CADRE Comments

Out of the 4 Gospel accounts, Mark is generally believed to have been written the earliest (c. AD 66-70, or potentially earlier). In the Gospel of John, the divinity of Jesus is emphasised in particular, but is the same evidence for Jesus’ self-understanding also present in the synoptic Gospel of Mark? Here are three paradigm-shifting passages on Jesus’ self-understanding as God Incarnate from Mark: 1) The Baptism of Jesus – Mark 1:9-11 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Given how subtle the general narrative of Mark is, the strong nature of this experience is very significant – literally a direct affirmation that Jesus is the very Son of God, in a literal sense. This would later cause an extremely hostile r...

A few days ago on You Tube, I found an interesting comment in Brain Outy’s discussion page (here is a link to her main page): Brain Outy's You Tube Page This lady also has a website: Brainout's Lord Pages First, I will start with some background about her: She goes (or used to go) to the Berachah Church in Houston. R.B. Thieme II used to be the pastor there until he passed away several years ago. According to some things I have heard and read about this guy and this church, I am glad I never went there: Internet Monk: Whatever Happened to R.B. Thieme II Thiemite Blog This pastor believed in some un-biblical things, like Super Grace, Ultra Super Grace, and the Privacy of the Priesthood to name a few. As for this Brain Outy lady, I have read through her site, and I think that she said something about how the Devil can eventually beat God (or something). If she believes that, then she is a little messed-up. Now, on to the comment. It had to do with a video that she d...

CRITICS OF THEISM, along with some theists, often claim that divine foreknowledge contradicts human free will. “Since God already knew what actions you were going to take,” they argue, “it follows necessarily that you had no choice but to take those same actions.” Basically, the argument for theological fatalism holds God’s knowledge to be the ultimate causal agent of all future outcomes, hence the ultimate metaphysical outworking of the pragmatic principle that “knowledge is power.” It is my belief that properly understood, knowledge comprehends true states of affairs, but does not and cannot create them. (To put it another way: Even if God personally dictated our future, he would have to do so by means other than mere knowledge of our future.) There is accordingly no sound reason to believe that God’s prior knowledge of human decisions freely rendered should not represent a true state of affairs.   At stake here is much more than academic philosophy or theology. For Chr...

In his excellent inaugural post our newest contributor, Elliot Swattridge, tells us that Mark did mention the resurrection .I thought it might complement if I told us how he didn't make it up. At lest the empty tomb was already part of the Christian tradition when Mark wrote. The crux of the Easter faith is the empty tomb. Atheists and sketics believe they have proved that Mark made up the empty tomb.Peter Kirby once defended the idea, claiming a huge number of scholars agreed with that. I'm not sure if he still holds to that or not. The paper is still up and the argument was made so I will  refute it. Peter Kirby once wrote: Several schoalrs doubt the historicity of the empty tomb. I intend to set out the reasons for disbelieving the empty tomb story. I will argue that the empty tomb narrative is the invention of the author Mark. This conclusion will be supported by showing that all the reports of the empty tomb are dependent upon Mark, that there are si...

The Gospel of Mark is often puzzled over: while often accepted as the earliest of the four gospel accounts in the New Testament (written c. AD 66-70, or potentially earlier), it ends abruptly as the women who had discovered the empty tomb “went out and fled … for terror and amazement had seized them” (16:8). It is widely believed that, since the shorter and longer endings to Mark after 16:8 were not present in the earliest manuscripts, they were not original to the text; this is a consensus to the extent that most modern Bible translations make this clear by bracketing off these sections. This means that the original version Mark makes no direct reference to seeing Jesus raised from the dead. Does this imply there was a legendary development of a Resurrection narrative from the basic Mark narrative to the more detailed accounts in the other gospels? If this were the case, two concepts would need to be true: Mark must be the earliest source available referring to the dea...

In response to my recent post, Saturday Night Vile: What's So Funny about Antichristian Bigotry? , one Anonymous countered in part:   You are the targets of this kind of scorn because you cry "I'm being persecuted" when you are not allowed to force others to conform to your faith. The effort to show other religious symbols at their respected holidays becomes a "war on Christmas". The request to be treated equally under law becomes a denial of your rights to refuse to serve people you deem unworthy of your business. You hold up individuals who hold illegal prayer rallies while crying outrage that a Muslim might lead a sanctioned public prayer. You fight to have your religious laws equally displayed with federal/state laws. Now I would normally not bother much with comments like this, but I think it serves as a good representative sample of an increasingly common mindset in an increasingly post-Christian society. According to a recent article in t...

http://atheistwatch.blogspot.com/2016/04/challenge-to-athyeists-especially.html I am debating three atheists at once, I made an open challenge to atheists to debate my Cosmological argument. They are outnumbered but I'm taking it easy on them.;-)

    For many years I have been ambivalent about Saturday Night Live . The show has always been slanted against conservative-evangelical types like me, but usually with plenty of funny and mostly harmless material thrown into the mix. One recent politically geared sketch was so completely over-the-top, however, that after 40 years of sporadic SNL viewing I've finally sworn off it for good. The (overly) offensive bit was "God Is a Boob Man," a spoof of the movie God's Not Dead 2 .   In it a Christian woman named Beth, played by Vanessa Bayer, is working at a bakery when she is asked to make a wedding cake for a gay couple – an obvious reference to the discrimination case in Colorado a couple of years ago in which a Christian bakery owner was (successfully) sued for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Conflicted, Beth starts to make the cake, but then breaks down and refuses because of her Christian beliefs. This leads to what are supposed to be side-...

This week, I want to share a discussion that has been going on over at the Atheism-Analyzed blog: http://atheism-analyzed.blogspot.com/2016/01/hawking-and-probability-wave-creation.html They have been having an interesting discussion about the Hartle-Hawking state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartle%E2%80%93Hawking_state Here is an excerpt from Stan’s article: The procedure to evaluate anything Hawking et al say is to list all of the serial assumptions which are made and which have to be “the case” in order for his theories to be valid, and then to see at which of the assumptions empirical validation automatically cease, leaving the theory to be a bedtime story for physicist speculators. This theory is no different. OK, first off it is not the Wave Theory of the Universe, it is Wave Theory Within an Infinite Multiverse which is both external to our universe, and contains our universe.

Helmutt Koester This is my contribution to a book Called Defending the Resurrection edited by J.P. Holiding. I urge the reader to buy it as there are many fine arguments made in it. Not all of this article was used. This is its original form it was changed substantially in several ways, such are the needs of editors. Introduction Skeptical machinations are endless, anytime the tide turns toward the apologist the skeptic will take a further step back and seek to change the ground rules in a fundamental way. So it is with the perennial resurrection debate since the tide was shifted by McDowell and then by Craig, years ago. One of the major tactics used by skeptics to change the ground rules has been to uproot all points of the compass so the apologist can’t get his/her bearings as to what events are actually historical and thus defensible. To accomplish this, the skeptic has partly pulled off a resurrection of his own, by resurrecting old ninetieth centu...