Tag Archive for: Atheist

Did God Command Genocide in the Old Testament

Did God Command Genocide in the Old Testament?

By Ryan Leasure

Richard Dawkins’ famous quote just about sums up how skeptics view the God of the Old Testament. He retorts:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.1

Whew. Other than his obvious thesaurus skills, we notice that Dawkins takes great offense at God’s behavior in the Old Testament. He scorns Scripture’s portrayal of slavery and the poor treatment of women, but it’s the Canaanite invasion that attracts most of his contempt. For example, he uses words such as bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, racist, infanticidal, and genocidal to make his point loud and clear.

But this raises an obvious question. Did God really command genocide? Did he really order Israel to wipe the Canaanites from the face of the earth? Some texts seem to suggest this:

“So Joshua struck the whole land, the hill country and the Negev and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings. He left none remaining, but devoted to destruction all that breathed, just as the LORD God of Israel commanded.” — Joshua 10:40

“Then they devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword.” — Joshua 6:21

It certainly looks like genocide. But as I’ll argue in a minute, I’m persuaded something other than genocide is going on here.

Joshua’s Claims vs. Reality

I’m persuaded something else is going on because several times Joshua makes claims that they “utterly destroyed” the Canaanites and “left none alive,” yet we read shortly thereafter that several survivors remain. Let me give you a few examples:

Joshua’s Claim: In Joshua 10, he says they left “no survivors” and “destroyed everything that breathed” in “the entire land” and “put all the inhabitants to the sword.”

Reality: Judges 1 states several times that Israel had failed to conquer the entire land of Canaan and couldn’t drive out all the inhabitants.

On the one hand, Joshua tells us that they left “no survivors.” On the other hand, Judges 1 tells us multiple times that Israel failed to drive out all the Canaanites.

Joshua’s Claim: Josh 10:39 says “every person” in Debir was “utterly destroyed.”

Reality: Josh 11:21 states that later, Joshua “utterly destroyed” Anakites in Debir.

Again, Joshua says they “utterly destroyed every person” in Debir. But the very next chapter, we read of survivors in Debir who Joshua “utterly destroyed” again.

Joshua’s Claims: In Joshua 11:21, he tells us the Anakites were “cut off” and “utterly destroyed” in Hebron.

Reality: A few chapters later in Joshua 15:13-14, we read that “Caleb “drove out” the Anakites from Hebron.

Once again, Joshua claims utter destruction while a few chapters later, he tells us that Caleb drove out the same people group he just “utterly destroyed.”

Just as the LORD had commanded

Certainly, Joshua’s claims and reality appear to contradict one another. Yet we read on multiple occasions that Joshua did just as God had commanded. Consider these two examples:

Joshua captured all the cities of these kings, and all their kings, and he struck them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed them; just as Moses the servant of the LORD had commanded. — Joshua 11:12

They struck every man with the edge of the sword, until they had destroyed them. They left no one who breathed. Just as the LORD had commanded Moses his servant… he left nothing undone of all that the LORD had commanded Moses. — Joshua 11:14-15

I’ve listed several examples where God commanded Joshua to “utterly destroy” the Canaanites. We’ve also seen that Joshua was faithful to do just as the LORD had commanded. Yet, we read several instances where survivors remain.

What is going on here?

God didn’t Mean Literal Genocide

As a quick caveat, I’m a biblical inerrantist. I’m not someone to play “fast and loose” with the text. Yet I’m persuaded that Joshua didn’t intend for us to interpret the “utterly destroy” language literally.

How could he if in Joshua 11 he tells us that they “utterly destroyed” the Anakites in Hebron, and then just a few chapters later in Joshua 15, he tells us that Caleb “drove out” those same Anakites in the same Hebron?

Would Joshua really be that irresponsible with his reporting? It’s doubtful. After all, God made it clear elsewhere that “utterly destroy” didn’t mean complete annihilation.

Consider Deuteronomy 7:2-4:

And when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction…you shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. You shall not intermarry them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they will turn away your sons from following me to serve other gods.

Now, wait a second. God ordered them to devote the Canaanites to complete destruction, but then he forbids them from intermarrying with them. How could they intermarry with people they had completely obliterated?

It seems obvious that whatever “utterly destroy” means, it doesn’t mean genocide.

“Utterly Destroy” was Common Hyperbolic Rhetoric

Just recently, the Golden State Warriors defeated the Portland Trail Blazers by 22 points. As I read various ESPN articles and listened to different radio shows, I heard commentators say things like the Warriors “annihilated” or “killed” the Trail Blazers. And shockingly, nobody called them out for lying. You see, this is how people talk nowadays with respect to athletic competitions. We speak in hyperbolic terms.

In the same way, military leaders during Joshua’s day used to speak in exaggerated terms. They would regularly make claims that they “utterly destroyed” their enemies and left “no survivors.” In reality, they defeated their enemies but didn’t commit them to genocide. Yet nobody was calling them liars because this was how military leaders communicated back then. Consider these examples:2

King Mesha of Moab (840 BC) reported that the Northern Kingdom of Israel “has utterly perished for always.” — In truth, Israel was around long enough to be taken into exile one hundred years later.

Tuthmosis III of Egypt (1500 BC) declared that “the numerous army of Mitanni was overthrown within the hour, annihilated totally, like those now not existent.” — Actually, Mitanni continued to fight for another two hundred years.

Merneptah of Egypt (1230 BC) bragged “Israel is wasted, his seed is not.” — Guess who is still around today?

When Moses or Joshua spoke in exaggerated ways, they were simply adopting the common hyperbolic rhetoric that all ancient Near Eastern military leaders used. Everyone reading the accounts would have understood it that way, just like we understand hyperbolic sports language.

Drive them Out, Not Genocide

It seems that God’s desire was for Israel to drive out — or dispossess — the Canaanites from the land, not to commit them to genocide. Truth is, “driving out” language is used far more frequently with respect to the Canaanites than “utterly destroy” language.3

We saw earlier in Deuteronomy 7:2-4 that God ordered Israel to commit the Canaanites to “complete destruction,” and then he ordered them not to intermarry with the Canaanites afterwards. These dual commands only make sense if the “complete destruction” means to drive them out, rather than annihilating them altogether.

On another occasion, God threatens to “destroy” Israel for their disobedience, but this destruction did not mean genocide. It meant driving them away from the promised land. Consider Deuteronomy 28:63-64

And the LORD took delight in doing you good and multiplying you, so the LORD will take delight in destroying you. You shall be plucked off the land… And the LORD will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other.

Here is a clear example where “destroying” really meant driving them out of the land. With this in mind, we can be confident that this was God’s purpose in issuing the “utterly destroy” commands.

Did they Really Commit Women and Children to Genocide?

As I’ve argued above, the stock language of “kill everything that’s alive” was hyperbolic language and really meant “driving out” the Canaanites. This means, the Israelites never slaughtered women or children in their conquests. They simply defeated the various Canaanite armies as they infiltrated the promised land.

After all, God had instructed Israel to always offer peace before attacking anyone (Deut. 20:10) which would have given women and children time to flee before any battle ensued. Unfortunately, almost nobody took them up on the offer (Josh. 11:19).

Furthermore, it appears that most of their battles occurred at military strongholds — like Jericho and AI — away from the populated civilian countrysides. Archeology digs suggest that Jericho housed roughly one hundred soldiers with no civilians,4 which explains how Israel could march around it seven times in one day. Rahab and maybe another female or two worked in the tavern to take care of travelers passing through.

Rahab, who turned from paganism, also serves as a great example that ethnic cleansing is not the goal of these conquests. The goal was to rid the area of the pagan influence that could easily lead Israel astray from worshipping Yahweh.

Why Drive Out the Canaanites?

In Genesis 15:16, God told Abraham that he would give the land to the Israelites after four hundred years of slavery in Egypt because the “sins of the Amorites (Canaanites) was not yet complete. That is, God wouldn’t drive them out yet, because it wouldn’t be justified. But after hundreds of years of wickedness, the Canaanites would be ripe for judgment.

