Zombies and the Bible According to Askegg

Image by iamraphael via Flickr

In my interactions with Askegg he postulated that the Bible is unbelievable because it contains zombies! Okay, I'll wait a minute while you finish laughing....done? Good! In his worldview, a zombie is anyone coming back from the dead. Zombies are fictional and therefore the Bible is lying. So he says. The issue is that, yes, zombies are fictional and the stuff of horror films, books, and video games. They are depicted in many different ways but none of the common depictions even remotely approaches what the Bible describes in the Old and New Testaments when people were raised back to life or when Jesus was resurrected. Being clinically dead and returning to life are not both necessary and sufficient criteria for determining what a zombie is. You've got to look at what a zombie is and see if they match the descriptions we see in the Bible.

1. Eat human flesh/brains
2. Bad skin and abnormalities making them look less than human and barely recognizable
3. Enhanced strength
4. Bad Breath

No one in the Bible even remotely resembles these characteristics. Besides Jesus can never die again according to the New Testament and zombies in fiction die all the time. Zombies in voodoo are not the same as zombies in fictional American cultures. Zombies in voodoo are mind-controlled and aren't dead.

To add to this discussion, earlier this week on G4TV's Attack of the Show, Kevin Pereira talked to Harvard Medical School Professor Steven C Scholzman about understanding the living dead, their biology and why they like to eat our brains. This could help Askegg a lot in defining what a zombie really is so he can see that zombies do not belong in the Bible.

Video Games - E3 2009 - Attack of the Show

reBlog from wired.com: Top 10 Reasons I’m Not Sorry to Be Missing Comic-Con

I found this fascinating quote today:

It’s July again, another Comic-Con has kicked off in San Diego, and yet again I’m not there. I would love to be writing GeekDad posts from my hotel room, but instead I read the host of tweets from people who are there and sigh heavily. To prevent myself from weeping out of sheer envy, I console myself with carefully considered reasons. Here are the best ten I’ve come up with so far:wired.com, Top 10 Reasons I’m Not Sorry to Be Missing Comic-Con, Jul 2009

You should read the whole article.

Responding to Atheism vis Twitter

Over the month of July, I have been in dialog with three or four people who have strong disagreements with me on the existence of God, the validity of the Bible, history, and the nature of the math and science. The past couple of days have been quiet as if my "playmates" have become tired of the discussion. My correspondents have been Askegg, naontiotami, Cynskeptical, AdamJTP, freeplay, jearle, and dsurman. Although they are all very different and ran the whole range from being civil and courteous to being insulting and childish, they're opposition all seemed to boil down to the same themes. I'm not saying that each of these guys all necessarily agree with one another, but considering that they never argued against each other is something of note. Here is the list of ideas and qualities I think they share.

1. How do you know the God of the Bible is real and all the other religions are wrong?
2. The Bible describes a God they would never worship.
3. There is no good evidence for the validity of God.
4. Asking them to prove there is no God is logically errant because you can't prove a negative.
5. There is no historical evidence for Jesus outside the Bible.
6. The universe is eternal, therefore it does not need a creator.
7. If the universe was designed by a creator, then the creator must have a designer.
8. The Bible is flawed and contradicts itself and known facts.
7. They all claimed familiarity with the Bible and what it teaches yet show a marked ignorance of what the text means and what Christians believe.
8. They refused to apply context and culture to the Bible text and instead imposed their own ideas and supposition anachronistically.
9. They claimed that Christianity borrowed/stored theological ideas can concepts from pagan/mystery religions.
10. They claimed that there are no known evidences and facts that confim the bible as being true.
11. They refused to discuss the original languages of the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic and instead wanted to focus on 400 year-old English translations which the translators themselves agreed was not perfect.
12. They were willing to call my knowledge and education into question without providing any credentials of their own to speak as an authority.
13. Refused in many cases to be corrected in things about what the Bible really does say. For example a. Zombies and b. Unicorns
14. Refused to provide any meaningful refutations of facts and information I raised or pointed them to.
15. Tried standard atheists arguments like trying to resorting to equating the evidence for God to the evidence for leprechauns as if it their existences were linked some how.
16. Ignoring the fact that intelligent and educated experts in sciences, history, and the fields of study we discussed have come to different conclusions that they have come to and should not be dismissed out right.
17. A couple of these men have blocked me from following them on twitter...so I guess that means that as far as they are concerned the discussions are over.
18. They don't see the hand of God in mathematics and the sciences.
19. They desire to come up with alternate theories to explain the obvious design of the universe
20. The use the same tired arguments as Richard Dawkins (who refuse to debate competent Theists anymore) and Christopher Hitchens (who is a good debater).
21. They accept macro evolution as the scientific explanation for the origin of the variouos lifeforms on earth.
22. They define God differently than God defines himself in the Bible.
23. They don't believe that there is one true religion that all of humanity should follow.

I haven't really decided to turn this post into a series or not. I could respond to each of these posts and even show examples of argument and statements made because I think it could be useful to anyone contemplating these matters. If I do turn this into a series of posts I will take each of the above statements and write a single post around it. I may even say some things I didn't say in my twitter stream. If any of the people I've been discussing these things in Twitter, or anyone, I hope that they will free to post their own responses if they disagree. I also hope that althought it got heated, especially from freeplay and askegg, that they know that i harbor no ill-will towards them but that God will make known to them about His love and mercy. Once you try Jesus you will never go back.

Christian Apologetics - Life and Doctrine: Jewish / Judaism : A Jewish Book Called “The New Testament”

Mariano has posted an excellent article arguing for the "Jewishness" of the New Testament. I agree totally. Christianity does not supplant Judaism but is a continuation of it. He even provides a handy chrat showing Old testament passages that Jesus uses in the Gospels. This great!

Christian Apologetics - Life and Doctrine: Jewish / Judaism : A Jewish Book Called “The New Testament”