CADRE Comments

Just over a week ago, I received a phone call from a woman in Texas. I didn’t recognize the number, so I let it go to voicemail. The voicemail the woman left told me that Joe Hinman, a man who posted on the Internet under the Pseudonym of Metacrock, had graduated to be with the Father in Heaven. I was asked to come to the funeral and share some memories about Joe. I don’t plan to go to the funeral – it is a long way from where I live, and I have other obligations on the day in question – but I didn’t want to pass up on the moment to share a few thoughts on Joe. I never met Joe face-to-face. We did talk on the phone a few times, but never for very long. And I haven’t talked to him either over the phone or on the Internet for 10 years - not because I didn’t like him, but because my interest in doing apologetics online had waned for a number of reasons I won’t recount in this post. (I am still strongly Christian, so please don’t take my loss of interest in online Christian apologetic...

I began to engage in Internet apologetics back in the early 1990s and continued to engage skeptics multiple times weekly until the late 2000s. If you are like me, you may remember those days: it was the time of the rise of the New Atheism led by Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins (two of whom have now died). Its proponents used harsh rhetoric against Christianity. These New Atheists believed that theism generally and Christian belief in particular deserved mockery. They argued that it was irrational for someone believe in the “big sky daddy,” and they somehow thought that the counter-example of the “flying spaghetti monster” somehow made Christian belief foolish. (Hint, it didn’t.) It was difficult and required both study and imagination to respond. But respond Christian did, and as we responded, it seemed to make no difference. Those who were adamant New Atheists clung to their non-belief. (Of course, they would say that those of us arguing for Christianity were the ones who clun...

christianity is a personal relationship with God https://metacrock.blogspot.com/2025/02/christianity-is-personal-relationship.html,