What did they do that prompted this judgment exactly? While they were notorious for temple prostitution, incest, and bestiality, perhaps their worst crime was their practice of child sacrifice. It was their ritual practice to burn their children alive on the god Molech.

Skeptics often ask why God doesn’t stop evil. Well, here is a clear example where he does, but they still find fault nonetheless.

Ultimately, God wanted to establish the nation of Israel in the land free of pagan influence to provide a context for the coming Messiah. Yes, Israel defeated these Canaanite armies, but the ultimate goal was to be a blessing to all the nations (Gen. 12:3). And that blessing would come through the person of Jesus Christ who came to fulfill the law and die as the once for all sacrifice for the sins of the world.

*For more on this topic, check out Paul Copan’s book Is God A Moral Monster?

 

Ryan Leasure holds an M.A. from Furman University and an M.Div. from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He currently serves as a pastor at Grace Bible Church in Moore, SC.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2wFn2mK

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Did Jesus Have a Wife A Simple Response to The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife

Did Jesus Have a Wife? – A Simple Response to The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife

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By Mikel Del Rosario

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife

So your skeptical friend just heard about something called, “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” But unlike the fiction Dan Brown created in the Da Vinci Code, this wasn’t in a movie or a novel. She just caught another sensational segment on the evening news talking about how controversial this new find is, and now she’s wondering, “Did Jesus have a wife?”

But here’s the thing. This fragment really isn’t rocking anyone’s world. Especially in the academic community. In fact, Karen L. King, the Harvard Professor who actually presented this at the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies said:

…this new discovery [highlight] does not prove that the historical Jesus was married. [/highlight] This gospel (is)…too late, historically speaking, to provide any evidence as to whether the historical Jesus was married or not

So this is all about later, Egyptian views about who Jesus was–not about the historical Jesus of the 1st century.

In this post, I’ll share a simple way to respond to this fragment because we’ve only got two real options here. But first, here’s what scholars are saying about the fragment itself.

Scholars are Skeptical

I got an e-mail about this from Dr. Dan Wallace as soon as this hit the nightly news.  Later, he expanded on his initial thoughts on his blog, saying:

Does this fragment prove that Jesus was married? [highlight]The answer is an emphatic no [/highlight] … it says nothing about true history, about Jesus of Nazareth.

He says that if this thing wasn’t faked (May 2014 Update: Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Looks More and More Like a Fake), one possibility is that it’s a Gnostic source (basically a totally different religion) which meant something other than real marriage here (since they weren’t big into physical stuff being good). Another possibility is that it’s talking about the church as Jesus’ wife, kind of like John does in the book of Revelation. Other scholars like Dr. Darrell Bock and Dr. Gary Habermas agree, saying there just isn’t an awful lot of context here to even figure out what the author was trying to say.

How I Answer, “Did Jesus Have a Wife?”

So what can you say to a skeptical friend who asks you, “Did Jesus have a wife?” Seems like I’ve been hearing this question off and on for a while now. Sometimes, it comes in the form of a possibility: “Isn’t it possible that Jesus had a wife?” I usually agree, which sometimes surprises people and grabs their attention. I say, “Sure. Anything’s possible. But the question is, are there any good reasons to believe that the historical Jesus of Nazareth really had a wife?” If you want to be confident in conversations about this fragment, here’s what I suggest.

Get the Facts

Blow past the headlines and get the hard facts. There are a whole bunch of Web sites covering The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, but this short post on Talbot School of Theology’s The Good Book Blog will give you the skinny on this fragment (which despite its sensationalized name, really isn’t a gospel) that’s basically the size of a business card.

Dr. Darrell Bock was recently quoted by CNN as saying:

“It’s a small text with very little context…It’s a historical curiosity but doesn’t really tell us who Jesus was…[highlight]It’s one small speck of a text in a mountain of texts about Jesus. [/highlight]”

Indeed, even if this fragment turns out to be real, there are over 5,000 New Testament manuscripts and other ancient sources outside the Bible that talk about Jesus. None of these sources indicate that Jesus ever had a wife. And if you’re really interested in the historical Jesus, you know that the four traditional gospels–Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John–were recognized as the most accurate biographies of Jesus by A.D. 125. It’s really these ancient documents that give us the very best picture of Jesus’ life and his teachings.

How History Answers, “Did Jesus Have a Wife?”

So did Jesus have a wife? The best ancient, documentary evidence for the historical Jesus says “no.” As historian Dr. Mike Licona observes:

The most powerful evidence that Jesus was single comes from a deafening silence. In 1 Corinthians 9:5 Paul writes, “Do we [i.e., Paul and Barnabas] not have a right to take along a believing wife, as do the rest of the apostles, the brothers of the Lord, and Peter?” It appears that all of Jesus’ disciples, all of his blood brothers, and even the lead apostle, Peter, were married. If Jesus had been married, …we certainly would expect for Paul to have mentioned it here, since it would have provided the ultimate example for his point.

A Simple Response You Can Use

So what can you say when someone asks you, “Did Jesus have a Wife?” after hearing something about this fragment? Let me share a simple response to The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. You don’t have to be a historian or a scholar to say this. It’s easy to remember and something you can use today. Tell your skeptical friend that when it comes to this little fragment, we’ve only got two real options here:

  • Option 1: It’s a fake fragment that tells us nothing about the historical Jesus. [See 2014 updates below]
  • Option 2: It’s a real fragment that tells us nothing about the historical Jesus.

As Christians, it’s important that we’re able to honestly look at something like this fragment without it messing with our faith. After all, if it’s fake, no one should care. If it’s a real 6th-century fragment, it could help us learn more about the kinds of things some Egyptian Gnostics were writing in Coptic hundreds of years after any of the actual eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life and teachings.

As for the question, “Was the historical Jesus married?” The historical evidence points to “no.”

Updates on the Fragment

2012

MSNBC: “One the most suspicious grammatical errors in the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife appeared to be a direct copy of a typo in the PDF file version of the Interlinear translation (of the Gospel of Thomas)”

More: See how Dr. Mark Goodacre compares the fragment text to the PDF.

Still More: Read Leo Depuydt’s conclusion Harvard Theological Review. “The author of this analysis has not the slightest doubt that the document is a forgery, and not a very good one at that.”

2014

Boston Globe: King responds to the alleged grammatical error and forgery charge: “such a combination of bumbling and sophistication seems extremely unlikely.”

Huffington Post: “Scientists have concluded the fragment dates back to at least the sixth to ninth centuries, and possibly as far back as the fourth century.” Still, 6th to the 9th century is way too late to tell us anything about the historical Jesus. Furthermore, there is no external or internal evidence suggesting this goes back to the 2nd or 4th century. According to Dr. Bock, “It is a suggestion based on when these discussions commonly arose. That is all it is.”

[highlight] New! [/highlight] 05/01/2014 Wall Street Journal: How The ‘Jesus Wife’ Hoax Fell Apart. 05/02/2014 GLive Science: Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Looks More and More Like a Fake.  Tyndale House quotes Askeland on the “smoking gun”:

The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife was one of several fragments which were announced by Karen King.  There was also in this group of fragments a fragment of the Gospel of John in Coptic. Just recently, when I gazed upon Karen King’s Coptic John fragment, what I saw was immediately clear.  [highlight] Not only were the writing tool, ink and hand exactly the same as those of the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife fragment, but also the method of composition was the same. As I looked at Karen King’s Gospel of John fragment, I finally saw that it was clearly copied (by the forger) from Herbert Thompson’s 1924 edition of Codex Qau. [/highlight] Indeed, the Gospel of John fragment had exactly the same line breaks as Codex Qau – a statistical improbability if it were genuine.

Scholars Discuss The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife (2012)

Did Jesus have a wife? Sit in on a discussion I attended on responding to The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife and get the details from Dr. Richard Taylor and Dr. Darrell Bock at Dallas Theological Seminary. You’ll even get to recite some Coptic before the end of this video! How many people get a chance to do that? I rarely post full-length videos on my blog. But if you’re read this far, this one will definitely be worth your time.

