CADRE Comments

I'm taking a break from my own blog this week for various reasons, so my post here is a repost of a 2010 post from my own blog. And yet, it could have been written yesterday as accurate as it is when it comes to the plague of erroneous information we suffer from today. I'll explain one reason why at the end. *** A reader asked me to have a look at something I’d rather have not seen: The Wikipedia page on the historicity of the book of Acts. Yes, of course: It’s a perfect example of why I call Wikipedia, “the abomination that causes misinformation.” Not just because it has outright errors, but because ideology can readily slant any of its pages when someone comes along with a bug in their nostrils. In this case, it is fairly clear that someone has come along who has been reading all the standard liberal commentators (eg, Haenchen) and thinks they’re gospel. Nearly all of the objections raised are old hat; I’ll put links to answers below, just for the sake of com...

Due to being busy on other projects, and also fighting off a nasty round of spring allergies, I didn't do an Easter series on the Cadre this year; and besides Joe was taking point on that this time. So I'll just put up a post for handy links to the first two parts of an ongoing series I've previously been working on, and call it a season. {g} Let me clarify and stress that the point of this series, is NOT to argue (directly anyway) for the historical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in any religiously Christian sense -- although, since I have somehow been mistaken by some fans of Richard Carrier in thinking I don't believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, I'll also clarify here that I do, with full trinitarian Christian theological meaning. (They were referencing a discussion I was having with Keith Parsons where I was taking the side of bodily resurrection vs a mass hallucination theory, not referencing this series; but eh, fans of Richard Carrier, in my ex...

[Note: I originally posted this on the Cadre in 2008; it seems relevant to repost now, as an explanation for why I'm not especially worried about 2 in 5 people in Great Britain thinking Jesus is non-historical. Original title: The Cultural Triumph of Scepticism (or, why the Jesus Myth theory will probably gain steam in Europe)] Keeping in mind this is from the London Daily Mail (via Fox News), and I haven't got a clue how the survey was conducted, but still -- if an estimated 25% of British citizens age 20 and younger don't believe Winston Churchill existed , then Christianity is most certainly doomed in Europe. But not for any reasonable reason. The same report also indicates significant numbers of the same respondents thought Ghandi, Cleopatra, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Charles Dickens (among others), had been invented for books and movies. (Though one might give a pass on Dickens if respondents believed this was an author pseudonym and so were responding in...

Eastern gate to Jerusalem, also called "Messiah gate" or "Golden gate." Messiah it is said will enter through this gate. I am angared by new rise in Jesus mytherism, It;s verydistrubimng becauseof the study thatshows us the following: 40% in Briton don;t believe Jesus existed https://www.premier.org.uk/News/UK/Two-in-five-think-Jesus-is-a-mythical-figure     We need to start addressing this big time,it;so uncalled. There are gobs of evidence for Jesus historicity but the mythers are so totally Argonaut and literally tell me I am an idiot for belief in Jesus as a man in history, Here is my post Peter Kirby's straw man argument om Talmudic evidence, I am not going to deal with any of the Pagan historians who document Jesus existence, such as Tacitus. Tacitus is defensible but it's not really the best evidence. Going by the best I've done Kirby's attempt at making the case on Josephus, Here I will deal wi...

Giotto's Resurrection W e think know because we've heard it all our lives but we probably haven't stopped to consider or understand the meaning of the resurrection. We must first understand why Jesus died. None of the referent metaphors used to communicate the event really stack up to the theological ramificat ions. I think we need to understand an old idea, the Subsidiarity or Participatory model of atonement. Stop thinking of Jesus' death as a financial transaction and think of it as God's statement of solidarity with humanity. The resurrection is also a statement of solidarity. The Atonement: God's Solidarity With Humanity A. The Inadequacy of Financial Transactions Many ministers, and therefore, many Christians speak of and think of Jesus' death on the cross as analogous to a financial transaction. Usually the idea goes something like this: we are in hock to the devil because we sinned. God pays the debt we owe by sending...

A major news item in apologetics came out this week, as it was announced that Hank Hanegraaff, the President of the Christian Research Institute (CRI), had formally joined an Orthodox Church.   This post won’t exactly be about that, though, beyond a few immediate disclaimers and caveats. First, I have only positive impressions of the Orthodox Church and of Hanegraaff’s decision. Readers may search my Ticker blog for a series I did with the title Journey Through Orthodoxy, wherein I make some observations about Orthodoxy. It’s not for me, but some of my beliefs match theirs (and I arrived at those beliefs independent of knowing what Orthodoxy believed). Second, it’s only fair to remind readers that I have deep connections to CRI and have written extensively for the Christian Research Journal. I also consider the editor of the Journal , Elliot Miller, and his wife to be close personal friends. I have had interactions with many staff members at CRI over the years, inc...

I don’t agree with everything that N.T. Wright writes (pun intended), but he is dead-on here. No comments needed – what he says stands for itself.

   During a recent discussion of the origin of life on Facebook some atheist friends challenged me to get up to speed on abiogenesis research and understand that life has essentially been created by scientists in a laboratory. To prove the point they directed me to an article at the Daily Mail , "Scientists Create Artificial Life." [ 1] Given that scientists have created a living bacterium, they suggested, there remains no reason for thinking that the creation of life requires the intervention of God. So I'm supposed to think that the mystery of life's origin has been solved and any suggestion otherwise invokes the "God of the gaps" fallacy.   Now as mentioned on the Facebook thread, I had issues with all this, beginning with the article itself:   1. The misleading headline. There's a huge difference between creating artificial life from nothing but chemicals, as the headline implies, and reverse engineering an existing bacterium to pro...