CADRE Comments

I first made this post in 2012, and since then I've made a sort of mini-career out of tracking down bogus quotes like this one (including a video version below). It's a sort of fun microcosm of the way information is mishandled in the Information Age. ** I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. – Mahatma Gandhi A Christian can probably expect to get this quote thrown at them at least once in their lifetime, and waved in their face many more. I had it put to me recently, but my experience with this sort of thing immediately led me to wonder -- is it real? The evidence at this point seems to be no. The first signal of a problem was that anywhere I found it, no source was given. That's often a sign that something is being passed around uncritically. Whether online sources or books, no one seemed to have a source for this quote. A second warning was that the quote has been given more than one context. As ...

There are some who believe that science has sounded the death knell for the belief in God. But that is far from the truth. In fact, science -- understood and applied appropriately -- and belief in God -- a correct belief in the God of the Bible -- are not incompatible at all. There are still areas that we have not yet fully figured out how to reconcile, but that is not the same as saying that the science has somehow disproven God. Professor John Lennox recenlty appeared with Eric Metaxas (who has a really fine radio show ) at one of Eric's Socrates in the City events where Dr. Lennox discussed The Question of Science and God in two parts. Part 1, set forth below, begins by discussing the intriguing question of why numbers make sense. He notes that Einstein once said that the only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. He also sites Eugene Wigner's fine paper from 1961 entitled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natu...

The women at the empty tomb who were the first to preach the Gospel strike an important blow for women in the church, yet they are written off as made up, fictional, the product of folk lore, by the major and most accomplished scholars working under the assumptions of the from critical school.  Form criticism is a philosophy and methodology of Biblical criticism, "Criticism" in relation to the Bible does not mean talking about how bad the Bible is (too long and hard to understand) but refers to a means of analysis in a systematic sense. Form criticism seeks to analyze the historical development of  the New Testament by understanding the forms in which the writing developed. The major scholars of that scho ol were Rudolph Bultmann (1584-1976) and  Martin Franz Dibelius  (1883-1947).  The from critics understood the Gospels as folk lore, their major paradigm for this view was the collection of German folk songs which were popular f...

Recently, Mrs H and I broke down and took a radical step in our personal lives. We bought our first smartphone. It may be a surprise that this is being said by me in 2018. It's like saying we just now discovered the wheel. Especially since I'm hardly less than Internet savvy, right? The main reason we bought the thing had little to do with making phone calls. Mrs H is discriminating about her music choices and can't stand most of what's on the radio. (Especially the megaphonic 60 seconds ads.) We got the smartphone so she could stream music in the car on the way to work. Given the cost, though, we also made it our home phone. We didn't want to do that. Because our power company loses the juice every time a yak sneezes in Siberia, we had hoped to keep a landline. But we found out that (at least where we are) it's easier to get coelacanth teeth than it is to get a landline. I'd rather not have a "smart" phone following me around so that I...

At my job, I regularly teach a class on safely assisting individuals with medications. During the class, I note that I have a dog. The dog will eat anything except for what the veterinarian gives it. For some reason, that dog can sense a veterinarian's pill and spit it out. So what do I do? I wrap the pill in cheese. That dog will eat anything wrapped in cheese. But then, I add, people are not dogs. You cannot hide medication in food because that deprives the individual of the right to know that she is receiving a medication and her right to refuse the medication if she so chooses. To most people, that statement that people are not dogs is not a particularly shocking statement. It seems unobjectionable that people are not dogs (and it is equally true that dogs are not people). But what if I had said, “People are not animals”? What do you suppose would be the reaction? In some very important ways, people are not animals. I am certain that some people who read this will immed...

Our atheist friend the regular on the comment section "Pixie" has an argument about the Resurrection accounts that is interesting and deserves answering: Mark is clear that Jesus went on ahead to Galilee. This is in both chapter 14 and 16. The supposed appearances in Jerusalem contradict that. You page on harmonization fails to even mention Galilee, totally ignoring both Mark and Matthew!... Okay, I should have said oldest that we have, and therefore closest to the original. We know Luke and Matthew were based on Mark, and yet they chose to remove the claim that the women did not say anything. They (their respective communities) were adding their own embellishments, and it made more sense to have the women talk, so they changed the text. again: We have a whole bunch of facts that need to be pieced together to make a coherent narrative. The author of Mark wrote what he wrote for a reason. I suggest he wrote that Jesus went on ahead to Galilee because that is what h...