 

Mikel Del Rosario, M.A., Th.M. helps Christians explain their faith with courage and compassion. He is a doctoral student in the New Testament department at Dallas Theological Seminary. Mikel teaches Christian Apologetics and World Religion at William Jessup University. He is the author of Accessible Apologetics and has published over 20 journal articles on apologetics and cultural engagement with his mentor, Dr. Darrell Bock. Mikel holds an M.A. in Christian Apologetics with highest honors from Biola University and a Master of Theology (Th.M.) from Dallas Theological Seminary where he serves as Cultural Engagement Manager at the Hendricks Center and a host of the Table Podcast. Visit his Web site at ApologeticsGuy.com.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2M8oWa2

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How a Cold-Case Atheist Detective Became a Case-Making Christian

How a Cold-Case Atheist Detective Became a Case-Making Christian

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By Terrell Clemmons

I think it may be true,” Jim Wallace said to his wife, Susie. He was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling.

“What may be true?”

“Christianity.” Why did she need to ask? He’d been obsessed with the subject for several weeks now, talking her ears off on multiple occasions. It had all started at Saddleback Church during an otherwise normal Sunday morning service. A friend, a fellow police officer, had been inviting him for months, and he’d finally acquiesced. Susie liked the family to attend church, and although Jim had no use for religion, he loved his wife deeply and placed a very high priority on marriage and family. As for church, he didn’t get it, but he was fine going along for her sake.

Jim managed to ignore most of the sermon, but his ears did perk up when Pastor Rick Warren mentioned some wise principles Jesus taught that could be applied today. He’d described Jesus as “the smartest man who ever lived.” This guy Jesus might have some information I could use workwise, Jim thought. He’d always been open to learning from any ancient sage whose wisdom had stood the test of time. So the following week he dropped $6.00 on a Bible at B. Dalton bookstore and leafed straight to the New Testament Gospels. He wasn’t interested in anything but the red letters. What did Jesus say?

As Jim read, though, he was soon struck by something else. By this time in his career as a police officer and crime investigator, he had interviewed hundreds if not thousands of eyewitnesses and suspects and had read countless written testimonies. The Gospel accounts, he was surprised to note, bore a striking resemblance, not to the mythology or moralistic storytelling he’d always believed them to be, but to actual eyewitness accounts, something with which he was intimately familiar. His investigator’s curiosity was piqued.

Opening an Investigation

Since he’d shown a knack for interviewing early in his career, Jim had received special training in a variety of investigative techniques. One of them, a methodology called Forensic Statement Analysis (FSA), was especially designed to scrutinize eyewitness testimonies to detect deception and other manner of falsification. Wow, Jim thought, wouldn’t it be cool to try to apply this discipline I do at work to one of the Gospels?

He was in his element now. He started with the Gospel of Mark. For a full month, he meticulously picked it apart, hanging on every word, and in spite of deep skepticism going in, ultimately came to the conclusion that the Gospel writer Mark had penned the eyewitness account of the Apostle Peter, exactly what traditional Christianity has held all along. Pressing on, he subsequently reached the conclusion that the other three Gospels also gave every appearance of being exactly what they purported to be—authentic, eyewitness accounts written by men who genuinely believed what they were writing.

Personal Crossroads

This was a wholly unexpected development. At this juncture, Jim’s well-honed drive to uncover truth ran square up against his lifelong aversion to all things religious. The only son of a divorced, cultural Catholic mother and atheist father, Jim had been an avowed atheist all his life. And he was quite happy with it. Religion had always been just plain silly to him, and as a shrewd cop for whom skepticism was a skill that got you home at night, he had a very low threshold for silliness. Christianity might be a useful delusion for some, or an area of weakness for others, but nothing beyond that. Worse, despite his love and respect for Susie as a quiet believer, he’d badmouthed the few people he’d known in the department who were Christians. Now, as a follow-the-facts-wherever-they-lead investigator, he had to contend with the possibility that there might be something to this “garbage” after all.

By now, he was on much more than an intellectual exercise. The Scriptures he’d been examining contained certain claims that were supremely unsettling to a contented atheist. There were supernatural claims, claims about authority, claims about exactly who was God. And some of Jesus’ teachings, if you took them seriously, were devastatingly convicting. What do I do with the claims of Jesus related to his own divinity? And the claims of Jesus related to the nature of my heart?

As an atheist, he’d always felt like he was a good guy. He’d made his own rules for what was appropriate, and according to them, he was living a good life. He wasn’t hurting anybody. He was even devoting his life to stopping the bad guys who were. He didn’t believe in heaven, but if there was one, he was fairly confident he would make it in. But Jesus said differently. Who was right?

“I knew that I was standing on the edge of something profound,” he wrote in Cold Case Christianity.

I started reading the Gospels to learn what Jesus taught about living a good life and found that He taught much more about His identity as God and the nature of eternal life. I knew that it would be hard to accept one dimension of His teaching while rejecting the others. If I had good reason to believe that the Gospels were reliable eyewitness accounts, I was going to have to deal with the stuff I had always resisted as a skeptic. What about all the miracles that are wedged in there between the remarkable words of Jesus?… And why was it that I continued to resist the miraculous elements in the first place?

These were imposing questions, threatening to upheave everything he’d believed all his life.

Sometime during this Gospel investigation, a friend gave him a copy of Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. After reading it, Jim, ever obsessive once onto the trail of something, went out and bought everything C. S. Lewis had written. One quote from God in the Dock resonated powerfully when he read it and never left him afterwards. “Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, is of infinite importance,” Lewis wrote. “The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.” It made such perfect sense. The big-question issues of life, Jim thought, those are the ones I should be spending my time on. The most important thing he could do right now was to answer the question, Are these Gospels divine?

All his adult life, he’d instructed jurors to stay evidential in their examination of what happened. “Live and breathe what the evidence dictates to you,” was the inviolable rule. And just as jurors must make decisions based on the evidence, not personal predispositions, so, he knew, must he. And after a full investigation, he found that the evidence strongly suggested that the Gospels were, in fact, divine. And if they were, it followed that Jesus was right and he was wrong. He knew that to reject this truth any longer would be perilous. He accepted it as transcendent truth and began making life adjustments accordingly.

Case-Making Christianity

Jim became a Christian, not because he had any life problem he needed to fix—he was quite happy with his life—but because he became convinced that Christianity is true. “It’s not convenient for me. It’s not always comfortable, and it doesn’t always serve my purposes. There are times when my brokenness would like to take a shortcut, but I’m stuck with the fact that this is true,” he says. “And like any transcendent truth, you’re either going to measure yourself by it, or you’re going to reject it to your own peril.”

But don’t get the idea that he’s a reluctant convert. He immediately plunged with Wallace-esque drive into full-bore Christian case-making: he enrolled in seminary and seven years later completed a masters in theology. He also served part-time as a youth pastor, all the while still working full-time as a detective. Out of his passion to train believers, particularly young people, to become case-making Christians, he created PleaseConvinceMe.com [coldcasechristianity.com current site] as a place to post and discuss what he was discovering about the evidence supporting Christianity.

The website draws fire at times because Jim doesn’t limit himself to presenting Christian principles for a Christian readership. Quite to the contrary, he regularly puts forth objective truth claims about reality, making the case that Christianity is true, not just true for him and maybe true for you, but transcendently true for everyone at all times.

