CADRE Comments

I have responded to perceived wrongs as a jerk. Like any conflict, the middle east comes to mind, where everyone is saying "well we are justified in doing this to them because they once did this to us," then no one listens and it just builds like a snowball. I must admit that I have been chided by William Lane Craig and he has enabled me to see that I have been wrong in the way I respond to insults.He said that I am egging them on by the way I respond. I know he's right. That doesn't excuse the hateful "Dawkies" but it does mean i am not excused either. The terms "Dawkamentalist" and "Dawkie" are not attempts to make fun of atheists. It's attempt to give us a means of distinguishing between one kind of atheist attitude and another. Atheists have this option with Christians. They can say "it's not all Christians it's jut the fundies...." So we should have same kind of distinction. I emailed Craig to ask him if Loftus...

On his blog Reasonable faith Craig answers questions. I made a post to him about the rancor and hostility on message boards these days. Be sure and read the whole thing because he answers an atheist letter too. Here is part of mine: I have been doing Christian apologetics on the net for ten years. I have a Masters degree from Perkins School of Theology, and I was a doctoral candidate in history of ideas for ten years, but was forced to give my studies due to family tragedies. I also host several message boards and have done so since 1999. I have grown increasingly frustrated and angry over the nature of the atheist mentality on message boards. It was nothing like it is now when I first discovered boards. It used to be fun. I used to get the better of them all the time. I used be liked and appreciated for my learning and my knowledge. It's not about me, I'm not doing it to win arguments. But that is a measure of how things have changed. Because I am now regarded as a total fool...

Once again I am driven to examine my hobby of making God arguments. No atheist will ever admit that they prove anything. Actually that's not quite true. There have been a couple of people on message boards, although they may not have called themselves "atheists" who came to admit that my argument proved to them that there must be a God. While these two are rare, if they were willing to do that, there must be more who are toying with the idea. The problem is, God arguments really don't prove God's existence in the way that full blooded empiricists would like to have proven. We will prove the existence of bigfoot before we prove God that way. That's because God is not a "thing" in creation. God is not another item alongside light posts and swizzel sticks; God is the framework of reality, god is off scale for any sort of measurement. This would be like trying to prove the universal constant with a speedometer from a car. God arguments are a take on real...

Like many other pro-life voters I was inspired by the story of the Republican Candidate for Vice President, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. She is a mother of five. Her most recent child has Down syndrome. Gov. Palin learned this well before the birth, but -- living up to her pro-life beliefs -- did not abort. While reading about Gov. Palin, I ran across a shocking New York Times story about babies with Down syndrome. Perhaps I was naive, or just uninformed, but I had no idea that the abortion rate for the unborn diagnosed with Down syndrome is 90 percent. I like to think that this is not representative of parents nationwide. I have known women who were reluctant to take such tests or rejected them outright because they knew the results would not affect their decision. Still, 90% is a shocking abortion rate. In addition to the high percentage, the raw number of such abortions continues to grow. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is recommending that all pregnan...

Atheists demand "evidence." I don't think atheists care about evidence. Evidence just means that one has something to reason from. What atheists demand is absolute proof, and at a level that can't be given for anything. I would bet that if for some reason atheists didn't like science, no amount of scientific "proof" wood suffice to prove to them that science works; because they would demand absolute proof, which can't be gotten. In thinking about the two other threads I initiative over the last few days, and the atheist take on my arguments and their 'dicing' of my thought processes, and their refusal to acknowledge standard resiances that I give all the time, I find the following state of affairs to be a good description of the current state of dialectic between atheists and theists on the boards: (1) Theists have a vast array of knowledge and argumentation built up over 2000 years, which basically amounts to a ton evidence for the existence...

The desperation with which Jesus Myth sympathizers cling to the possibility of Christian copying of Mithraism is good evidence of their willingness to sacrifice reason and dispassionate inquiry. As a mini-case study I will look at the way a Jesus Myth website (jesusneverexisted.com) advances the Mithra-Christianity Copycat Theory (in an article titled, "Dress Rehearsal for Christianity"). This is Part 1. The article itself is not well organized, so please have patience as I work through it section by section. The Sources The site leads off with a list of 14 impressive sounding books identified as “Sources.” Although a few choice quotes are extracted from some of these books, most of the site's assertions are unsupported by any reference (to the listed sources or otherwise). For those tidbits that have citations, they generally are unrelated to the task of proving that Christianity copied Mithraism. Indeed, one of the books they cite so completely contradicts the si...

Occasionally, I have a question from a skeptic that really makes me think. It doesn't make me think, "Gee, maybe Christianity is wrong after all." I have responded to enough skeptical ideas over the last 10 years that I believe it is highly doubtful that any atheist will ever actually shake my confidence in Christianity (but they are welcome to keep trying). Rather, the question (which is usually designed to shake my confidence) usually makes me look prayerfully and more deeply into my own understandings of Christian philosophy. One such question came up earlier this week. Since I don't have permission from the skeptic to repost his question word for word, I will paraphrase the challenge. The anonymous skeptic was discussing the question of why there was evil in the world. Certainly, I have heard that question many times, and I have my approach for answering the question and it involves the Free Will Defense. For those unfamiliar with the Free Will Defense, here is a ...

I enjoy reading bumper stickers. Some seem to manage to capture a real truth in a very few words. Others, however, substitute a pithy saying for real thought or analysis. One of the latter is the bumper sticker that is rather prevalent in my area of the country that reads: "God bless the whole word, no exceptions." Obviously, this is a response to the bumper stickers that say, "God bless America." The person with the "God bless the whole world" bumper sticker apparently thinks that the person with the "God bless America" sticker is being too provincial and wants to be more inclusive. But is there really anything wrong with saying "God bless America"? Certainly, when a person says "God bless America" they are not saying "God bless America and no other country ." When the people at an American baseball game stand in the seventh inning and sing the song by that title, they are not trying to gain God's exclusive favo...

There are two basic reasons we can put this nonsense behind us: (1) There is no reason why we have to theorize that the original evangelists strooped to copying pagan lore when all the elements of the dying rising messiah were present in Judaism. (2) We can prove Jesus existed as a man in history. The Whole thesis that the story of Jesus is shaped out of bits and pieces of the mono myth, archetypes from all cultures that make up the basis of all mythology, is extraneous to the facts. All the elements of the Jesus story come from Judaism, including that of the suffering Messiah whose death has atoning implications for his people. This is nothing new. This fact has been known for more than two decades. It comes from several fragments found at Qumran, suggesting that Messiah would atone for the sins of Israel. In fact, the atonement implications were discussed in his book The Dead Sea Scrolls by John Allegro as ealry as 1962. But fragments from Qumran were discovered in the 80s. Dead Sea...