CADRE Comments

Lend an open ear to your local and/or national talk radio stations, news channels, or just about any other source covering the "War On Terror" in the last 4 years and the all to common word "fundamentalist" will be used as a lable to just about anyone. The term has breached the Evangelical circles for some time now and has recently been applied to the Islamic terrorists. Can a consensus be reached on a definitive definition when discussing religion? Is it true that Muslim terrorists who claim to follow the creeds of the Qur'an have extrapolated or falsely represented the original teachings of Mohammad--the founder of Islam? If not, can we truly call them "fundamentalists," or will have to drop the ball on that lable and configure another more accurate term? To begin, one ought to understand the traditional meaning of a "fundamentalist" with regards to religion. Historically, a "fundamentalist" was one who adhered to the core doctrin...

This week's Christian Carnival is up at Christ Web . The Carnival is a weekly index to various Christian blog articles around the web.

It is time to turn up the heat? I don't mean that literally of course. As apologists, we need to start letting our position be known. Whether it be through debate, talking to a friend, explaining certain things to others, or whatever, we need to increase the dialogue and get the Christian worldview position out there. Worring about the effectiveness of your argument (if you have studied the issue adaquately) not convincing every person who hears is not an excuse to try these things. After the research is done, apply it everyday. We apologists are something like intellectual soldiers, and soldiers fight. Let's turn up the heat and start dialoging.

One of the big rock and roll events of the past few weeks has been the Live 8 concerts organized by Bob Geldof and Bono to provide aid to Africa. The concert was available on television and over the Internet. Not surprisingly (at least not to me) was that the during and following the conference one of the largest increases in sales went to one of my favorite bands as a kid: Pink Floyd. When Pink Floyd released The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, it immediately went onto the top 100 on the Billboard charts where it remained for an incredible 741 weeks (for the mathematically challenged, that's over 14 years!). The album is superbly engineered by Alan Parsons, and many of the songs on the album like "Money", "Time" and "Us and Them", remain staples on most classic rock stations. Regardless of whether you like Rock and Roll, one has to be impressed with the skill, care and creativity that went into each and every song on this spectacular album. The re...

For those who are obsessed, like me, with who Bush is going to announce tonight as his nominee to replace Sandra O'Connor on the Supreme Court, my good friend Lores has kindly posted part of an email exchange we have been having on the process. Her blog is modestly titled, Just A Woman , but she offers excellent insights on culture and politics. Check out the rest of her posts if you visit.

If you are an apologist who enjoys writing, you may want to consider taking up the call for articles from the Countercult Apologetics Journal. The entire call for articles can be found here , but here is a taste of what the Journal is seeking: I would like to produce the first edition in Jan. 06 with articles, reviews, reports, announcements, recommendations, etc. This will start out as a Web based journal with the hopes of going to print (ETS type journal), with some articles online, in 2007. At this point it will be an annual publication. Below are ideas I have for this journal (kind of thrown together at this point). Target Audience: Scholars, pastors, teachers, missionaries, Countercult ministries, laymen. Material: Articles, book and article Reviews, editorials, reports, announcements, etc. Content: 1, Exegetical & theological articles 2. Book & article reviews: material written by evangelicals and/or non-Christian literature 3. Statisics on current growth rate, literature...

In an earlier post , I discussed a portion of a course offered at Suite 101 entitled The Philosophy of Atheism" and I said: The course is so incredibly shallow and superficial as to be a complete waste of time for anyone who is seriously interested in the issue of the truth or falsity of theism and atheism. His "hack-job" summaries of the arguments for the existence of God would be laughable if it weren't for the fact that his course may be being read by people without much knowledge of the subject. I may be reading the comments wrong, but it appears to me that at least one person thought I was talking about arguments advanced against theism by atheists generally when I said they were "shallow and superficial". Well, let me set the records straight. As the paragraph above shows, the thing that was "shallow and superficial" was the course being offered at Suite 101 -- not atheist arguments generally. In fact, I think that atheist arguments, while ...

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article called, " The Right Kind of Justice ." I don't want to focus on the majority of the piece. But I do want to address a paragraph that classified the basis of abortion as a "constitutional right to privacy." The section below contains this uninformed and false statement. "The far right's agenda for the court is a frightening one. Activists want a justice who will radically reinterpret the Commerce Clause and other parts of the Constitution to tie Congress's hands, so it no longer has the power to protect people from discrimination, unsafe working conditions and pollution. They want to obliterate the constitutional right to privacy, which is the basis not only for the right to abortion, but also for such elemental protections as the right to buy contraception." Setting aside the origin of "rights" for the more important question-- is abortion really a matter of privacy ? We can't ask thi...

The question is whether God is good, considering the evil in the world. If the focus of our answer is us defending God on paper, instead of God defending us in the real world, then we’ve already conceded the most essential point, and unnecessarily. Here I’ll visit the traditional definitions-and-syllogisms approach to theodicy in passing briefness, then move on to the worth of life, to hope, and to the goodness of God, which are the real essence of the matter. Mention and Critique of Definitions-and-Syllogisms Method The usual argument goes that if God is omnipotent, then he can do anything which is not self-contradictory. Self-contradictory is something along the lines of A = ~A. So is it possible for a human to exist who is capable of love, but who is not capable of turning love of self against God and neighbor? Here “love” is not specifically the romantic-variety love, but more broadly any valuing, appreciating, or desiring that we do. Is it inherently impossible to misuse lo...

2,000 Year Old Manuscript Fragments of Leviticus Found in Israel Those crazy Bedouins are at it again. A Bedouin recently sold two fragements of the Book of Leviticus to an archeologist who was provided the funding by Bar Ilan University. This would make them very old representations of Leviticus. The Israeli Antiquities Authority is testing them now to determine their authenticity. But this hardly seems the kind of find that forgers would be interested in faking.