And he’s amassing formidable evidence to support the claim. Much of it is objective and rational—that’s what draws the fire. But there is also that which is subjective and personal, but no less real. Case in point: this formerly angry atheist who had been ever ready to tell any bothersome Christian why he didn’t accept all that “hooey” engages his detractors with remarkable patience, occasionally hearing echoes of his own younger voice. As a toughened cop and softened believer, he can now “take a punch and deliver a kiss. I no longer have a desire to respond with anger,” he explains. “Not because I’m more clever tactically, but because I think that God has done something in my own life. That God who I discovered was true evidentially, I’m also discovering in my own life is true evidentially. Because he’s changing me.” •

Christian Case-Making 101

Cold Case Christianity

Jim Wallace keeps a leather bag packed beside his bed. His callout bag holds the tools he’ll need if he’s called to a homicide scene during the night—a flashlight, digital recorder, notepad, etc. It also contains an investigative checklist representing years of distilled wisdom gleaned from partners, classes, training seminars, and his own years of experience. His new book, Cold Case Christianity, offers a metaphorical toolkit for both Christians and skeptics and invites them to retrace with him the steps he took when he applied his investigative tools to the Gospels years ago. The real-life detective stories he uses to illustrate the principles will be an added delight for TV crime-show fans. Cold Case Christianity will:

  • Give you ten principles of cold case investigation and equip you to use them to evaluate the claims of the New Testament Gospel authors. Applying these principles will help you gain a firmer handle on the historic evidence for Christianity.
  • Provide you with a four-step template for evaluating eyewitnesses to determine if they are reliable, and walk you through applying these steps to the eyewitness Gospel accounts, showing how they more than adequately pass forensic muster.

The historic truth claims of Christianity are under assault from all directions, but when pressed, they withstand the most scrupulous of investigative techniques. Jim Wallace is passionate about getting this information out, and about training Christians to become skilled case-makers for Christianity. “Most other theistic worldviews are deficient in the very areas where Christianity is strong,” he says. “We have great reasons to believe what we believe.”

—Terrell Clemmons

 

Terrell Clemmons is a freelance writer and blogger on apologetics and matters of faith.

This article was originally published at salvomag.com: http://bit.ly/2VUTDDS

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Transcending Spiritual Gymnastics

Transcending Spiritual Gymnastics

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By Nathan Howe

“Spiritual” people, specifically non-believers, can have some pretty comical explanations of the supernatural as they come out of Atheism. Coming from a perspective that attributes no part of existence by any Spiritual guidance or conscious force, is a horrible building block to start learning about spirituality. Truly, the case consists of individuals who fight tooth and nail to believe that existence is a freak accident, then turn right around and contribute omnipotent characteristics to things like, Nature, or create moral rebounds by a force known as “Karma.”

I’m reading an article someone wrote about the Law of Transcendence, Where the author correlates it to Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that everything in existence is moving in one direction or another, completely incapable of remaining in the condition it was created in.

Well, that would make sense considering that since sin entered the world, we have lived in a constant state of Decay. But Non-believer’s don’t see the Second Law of Thermodynamics from the Bible’s perspective. They state that things can actually move forward, getting better by means of health or wealth. The issue with that is that wealth isn’t always applicable to the quality of life, this is made evident by the countless millionaires who met their end by their own hand, as well as commonly circulated phrases such as, “Money doesn’t buy happiness.”

The problem with this word, “Transcendence,” is that it’s incredibly vague by definition. The dictionary defines it as, “existence or experience beyond the normal or physical level.” By this definition, we experience transcendence just about every time we take a wrong turn on our way home from work, (Does anybody actually do that?)

However, the point where this reaches “Maximum Silliness,” is when the writer states: “This chain of events is put in place because nature’s desire is for all forms of existence to improve upon themselves.”

Did you catch it? See, this is something Atheism, as well as New Agers, do quite commonly. “There is no God; your God isn’t real. We are the higher power.” And in the same breath, will turn around and give conscious characteristics to “Nature,” describing it as a conscious force that has a will for existence.

This is literally a description of God, but at the same time, they’re dancing around the title “God,” for peer approval, all the while pursuing spirituality. This is a people who will embrace Satanism under whatever guise it comes to the world as.

Watch the author do it again here, where they write, “It is not nature’s desire for any form of existence to stand still, and therefore, no being is permitted by nature to remain in any one condition for very long.” That time, it should have been pretty easy to catch. Not only does Nature have a desire for all things in existence to move about altering their conditions for better or for worse, but that the force (in a sense) doesn’t leave people where it finds them. It comes into their lives and moves them towards transcendence… The author just described God and called him “Nature,” That’s all they did.

We started with calling it the “State of Decay” caused by Sin and death entering the world, then the secular scientists redefined it as “The Second Law of Thermodynamics,” and after it watered down peoples philosophical understanding of the world we live in, the New Agers come along only to call it, “The Law of Transcendence,” completely cutting God out of the picture and replacing it with a conscious all-powerful force of their own. Are people catching this sleight of hand? Or are we now being blown around by any doctrine we hear? Never grab hold of a doctrine that cuts God out of the picture and tries to replace him with an all-powerful force who doesn’t pay mind to wrongdoing. The Law of Transcendence ought to be packed away with Astrology, the New Age Movement, New Thought, and other forms of teachings that cut God out of the picture He created.

 

Nathan Howe is a 26-year-old Male from Seattle, WA. He is relocated to Phoenix, AZ over 2 years ago, and currently, participate in his church (Vineyard Church North Phoenix) by playing the Bass guitar in the 18-25 Small Group band. He currently works at Arizona Autism as an HCBS Coordinator overseeing the North Phoenix Area; they are pediatric therapy specialists providing Respite, Habilitation and Therapy Services for Children with Developmental Disabilities.

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16 Bad Atheist Arguments and How to Respond to Them

16 Bad Atheist Arguments and How to Respond to Them

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By Jeremy Linn

With the NCAA Final Four coming to the Twin Cities this weekend, it seems appropriate to have our own little March Madness Tournament. Instead of college teams, we built a bracket with some of the “top” bad Atheist arguments.

Below we list 16 of these bad arguments and list at least one problem with the argument for each. Much more could be said for each of these arguments, so we present this post with the risk of coming across shallow.  The point of the post, however, is not to give you a thorough response to each argument – It’s to give you ideas for an initial response to them.

For each of the arguments, we give an example question you can ask to better understand where the person who gave the argument is coming from. The goal is to listen and understand, rather than to dominate and tear down.

Now that we have those precursors set, here are the 16 bad Atheist arguments and how to respond to them.

Argument #1: Who created God?

This question is asked under the assumption that God needs a creator. This assumption misrepresents the Christian understanding of God, where God is the necessary cause of all creation.

Question: Why do you think a Christian would say that no one created God?

Argument #2: Jesus never existed

This objection flies against the conclusions of almost all scholars invested into Biblical and Roman history, along with evidence from both the New Testament books and extrabiblical sources.

Question: How did you come to the conclusion that Jesus never existed?

Argument #3: Atheists believe in just one less god than Christians

Some Atheists try to use this argument to show that there is not much of a difference between them and Christians. After all, Christians are “Atheists” for thousands of gods from other religions since they lack belief in those gods!

The problem is, there is a huge difference between a Theist (such as a Christian) and an Atheist. Theists believe in a supreme, personal creator of the Universe. Atheists don’t. This difference has huge implications for how each carries out their lives.

Question: Do you think there are any major differences between Christians and Atheists?

Argument #4: Believing in God is like believing in Santa or leprechauns.

This statement calls God “made up,” equal on the level of something like Santa Claus. But the Christian claims to have evidence for God, and hardly anyone claims to have evidence for a real Santa. The alleged evidence for God cannot be simply dismissed with this silly statement.

Question: Do you think there is any evidence for the existence of God?

Argument #5: The gospels are full of myths

This objection completely ignores the definition of a myth in ancient literature. A myth looks back at the past to understand how something in the present came to be. The gospels were written as a historical narrative, discussing things that were happening at the time.

Question: What do you mean when you use the word “myth”?

Argument #6: Faith is belief without evidence 

This definition of faith is a clear strawman of the Christian position. Most Christians view faith as involving some sort of personal trust. The trust aspect of faith is simply ignored by the “no evidence” definition.

Question: How do you think Christians would typically define “faith”?

