated.

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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

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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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Can someone explain this to me?

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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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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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Problem With Materialists Understanding of Physical Laws

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On the one hand you tell me that laws of physics are just descriptive and they don't determine anything. On the other hand you say that there is natural world that extends beyond our space/time, presumably to anything physical? So you see the dichotomy of nature/spirit as physical, tangible, visible vs "in" and "un" and "non" versions of these, intangible, invisible, non physical. But how can it be that "nature" extends all over existence beyond the realm of all we know to all other realms anywhere and yet there are no prescriptive physical laws? It seems to me that to be able say that you would have to have a set of laws that delimit what can happen. Otherwise how can you possibly know there is not a universe in which all existence is immaterial? Here are some quotes about Big bang cosmology. They are from major physicists and some obscure physicists and the major upshot of them is we have no physics to explain the big bang. No Physics to ex...
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Meaningless universe built into modern secular ideology

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We want to know origins. We want to know why we are here even if there no real reason (we want to know that too). This is why we don’t see scientists just throwing up their arms and saying “there's no way to tell it's all here that's all.” They are still making theories because we want to know. We don’t find it satisfying to just leave it hanging. Perhaps there is no actual reason and saying that is not satisfying than sloughing off the question as though it's not important; that is most unsatisfying of all. Yet modern secular thought can't even ask the question much less answer it. It's not enough to merely talk about planetary formation and how the galaxy emerged. That's not an answer to the question “why are we here?” Even if the answer is “there is no way to know” we still want to know that definitively. Modern secular thought can't give a definitive answer because the question is out of bounds. That is a metaphysical question and modern thou...
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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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