CADRE Comments

In an election cycle that is dominated by Bush bashing, anti-Iraq fervor, and over-hyping of the current financial crisis, some think that some of the other social issues are irrelevant. Yet, for those like me who are not huge Sen. John McCain fans, I find that I cannot, in good conscious, vote for Sen. Barack Obama, a candidate whose abortion views are so extreme as to make his views completely unacceptable. Let me make this clear: I am not a one-issue voter. If I thought that Sen. McCain's economics would send the United States into financial free fall, while Sen. Obama's views were the only things that could save the economy, then I might be forced to vote for Sen. Obama even if he were pro-choice/pro-abortion. But even in these troubling financial times, abortion remains an important factor in determining which candidate will receive my vote. However, even if I believed it would be economically disastrous to elect Sen. McCain, Sen. Obama's extreme views on abortion make...

Archaeologists in Israel, lead by Yosef Garfinkel of Hebrew University, report finding what is perhaps the oldest Hebrew text on a pottery shard at a site near Jerusalem. The site is an ancient fortress city in the valley were David slew Goliath. The shard and text are 3,000 years old. This would by far be the oldest discovered use of the Hebrew language. There is dispute over whether the language on the shard is "proto-Cannanite" -- used by people other than the Israelis, or Hebrew. One factor that Garfkinkel finds determinative is the presence of a common verb that is typical of Hebrew but not found in any proto-Cannanite writings (of which there is a fair amount). Carbon dating places the shard in the reign of King David. The "minimalist" approach to Israeli history doubts that such a figure, or people, existed at this time. If the ceramic is Hebrew, it would be weighty evidence against this school of thought. The site is a fortress city indicative of a...

Rob Bowman, author of The Religious Researcher , has posted a rather tongue-in-cheek blog in which he reveals some common debate tactics that are used on both sides in arguments about religion generally when one party is losing the debate. As the introduction to the aptly named Twenty Ways to Answer Someone If You Have No Case notes: Finding someone’s argument too tough to handle? Over your head in a matter of biblical exegesis, scientific evidence, or logical validity? Don’t despair. Now you can always respond to those smart-alecks and put them in their place. These are field-tested methods for diverting attention from the lack of substance in your argument. Never be stuck again for a snappy comeback! He then identifies twenty common tactics, including The Amateur-Status Violation, The Evil Nun / Mad Scientist Defense, The Hoagland Hustle, The Moroni Maneuver and The Sextus Empiricus Switch. Very good.

Over at Debunking Christianity, Harry McCall responds to those who claim that he and other apostates just don't 'get' Christianity with a challenge: for Christians to come up with a succinct description of what they take Christianity to be. What is it exactly that apostates misunderstand? It goes without saying that the word 'Christianity' can have many different connotations. Here I take it the challenge is to elucidate the cognitive content of Christian theism: what beliefs does it entail about the world, human beings, about history, etc.? Which of these are necessary and sufficient for someone to be labeled a Christian, and which are still important but peripheral? Obviously there is broad disagreement over this, just as there is over what makes someone a liberal or a conservative in politics or economics, what makes someone a naturalist or materialist in philosophy, etc. This disagreement is to be expected due to the way human cognition works (see for example ...

Many atheists react strongly against the idea that God is judgmental. They balk at the idea that God is a God of justice as well as mercy and will reward everyone according to their works. How can God be both a God of love and of judgment? What kind of insulated, utopian world do they live in? In Congo, a doctor keeps helping as rape victims keep coming When I read stories like this I hope with all my heart that God is a God of justice and that the wicked will not go unpunished. When an army uses gang rape as a weapon of war, this is not a matter of poor upbringing or having the wrong genes: this is cold, calculated atrocity designed to humiliate, traumatize and keep people under control. Those who perpetrate it are in full, rational command of their actions, and deserve the harshest justice one can imagine. This is not to say that the motive of God's justice is revenge. God's justice is fundamentally corrective, not retributive. But something has to happen to balance the moral...

Richard Dawkins, blowhard stalwart of the New Atheist movement, has made a rather stunning and significant admission in a recent debate. According to Is Richard Dawkins still evolving? by Melanie Phillips in the Spectator: This week’s debate, however, was different because from the off Dawkins moved it onto safer territory– and at the very beginning made a most startling admission. He said: A serious case could be made for a deistic God. This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force. A creator. True, he was not saying he was now a deist; on the contrary, he still didn't believe in such a purposeful founding intelligence, and he was certainly still saying that belief in the personal ...

A claim that is made is that a portion of the Biblical book of Proverbs is actually copied from an Egyptian source, Amenemope. According to Introduction to the Old Testament by Georg Fohrer, Abingdon Press, 1968, p. 321: As has long been recognized, the first subsidiary collection (22:17-23:11) is closely related to the Egyptian Instruction of Amen-em-opet, which probably dates between the tenth and sixth centuries BC. The introductory poem (22:17-21) and the ten themes discussed (22:22-23:11) follow--often word for word--their Egyptian source. Even the division of this source into thirty chapters ("houses") seems to have been borrowed by the Israelite redactor for the entire collection 22:17-24:22 (cf. 22:20, where the RSV correctly reads "thirty sayings" for the Hebrew "day before yesterday" or "adjutants"). Now, Benjamin Shaw, Associate Professor of Old Testament at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, has written a series of short b...

Through the Amazon Vine program I received a review copy of Churched , by Matthew Paul Turner. The subtitle is "one kid's journey toward God despite a holy mess." Part of the description on the back reads, "He spent his childhood trapped within the confines of countless bizarre, strict rules. And lives to tell about it." It ends describing the author as "a young man who, amidst the chaotic mess of religion, falls in love with Jesus." As you may have figured out, the author was "trapped" in a fundamentalist church. To be specific, an "Independent Fundamentalist Baptist" church. His family left the Methodist church when he was four and joined an IFB church where he attended until his graduation from high school. The author writes from the perspective of his younger self, immersed in a fundamentalist church. This is a clever way to make the church he attended and his family and friends look more bizarre and clueless than they l...

This November, the people of the State of California will be voting on Proposition 8 which could ban homosexual marriage in that state. On a site that I ran across called "Gather" (which I gather is a gathering site for gay rights people), an author (Troy W) published a short essay entitled Why California’s Proposition 8 Would Make Jesus Weep in which he said: In the name of “traditional family values” and spearheaded by conservative Christian groups a measure has been put on the California ballot to, for the first time in California history, add discrimination to the state constitution. This measure has no other purpose than to limit the rights of human beings to legally acknowledge their love for one another and make a binding commitment to one another. Now, I don't particularly want to get into the merits of this proposition. Needless to say, I disagree with the opinion of Troy W. both as to the purpose and effect of the proposition. I will say that it seems apparent ...

These are truly momentous times we live in. The world is caught in the grip of the worst financial crisis in decades, governments and individuals are just beginning to come to terms with a future of diminishing natural resources ( peak oil being just one example of the more general trend) and uncertainty and anxiety seem to pervade the cultural milieu. All these factors have renewed interest in the possibility of a systemic collapse of civilized order, whether through resource depletion, economic catastrophe, military escalation or all three, and the concomitant question of what life would be like on the other side of this collapse. Can we in the developed world really imagine a situation in which basic services like electricity, running water, medical assistance and food delivery to supermarkets were greatly reduced or non-existent? More importantly, what would be a proper Christian response to such a situation if it ever came about? What does Christian faith look like in a situat...