Argument #7: There’s no evidence for God

Christians claim to have philosophical arguments for God’s existence. It seems like those arguments could provide at least a tiny bit of evidence for God, even if an Atheist doesn’t consider the evidence close to satisfactory. Atheists who use this phrase are overstating their case.

Question: What type of evidence would you need to see in order to be convinced that there is at least some evidence for God?

Argument #8: God is a maniac slavedriver

The idea here is that God is some sort of dictator who tells us what to do and believe and threatens to send us to hell if we don’t listen. But this characterization of God contrasts from the understanding that God offers a choice for us to escape the “slavery” of sin and to experience life as it was meant to be lived.

Question: Do you think God gives us a choice in how to live our lives?

Argument #9: Science disproves God

This is one of the most broad arguments in the list. There are many fields in science, and some concepts about God are completely unrelated to those fields. What exactly is being said here? There needs to be more detail given before any substantial discussion can take place.

Question: What is one way in which science disproves God?

Argument #10: Stories of Jesus changed like the game of telephone

The story goes… You know the game of telephone? You start with a sentence and then it gets changed after being passed down from person to person? Well, that’s what happened when stories of Jesus were passed from person to person.

This objection does not take into account the communal aspect of oral tradition – people could check their stories against one another. The objection also causes the reliability of all ancient history to be called into question.

Question: How might the way stories were spread in ancient history be different than the game of telephone?

Argument #11: If you grew up somewhere else you would believe something else

This is one of the most common objections to Christianity – if you grew up in a middle eastern country, you would be a Muslim, not a Christian! While this concept does have some truth in it, it packs a load of unsupported assumptions. It also has little effect on the question of if God actually exists or not.

Question: How do you know I believe what I do because where I grew up?

Argument #12: Atheists can be good without believing in God

This statement is true in the sense that people who do not believe in God can make choices that are moral choices. But the statement ignores the grounding of the good – the question of what caused the existence of objective moral duties.

Question: I agree that Atheists can do good things without believing in God. But what caused “good” and “bad” to exist in the first place?

Argument #13: Religion is toxic

The idea here is that religious thought always motivates actions that are bad. One problem with this idea is that “religion” is a broad term. It puts people who follow all kinds of religions under one umbrella, even if the differences between those religions are stark. It also downplays any potentially “good” actions taken under religious motivations.

Question: Are you referring to one specific religion, or are you saying all religions are toxic?

Argument #14: Jesus is just a copy of pagan gods

This argument seems powerful on the surface as Atheists stack up to similar traits between Jesus and pagan gods – “born of a virgin,” “resurrected,” “born on December 25”, etc. But when you dig deeper into the primary sources for the pagan gods, you will find that the traits don’t align with the actual stories of those gods.

Question: Which god is Jesus a copy of, and how do you know that?

Argument #15: The Flying Spaghetti Monster

New Atheists intended to make a point by bringing up this fictional creature – that you could assign the attributes of God to any random thing. But many Atheists who mention the creature now seem to do so in order to mock religious ideas rather than make a substantial point about them. Overall an Atheist who brings the creature up today ends up looking more ridiculous than thoughtful.

Question: What relevance does the Flying Spaghetti Monster have to what you are saying about God?

Argument #16: Christians never agree

The argument goes like this: Since Christians always seem to disagree about everything, it’s clear that God isn’t involved in the whole process. This argument is incredibly broad and immeasurable – it is uncertain how much agreement there would need to be before the objector no longer sees a problem. It also ignores that “mere Christianity” – the divinity, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ – is almost entirely agreed on amongst Christians.

Question: How much agreement would you need to see between Christians in order to no longer consider this objection a problem?

Hopefully, this list gives you a better idea of how to respond to these bad arguments when they come up. We’re hoping that the Final Four also comes to the Twin Cities next year so we can do something like this again. At the very least, this was fun.

 

Jeremy is the co-founder of the ministry Twin Cities Apologetics and is an accountant for a law firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He’s also going to Bethel Seminary for a graduate degree in a program called Christian Thought (basically Apologetics!). Outside of Apologetics, Jeremy enjoys sports, playing guitar, and making videos.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2DaNPe5

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What Criteria Do Historians Use to Get To The Minimal Facts About The Historical Jesus

What Criteria Do Historians Use to Get To The Minimal Facts About The Historical Jesus?

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By Wintery Knight

Have you ever heard Gary Habermas, Michael Licona or William Lane Craig defend the resurrection of Jesus in a debate by saying that the resurrection is the best explanation for the “minimal facts” about Jesus? The lists of minimal facts that they use are typically agreed to by their opponents during the debates. Minimal facts are the parts of the New Testament that meet a set of strict historical criteria. These are the facts that skeptical historians agree with, totally apart from any religious beliefs.

So what are the criteria that skeptical historians use to derive a list of minimal facts about Jesus?

Dr. Craig explains them in this article.

Excerpt:

The other way, more influential in contemporary New Testament scholarship, is to establish specific facts about Jesus without assuming the general reliability of the Gospels. The key here are the so-called “Criteria of Authenticity” which enable us to establish specific sayings or events in Jesus’ life as historical. Scholars involved in the quest of the historical Jesus have enunciated a number of these criteria for detecting historically authentic features of Jesus, such as dissimilarity to Christian teaching, multiple attestations, linguistic Semitisms, traces of Palestinian milieu, retention of embarrassing material, coherence with other authentic material, and so forth.

It is somewhat misleading to call these “criteria,” for they aim at stating sufficient, not necessary, conditions of historicity. This is easy to see: suppose a saying is multiply attested and dissimilar but not embarrassing. If embarrassment were a necessary condition of authenticity, then the saying would have to be deemed inauthentic, which is wrong-headed, since its multiple attestation and dissimilarity are sufficient for authenticity. Of course, the criteria are defeasible, meaning that they are not infallible guides to authenticity. They might be better called “Indications of Authenticity” or “Signs of Credibility.”

In point of fact, what the criteria really amount to are statements about the effect of certain types of evidence upon the probability of various sayings or events in Jesus’ life. For some saying or event S and evidence of a certain type E, the criteria would state that all things being equal, the probability of S given E is greater than the probability of S on our background knowledge alone. So, for example, all else being equal, the probability of some event or saying is greater given its multiple attestations than it would have been without it.

What are some of the factors that might serve the role of E in increasing the probability of some saying or event S? The following are some of the most important:

(1) Historical congruence: S fits in with known historical facts concerning the context in which S is said to have occurred.

(2) Independent, early attestation: S appears in multiple sources which are near to the time at which S is alleged to have occurred and which depend neither upon each other nor a common source.

(3) Embarrassment: S is awkward or counter-productive for the persons who serve as the source of information for S.

(4) Dissimilarity: S is unlike antecedent Jewish thought-forms and/or unlike subsequent Christian thought-forms.

(5) Semitisms: traces in the narrative of Aramaic or Hebrew linguistic forms.

(6) Coherence: S is consistent with already established facts about Jesus.

For a good discussion of these factors see Robert Stein, “The ‘Criteria’ for Authenticity,” in Gospel Perspectives I, ed. R. T. France and David Wenham (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1980), pp. 225-63.

Notice that these “criteria” do not presuppose the general reliability of the Gospels. Rather they focus on a particular saying or event and give evidence for thinking that specific element of Jesus’ life to be historical, regardless of the general reliability of the document in which the particular saying or event is reported. These same “criteria” are thus applicable to reports of Jesus found in the apocryphal Gospels, or rabbinical writings, or even the Qur’an. Of course, if the Gospels can be shown to be generally reliable documents, so much the better! But the “criteria” do not depend on any such presupposition. They serve to help spot historical kernels even in the midst of historical chaff. Thus we need not concern ourselves with defending the Gospels’ every claim attributed to Jesus in the gospels; the question will be whether we can establish enough about Jesus to make faith in him reasonable.

And you can see Dr. Craig using these criteria to defend minimal facts in his debates. For example, in his debate with Ehrman, he alludes to the criteria when making his case for the empty tomb.

