CADRE Comments

My focus today is on people who have conversations with God. I allude there to a fad author of some years back named Neale Donald Walsch, who sold millions of copies of books in which he recorded his alleged interactions with divinity. Walsch was a New Age sort of crank, but Christians have cranks of similar tendencies among their own ranks.  The variations within the ranks are legion. They range from the sublime (Charles Stanley saying that some vague "inner rustling" told him to not hire someone) to the ridiculous (Joyce Meyer saying that God told her to make fruit salad for her husband, smile in the shower, and keep her eyes open during sex). However, they all have this in common: They boldly claim to hear from God without any sort of evidence. Deuteronomy had some strict tests for those who claimed to hear God's voice. The penalty for being wrong was a shower of stones. I have asked whether Meyer would be so quick to claim God was giving her such messages if it mean...

https://metacrock.blogspot.com/2018/11/phenomenology-and-epistemic-judgement.html I am defending my experience argument against atheist philosopher Eric Sotnak

The last time I argued about the Jesus myth Idea I was told that there is now a serious renowned Bible Scholar who supports the Jesus myth idea, his name is Thomas Brodie. I have not been able to obtain his works as yet but I did cone across an article on a blog by someone named Tom Dystra, who argues for Brodie's work [1] .Dystra takes Brodie's side against Bart  Ehrman , I will discuss his arguments about Brodie and  Ehrman. Ehrman’s key point was the existence of multiple independent witnesses to the historical Jesus.  He considered Mark, Q, L (Luke’s special material), and M (Matthew’s special material) all to be independent witnesses, and he even cited the Gospel of Thomas and later sources such as Papias, Ignatius, and 1 Clement. Brodie argues that none of these are genuinely independent witnesses.  All of the New Testament sources are actually dependent on Old Testament texts and each other, and later sources are dependent on the New Testament...

If you've been a Christian for any length of time, chances are you know someone for whom a Chick tract was instrumental in their conversion. The little things are everywhere: On bus station benches, inside public restrooms, and handed out on street corners. They are ubiquitous, and as the company's puffery states, they get read. That they do get read (and believed) is also one of the greater tragedies of the modern church. No, I don't mean what can be extracted from them in terms of the salvation message, though there are countless more reliable and more beneficial sources that could have come from (like, um, the New Testament), and unless you are a very sort of strange Calvinist, you won't think that God could only have moved a person through a Chick tract. Jack Chick, however, once claimed to have been inspired by Chinese Communists who also used cartoon tracts to persuade people. That he thought of this as a good role model is in itself disturbing. He didn't on...

The Empirical Study of Mystical Experience https://metacrock.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-empirical-study-of-mystical.html This article is a summary my book,  the  Trace of God  by  Joseph Hinman  ( available on Amazon ). I recently   posted essays  showing that the true Christian concept of Supernatural is mystical experience nothing more. Now I show mystical experience is empirical, thus SN is empirical. I wrote this for an academic conference,  it was accepted. I posted it in two parts that's I'm uniting them here. The argument from religious experience is deemed too subjective to be of any real interest to rationally minded skeptics. Yet over the last 50 years, a huge body of empirical scientific work has emerged in peer reviewed journals that strengthens the case for religious experience as a God argument. Unfortunately, this body of work is largely confined to psychology of religion and is v...

Today on Metacrock's Blog   Joseph Hinman   (aka Metacrock) deals with the argument that atheists have mystical experience without God https://metacrock.blogspot.com/2018/10/psychology-atheists-and-mystical.html

Messiah gate Jerusalem summary of the argument  (1) The Messiah is shown to have the same name as the high priest (2) the name of the High priest is Jesus (3) Therefore Jesus will be the sameofthe essiah (4) The two messiah (Davidic and Priestly) are shown to be aspects of the same Messiah. (5) This means Messiah will atone for sins of his people and will sit on the Throne of David (6) Jesus of Nazareth ha the right nae and  fits aspects of both messianic figures, and he is the only one in hisotry who can make these claims, The two figures in Zachariah (the High Priest and the King) probably both refer to the same Messiah. Both are each two different symbols for the same figure. The high priest Joshua (Jesus) represents the Messiah's priestly function and his atonement for sin, and  Zerubbabel   (Davidic line) represents his genealogical line.This tags Jesus of Nazareth as the actual fulfillment becuase no other candidate for Messiah in history w...

The Anti-Missionaries would have us believe that everyone of the Quotations on the first page, "Jesus Christ:King Messiah" is merely figurative becaue they all come from Midrash, and that they are suspect because they derive form sources such as Driver and Nebaurer (even though they never really say what's wrong with Driver and Nebarauer other than the fact that they are quoted by Jews from Jesus). chronology of the sources. by Glenn Miller From his website "The Christian Think Tank" (Miller actually does have an advanced degree in Theology and Bibical studies form Dallas Theoloigcal Seminary) Here he goes through a basic summary of the sources in which we mind all the extra-Bilical references to Messiah among Jewish believers up to two centuries after Jesus of Nazerath. In other words all of the early souces that would reflect ideas floating around in Jesus' day and bit beyond it. Glenn Miller's Chr. Think Tanks http://www.christian-thinkta...