CADRE Comments

I never realized that actress Kiera Knightley was a comedienne. The only problem is that she probably doesn't think of herself as a comedienne either. She probably thinks of herself as a serious thinker. Allow me to elaborate. In our adult education program last Sunday, the teacher used the meme above in the class PowerPoint as part of a discussion of world views and atheism. In the event the reader is unable to see the meme above, it shows a photo of Ms. Knightley with a quote that reads, "If only I wasn't an atheist, I could get away with anything. You'd just ask for forgiveness and then you'd be forgiven. It sounds much better than having to live with guilt." Now, I didn't comment about the quote in class, but whether Ms. Knightley realizes it or not, her thoughtful words are basically a retelling of a joke that Emo Phillip s (an acknowledged comedian - and a very funny one, at that) shared as part of his stage act in the late 1980s or early 1...

Shades of the old days! I haven't thought about this topic since about 2005. Our atheist friend "I'm Skeptical," (aka "Skepie") responded to J.P.Holding's piece on Hitler and Christianity by linking to a source,  Coel Hellier, an astrophysicist who argues that there were religious influences in the Nazi movement. [1] This is supposed to Prove  that Hitler was a Christian and the upshot of that is if you think like a Christian long enough you become Nazi-like, They never really state this last move openly but I really don't see why they are obsessed with Hitler being a Christian if that's not it, Of course now they have put a creationist/evolution spin on it that wasn't there way back in the early ought when I used to give a damn about this topic. The new spin allows them to stop short of saying Christianity = Nazism because they can just say creationism = Nazism., It's still guilt by association, Oddly enough the sour...

This is a chapter from an ebook I did which included a look at the works of Alexander Hislop -- the Christian version of Acharya S. Sadly, even Christian leaders as prominent as John MacArthur fall for this kind of stuff. *** Who can forget those "Where's Waldo?" books, where you had to strain your eyes while scanning a giant cartoon picture looking for that one guy with the glasses, the striped shirt and the funny hat? If you were good at finding Waldo, you might also be good at finding Semiramis. She isn't in the Bible. She's also not in the works of the Jewish historian Josephus. So, we have to ask ourselves a question. Alexander Hislop says that Semiramis is pretty important as the wife of Nimrod, and co-founder of the Babylonian mysteries. But how can this be the case about someone who isn't even found in the Bible? Let's start this round with a look at the history of Semiramis in the real world. The most complete and detailed history o...

  From time to time someone will announce here that Christian apologetics is a sham discipline because it presupposes the truth of what it sets out to discover. Given that apologists are theologically biased from the outset, they must cherry-pick their facts in order to support the truth of Christianity and at the same time spurn unwelcome alternative views of the world. Thus apologetics is a grand exercise in question-begging. Or so we're told. This purportedly intellectually deficient – or worse, intellectually dishonest – apologetic approach is usually contrasted with the virtues of "science," in which discoveries are confirmed only as they clear various objective methodological hurdles like repeated observations, consistent measurements, careful experimental designs, statistical analysis of findings, peer review, and so forth.    Now at first blush there seems to be a grain of truth in the charge. Having personally experienced the presence of Christ an...

Atheists are intent upon echoing the constant refrain, "no empirical proof for God."   If God is empirical then the lack of empirical proof counts against belief. Yet, there's more to this than just a demand for evidence of some fact. They have vested an entire world view imn the notion that empirical knowledge is the only valid knowledge. So they are willing to give up logically obvious positions in order to get this child's advantage of being able to insist that our little limited view point on this dust mote in a vast sea we have yet to plumb,  is somehow indicative of real empirical proof of the nature of the universe. One example of the sacrifice of logic to push empiricism is seen in my recent confrontation with an atheist (call him "Dusty") on Victor Reppart's  Dangerous Idea  blog.  [1]  Defending Hartshorne's modal argument I advanced the notion that if God can be conceived analytically without contradiction then God is not impossibl...

This is a reprint of the last chapter of my ebook Hitler's Christianity . In it I address claims that in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, Hitler should still be reckoned a Christian because...well, because !! *** In spite of all the information we have presented in this volume, and the twisted nature of Hitler's Positive Christian beliefs, and of the Nazi persecution of mainstream churches, and in spite of the attempted destruction of European Jewry, there are critics who will nevertheless insist that this is insufficient to disqualify Hitler (or any Nazi figure) as a Christian. We will now consider a collection of objections designed to argue this point, although ineffectively. The Self-Profession Argument The first objection has been formulated by one online atheist source as follows: The basic problem (for religious folks) is that Hitler said he was a Christian, and God apparently didn't feel the need to disagree in public. We may disreg...