Here, he uses multiple attestations and the criteria of embarrassment:

Among the reasons which have led most scholars to this conclusion are the following:

  1. The empty tomb is also multiply attested by independent, early sources.

Mark’s source didn’t end with the burial, but with the story of the empty tomb, which is tied to the burial story verbally and grammatically. Moreover, Matthew and John have independent sources about the empty tomb; it’s also mentioned in the sermons in the Acts of the Apostles (2.29; 13.36); and it’s implied by Paul in his first letter to the Corinthian church (I Cor. 15.4). Thus, we have again multiple, early, independent attestation of the fact of the empty tomb.

  1. The tomb was discovered empty by women.

In patriarchal Jewish society, the testimony of women was not highly regarded. In fact, the Jewish historian Josephus says that women weren’t even permitted to serve as witnesses in a Jewish court of law. Now in light of this fact, how remarkable it is that it is women who are the discoverers of Jesus’ empty tomb. Any later legendary account would certainly have made male disciples like Peter and John discover the empty tomb. The fact that it is women, rather than men, who are the discoverers of the empty tomb is best explained by the fact that they were the chief witnesses to the fact of the empty tomb, and the Gospel writers faithfully record what, for them, was an awkward and embarrassing fact.

There are actually a few more reasons for believing in the empty tomb that he doesn’t go into in the debate, but you can find them in his written work. For example, in his essay on Gerd Ludemann’s “vision” hypothesis. That essay covers the reasons for all four of his minimal facts.

So, if you are going to talk about the resurrection with a skeptic, you don’t want to invoke the Bible as some sort of inerrant/inspired Holy Book.

Try this approach instead:

  1. Explain the criteria that historians use to get their lists of minimal facts
  2. Explain your list of minimal facts
  3. Defend your list of minimal facts using the criteria
  4. Cite skeptics who admit to each of your minimal facts, to show that they are widely accepted
  5. List some parts of the Bible that don’t pass the criteria (e.g. – guard at the tomb, Matthew earthquake)
  6. Explain why those parts don’t pass the criteria and explain that they are not part of your case
  7. Challenge your opponent to either deny some or all the facts or propose a naturalistic alternative that explains the facts better than the resurrection
  8. Don’t let your opponent attack any of your minimal facts by attacking other parts of the Bible (e.g. – the number of angels being one or two, etc.)

And remember that there is no good case for the resurrection that does not make heavy use of the early creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8.

The best essay on the minimal facts criteria that I’ve read is the one by Robert H. Stein in “Contending with Christianity’s Critics“. It’s a good short essay that goes over all the historical criteria that are used to derive the short list of facts from which we infer the conclusion “God raised Jesus from the dead”. That whole book is really very, very good.

 

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2Tfx7jC

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J. Warner Wallace_ Different Answers to The Question “Why Are You a Christian”

J. Warner Wallace: Different Answers to The Question “Why Are You a Christian?”

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By Wintery Knight

I sometimes think about the horrible experiences I had encountering “normal” Christians in American churches after having become a Christian on my own through reading the New Testament, reading apologetics, and watching William Lane Craig debates. I heard a lot of different reasons to be a Christian from the church Christians, and what struck me was 1) their reasons had nothing to do with objective truth, and 2) their reasons hadn’t prepared them to have serious conversations about Christianity with non-Christians.

Well, J. Warner Wallace recently posted an episode of his podcast about this, and I thought that this might be useful to people who (like me) were confused by what they found in the church.

LAPD homicide detective Jim Wallace examining an assault rifle

Here is the video:

And he has a blog post about it, where he explains all the responses to the question “why are you a Christian?” which he got from the church – none of which were like his answer for why he became a Christian.

Here are some answers that were not like his answer:

I Didn’t Become a Christian Because I Was Raised in the Church
I didn’t come from a Christian family. I wasn’t raised in the church or by people who attended church regularly. While students often tell me this is the reason they’re Christians, this wasn’t the case for me.

I Didn’t Become a Christian Because My Friends Were Christians
I also didn’t know any Christians. I was never invited to church by anyone as a child, and although I knew Christians in my college years, none of these folks ever invited me to church either. My friends were all happy atheists. I didn’t become a Christian to be part of a club.

I Didn’t Become a Christian Because I Wanted to Know God
I can honestly say I had no interest in God growing up, while in college, or while a young married man. I felt no “hole” in my life, had no yearning for the transcendent, no sense something was missing. I was happy and content. I didn’t become a Christian to fulfill some need.

I Didn’t Become a Christian Because I Wanted to Go to Heaven
I was also comfortable with my own mortality. Sure it would be nice if we could all live forever, but that’s just not the way it is. Live life to the fullest, enjoy your friends and family while you have them, and stop whining. I didn’t become a Christian because I was afraid of dying.

I Didn’t Become a Christian Because I Needed to Change My Life
My life prior to becoming a Christian was great. I had a meaningful and fulfilling career, a beautiful family, an incredible wife, and lots of friends. I wasn’t struggling and looking for a solution. I didn’t become a Christian to stop beating my wife or to sober up.

I’m sure that all my readers know that Wallace is a homicide detective and an evidentialist. He handles evidence and builds cases with evidence, and that’s how he approaches his worldview as well. So he didn’t answer any of those.

Wallace’s answer was different:

[…][A]lthough these reasons might motivate students to start their journey, I hope these aren’t the only reasons they’re still here. I’m not sure any of these motivations will suffice when push comes to shove, times get tough or students face the challenges of university life. In the end,truth matters more than anything else. I’m not looking for a useful delusion, a convenient social network, or an empty promise. I just want to know what’s true. I think the students I met in Montreal resonated with this approach to Christianity. They are already members of the Church, have friends in the group, understand the importance of a relationship with God and the promise of Heaven. Now they want to know if any of this stuff is true. It’s our job, as Christian Case Makers, to provide them with the answer.

I’m actually much harder on church Christians than he is because I found that the more fideistic the Churchian, the less you could count on them to act like authentic Christians. I have never met an evidential apologist who was soft on moral questions or tough theology, for example. To me, if you have an evidentialist approach to Christianity, then you have no problem with things like a bodily resurrection of Jesus, with exclusive salvation through faith alone in Christ alone, with a literal eternal separation from God called Hell, and so on.

What about people in other religions? Well, if evidence is your first concern, then it doesn’t bother you that someone of a different religion won’t be saved. For example, I like my Mormon friends, but I know that they’re wrong in their belief in an eternal universe. When I present evidence to them for the beginning of the universe, they just tell me that science isn’t as important to them as the burning in the bosom, their family, their community, etc. Well, if those things are more important to you than knowing the truth about God as he really is, then I’m fine with whatever God decides to do with you when you eventually get old, die and face judgment.

A truth-centered approach to life makes you indifferent to what people think of you. And that’s something that we could all use as Christians, especially those Christians who are more driven by feelings than by facts. A lot of people raised in the church drop out because they go somewhere (e.g., college) where they are made to feel bad for being different. That’s not a problem for evidentialists. We like to be right. We don’t care what people who are wrong think about us. Christians should all read 1 Corinthians 4:1-4, and accept the fact that being truth-centered isn’t going to make you popular.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

 

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2UJtRhQ

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My Conversation About Morality with an Atheist Millennial Man

My Conversation About Morality with an Atheist Millennial Man

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By Wintery Knight

wintery knight 2.png

A meme that was posted on the WK Facebook page, by the new meme admin

I spent some time talking to an atheist millennial recently. He considers himself a moral person, and he is very helpful to others. I asked him to define morality, and he said that morality was feeling good, and helping other people to feel good. I was trying to think of a way to punch a hole in his feelings-based utilitarianism. How could I show him that happy feelings are not a good basis for morality?

Now, you’re probably thinking that abortion is the most obvious example of something that is morally wrong – it’s just killing a baby because adults don’t want to take responsibility for their foolish pursuit of pleasure. But atheists typically don’t think of unborn children as people. They usually believe in naturalistic evolution, and they are committed to a view of reality where the universe is an accident, human beings are accidents, there are no objective human rights, and biological evolution progresses because the strong survive while the weak die. So you aren’t going to be able to generate a moral standard that includes compassion for weak unborn children on that scenario. If the rule is “let’s do what makes us happy,” and the unborn child can’t voice her opinion, then the selfish grown-ups win.

Instead, I decided to focus on fatherlessness. I asked him whether he thought that fatherlessness harmed children. Surprisingly, he said that it didn’t and that he had a relative who was doing a great job raising fatherless kids. I asked him if he had ever looked at the research on what father absence does to children. He hadn’t. Then I asked him if a system of sexual rules based on “me feeling good, and other people around me feeling good,” was likely to protect children. He went silent.

Well, that was the end of that conversation. And I think it was a nice window into how millennials – who are absolutely clueless about what research says about sex, dating, marriage, and parenting – think about relationships. They’re making decisions based on their feelings, then acting surprised when their “common sense” decisions based on happiness “in the moment” blow up in their faces, and destroy the lives of their children, including their unborn children.

Unfortunately, young people are having children outside of a marriage commitment more and more.

wintery knight 1

Out-of-wedlocks births rising as cohabitation replaces marriage

Far-left Bloomberg News reports:

Forty percent of all births in the U.S. now occur outside of wedlock, up from 10 percent in 1970, according to an annual report released on Wednesday by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the largest international provider of sexual and reproductive health services. That number is even higher in the European Union.

The EU has a higher rate of fatherless births because they have high taxes and big government to allow women to have children without having to commit to a husband:

The EU likely sees more births out of wedlock because many member countries have welfare systems that support gender-balanced child care, said Michael Hermann, UNFPA’s senior adviser on economics and demography, in an interview. Public health care systems, paid paternal leave, early education programs and tax incentives give unwed parents support beyond what a partner can provide.

More welfare and more government services make it easier for women to pursue relationships with men who aren’t interested in marriage. Hot bad boys who give them all the tingles. Big government makes those boring, predictable marriage-ready men dispensable. Big government also makes it much harder for a man who does marry to afford a stay-at-home mother for his kids, because he has to pay higher taxes for big government.

More:

The data show such births in the U.S. and EU are predominantly to unmarried couples living together rather than to single mothers, the report says.

[…] Jones also noted that the rise in births outside of marriage is closely correlated to delays in childbearing. “Women are claiming their ground professionally,” she said. “Delaying motherhood is a rational decision when you consider the impact it can have on your career, and that’s contributing to this trend.”

[….] The traditional progression of Western life “has been reversed,” said John Santelli, a professor in population, family health and pediatrics at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. “Cohabiting partners are having children before getting married. That’s a long-term trend across developing nations.”

Regardless of marital status, more couples are choosing not to have kids at all. The U.S. fertility rate hit a historic 30-year low last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hermann said the rise in births outside of wedlock has actually mitigated the decline in fertility, which “would be much steeper if women weren’t having children outside marriage.”

What’s interesting about this anti-marriage article is that they have nothing to say about the research showing that cohabitation – and also marriages that occur after a period of cohabitation – are inferior to no-cohabitation marriages. People who are serious about self-control, and who are serious about committing through thick and thin, tend to have longer lasting marriages. But we don’t prioritize chastity, fidelity and self-sacrificial commitment anymore, because that relationships that require self-denial make us unhappy.

The article concludes: “We can’t go back to the ’50s”. Right. Because if feelings-based “morality” is assumed, then any choice between adult happiness and children’s happiness will favor the adults. Today’s young people carefully AVOID any evidence that contradicts their new “happiness-morality.” They act surprised when their unstable relationships dissolve, leaving children separated from their fathers. Marriage requires that both partners have a system of morality that puts the commitment above happy feelings. People have to be accustomed to doing things that feel bad, just because they are good and moral things to do according to an objective standard of morality. The new atheist morality of happy feelings doesn’t develop the character needed for commitment.

If you ask an atheist millennial, they think they are doing a great job of being “moral.” They don’t see the messes they are making for children as something that they are causing themselves, with their own foolish feelings-based decision-making. They think they know everything about relationships through their feelings. They think that they are exempt from the patterns of cause and effect in the peer-reviewed research.

 

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2AUAuVq

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Does The Bible Promote Slavery

Does The Bible Promote Slavery?

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By Ryan Leasure

“Consult the Bible, and you will discover that the creator of the universe clearly expects us to keep slaves.” 1 This provocative statement by atheist Sam Harris is meant to cast shade on the God of the Bible. After all, if civilized humanity overwhelmingly condemns slavery, why should we worship a God who thinks it’s acceptable?

The question of slavery and the Bible is a bit more complicated than Sam Harris makes it out to be. Unfortunately, Harris and others aren’t interested in providing context or nuance in their books. Instead, they “quote mine” verses and then spin them in such a way to make the slavery laws look as ridiculous and backwoodsy as possible. Furthermore, they assume that biblical slavery and pre-Civil War slavery are essentially the same institutions.

In the remaining space, I’ll attempt to provide some context and nuance for slavery in the Bible. I can’t address everything — which would require much more than a blog post — but I hope to provide some clarity on the issue by looking at eight key points.

1. Slavery Was Pervasive Throughout The Entire Ancient World

It’s estimated that of all the people in the first century Roman Empire, 85 to 90 percent were slaves.2 We also know from the Code of Hammurabi (1700 BC) and another ancient Near Eastern law codes that slavery was pervasive in earlier times.

Not only was slavery the norm, but it was also corrupt and extremely harsh. We see this in how the Egyptians treated the Israelite slaves — forced hard labor, whippings, and killing young children. As you’ll see below, Israel’s slavery laws were a vast improvement on this horrendous institution.

2. God Outlawed The Slave Trade

Exodus 21:16 states, “He who kidnaps a man, whether he sells him or he is found in his possession, shall surely be put to death.” Unlike other ancient cultures and the antebellum South, God forbade Israel from kidnapping individuals and forcing them into slavery. God was so serious about this offense that this act was punishable by death. Already, we can see that Biblical slavery was significantly different from the slavery we think of today.

3. Slavery Was More Like Indentured Servitude

In colonial America times, many foreigners couldn’t afford the fare to cross the Atlantic. So they’d contract themselves — agree to work for a set period of time — until they paid back their debt to the one who paid for their passage.

In the same way, ancient Israelites often times found themselves in financial trouble. In order to get themselves out of debt, they’d agree to become someone’s servant — or slave — until they could get themselves back on their feet.

Leviticus 25:39 describes this when it says, “If your brother becomes poor beside you and sells himself to you, you shall not make him serve as a slave: he shall be with you as a hired worker and as a sojourner.” Furthermore, verse 47 even reports that Israelites became slaves of foreigners living in the land. It states, “If a stranger or sojourner with you becomes rich, and your brother beside him becomes poor and sells himself to the stranger or sojourner…”

Unlike antebellum slavery where the owner had complete ownership over the slave, biblical slavery was more equivalent to an employer/employee relationship. This setup provided financial security for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to survive on their own. By agreeing to become someone’s slave, they received regular food, shelter, and clothing.

And to give you an idea of how different this institution was from slavery in the South, Israelites often times sold themselves back into slavery after they had gained their freedom because it provided a better life for them.3

4. Masters Couldn’t Harm Their Slaves

Horror stories of slave abuse and mistreatment abound from the antebellum South. God, however, established laws that forbade owners from physically harming their slaves. In Exodus 21:26-27, we read that if a master injured his slave, that slave was to go free. Additionally, if the owner killed his slave, he received the death penalty (Ex 21:20).

Israel’s anti-harm law was a vast improvement on slavery throughout the rest of the world. Jewish scholar Nahum Sarna reports, “This law — the protection of slaves from maltreatment by their masters — is found nowhere else in the entire existing corpus of ancient Near Eastern legislation.”4 The Hammurabi Code, by contrast, permitted masters to cut off their disobedient slave’s ears.5

5. Slavery Was Only For Seven Years

“If any of your people — Hebrew men or women — sell themselves to you and serve you six years, in the seventh you must let them go free (Deut. 15:12). That is to say, Israelite slavery was never intended to be a life-long ordeal. At most, God allowed for them to sign a seven-year contract to work for their master while they paid off their debts, but that was to be the maximum.

Again, this doesn’t sound anything like slavery in the South where it was “once a slave always a slave.” As I mentioned earlier, many times slaves would voluntarily go back into slavery after they gained their freedom because it provided a better lifestyle for them. The key, however, was that it was voluntary.

6. Runaway Slaves Received Safe Haven

Unlike slavery in the South which legally required runaway slaves to be returned to their masters, God ordered the Israelites to give runaways safe haven. Deuteronomy 23:15-16 orders, “If a slave has taken refuge with you, do not hand them over to their master. Let them live among you wherever they like and in whatever town they choose. Do not oppress them.”

Not only is this different from the South, it’s a huge improvement upon other the Hammurabi Code which demanded the death penalty for those helping runaway slaves.6

7. Slavery Is Not God’s Ideal

Contrary to what Sam Harris thinks, God doesn’t want us to have slaves. Just because the Bible describes slavery and regulates the already existing institution doesn’t mean God thinks it’s ideal. Consider Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:8 with respect to divorce. He says, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard.” In other words, God allowed for divorce under certain circumstances and even gave laws related to its practice, but that doesn’t mean God was happy with it. After all, Jesus previously said, “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate” (Mt 19:6).

In the same way, just because God established laws regulating the already existing institution of slavery doesn’t mean he approved of it. Rather, it seems that God gave laws that sought to mitigate slavery and undermine it altogether.

For example, because poverty was the main cause of slavery, God made laws that benefited the poor. He decreed that landowners leave the crops on the edges of their fields for the needy (Lev 19:9-20), ordered the wealthy to never charge interest on loans to the poor (Ex 22:25), and permitted the poor to sacrifice less expensive animals (Lev 5:7). Additionally, God ordered that lenders cancel all debts every seven years (Deut 15:1-3).

8. The Full Personhood Of Slaves

Israelites were to treat slaves as people, not property. Job refers to this when he declares, “If I have denied justice to any of my servants, whether male or female… what will I do when God confronts me?… Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?” (Job 31:13-15)

Job understood full well that his slaves were God’s image bearers as he was (Gen 1:26-27). Furthermore, slaves received a day of rest on the Sabbath (Deut 5:14) and were participants in Israel’s religious life (Deut 12:12). Paul even writes in the New Testament that both slave and free are one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:28). “We have in the Bible,” Muhammad Dandamayev observes, “the first appeals in world literature to treat slaves as human beings for their own sake and not just in the interests of their masters.”7

Slavery And The Bible

I hope it’s clear by now that God isn’t pro-slavery. The slavery in the Bible — though not ideal — is a far cry from the slavery that comes to our mind when we think of the word. Those who have used the Bible to justify slavery in the past have, therefore, distorted Scripture’s teachings.

It’s interesting to note that modern abolitionists and civil rights leaders like William Wilberforce and Martin Luther King Jr. have led the charge against slavery and racial injustice by appealing to Scripture’s teaching that every person bears God’s image. Rather than promoting slavery, it seems the Bible was the foundation for abolishing it.

 

Ryan Leasure holds an M.A. from Furman University and an M.Div. from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He currently serves as a pastor at Grace Bible Church in Moore, SC.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2Jzf9oc

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Answering Two Common Objections To The Author Of Life Argument

Answering Two Common Objections To The Author Of Life Argument

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By Evan Minton 

When atheists accuse God of being immoral, they usually point to nasty Old Testament accounts like the conquest of Canaan, God sicking two female bears on a group of youths for harassing Elisha, or destroying humanity in a massive flood (Genesis 6-9). In addition to various other considerations regarding these specific incidences, one factor I always bring up is that God does no wrong in ending the life of an individual human being. Why? Because He is the author of life and therefore He can take life as He sees fit. It’s wrong for humans to kill humans because we aren’t the Author Of Life. The Author Of Life can take life. If you didn’t give life, it isn’t yours to take. It is God’s prerogative as God to decide when the date of our death is.

How Skeptics Typically Respond To This

Two common responses from the skeptic are typically raised against this as reductio ad absurdum arguments. First, they’ll say, if giving someone life entails that you have the prerogative to take that life, then this would entail that parents have the right to kill their children since parents gave their children life. Second, they’ll say something like “If a scientist were able to create a living thing in the lab, your logic would entail that the scientist would have the right to kill that living thing.” Professor Utonium could smother the PowerPuff Girls in their sleep. Dr. Frankenstein could kill his monster. Yet we intuitively recoil at such an idea. This suggests that there’s something wrong with the argument.

The Problem With These Responses: The Fallacy Of The False Analogy

The problem with these responses is that it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. As far as parents and children go, parents only give their offspring life insofar as they come together in sexual union, and the mother allows the child to grow to full term before giving birth. Yet, my mother did not create any of her eggs, and my father didn’t create any of their sperm. Secondly, they wouldn’t exist unless their parents likewise came together in sexual union and so on. Ultimately there would be no sexual reproductive process if the universe weren’t created and finely tuned for life. As I recently told an atheist on Twitter “Parents and having sex and conceiving VS. God creating life is comparing apples to oranges. Create a living, breathing spirit by the word of your mouth; then we’ll talk about whether you can kill it.” The point is that God is the ULTIMATE creator of all things (Genesis 1, John 1:1-3) and sustains everything’s existence moment by moment (Colossians 1:17). While my mother and father certainly participated in my creation, they didn’t and couldn’t have done it apart from the will of God. Eve recognized this when she gave birth to her firstborn son Cain. She said, “With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man.” (Genesis 4:1)

Regarding the lab creation, again, the major key difference between God taking life and you taking the life of your lab experiment is that God is the supreme Creator of literally everything (as I’ve just said). There wouldn’t be anything if God had decided not to make the universe. Even if you could make life in a lab, you wouldn’t be the ultimate source of life. It reminds me of that joke in which scientists tell God that they create lifelike He can, and when they scoop up a pile of dirt to do so, God responds with “Hey! Hands off! Get your own dirt!”

Is The Argument Ad-Hoc? 

Recently when debating this issue on Twitter, an atheist accused The Author-Of Life argument as being “ad-hoc.” The ad hoc fallacy occurs when you make up an explanation just to save your belief from being refuted. In this case, the Twitter atheist accused me of making up this God-Has-Sovereignty-Over-Life-And-Death position just to avoid the conclusion that God did something wrong in sicking the bears on Elisha’s harassers or exterminating the Canaanites.

However, this charge would only stand if that were my reason for making the proposal, but it isn’t. The church has long held that God is sovereign over life and death precisely because He is the source of all life. This isn’t something I or other contemporary apologists came up with to get God off the hook. Only if this position on God’s sovereignty over life were invented solely with the purpose of answering God-Is-Immoral arguments would the charge of the ad hoc fallacy stand. I asked this person “Can you show me historical evidence that any of the church fathers or the Rabbis that preceded the rise of Christianity held to the view that God has sovereignty over life and death SPECIFICALLY to answer objections like the Elisha bears incident?” He denied that he could and ultimately said that it was unprovable. I told him he ought to refrain from making unprovable assertions in the future.

In Conclusion 

The attempts of the skeptic to make a murderer out of God fail.

“The Lord giveth and The Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of The Lord!” – Job 21:1 (KJV)

 

Evan Minton is a Christian Apologist and blogger at Cerebral Faith (www.cerebralfaith.blogspot.com). He is the author of “Inference To The One True God” and “A Hellacious Doctrine.” He has engaged in several debates which can be viewed on Cerebral Faith’s “My Debates” section. Mr. Minton lives in South Carolina, USA.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2O4YPML

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