When to End a Conversation With A Four Year-Old

Image via WikipediaLast Sunday I took my family to Olive Garden and during dinner I was telling my wife, Suki, that I looked up the character Black Manta and found a picture of him without a helmet and that he is a  black man because I had never seen him outside of costume. I was amazed. I never knew that.

Suki wasn't really impressed, but she humors me anyway. She said, "How could you not know? All black characters have  'Black' in their name."

I replied, "No, that's not true." I already had a couple of characters in mind.

"Name one," my wife challenged.

Before I could respond, our four-year-old daughter, Makayla, who was obviously paying closer attention to the conversation and watching me during her life, said "Black Widow!" We busted out laughing. Makayla said it with the look on her face of knowing that she was undeniably correct.

At this point, I was through.  I mean Makayla has a point. Black Widow is a white fictional character with "black" in her codename. Let's just say I backed away slowly! I've learned that when your toddler's got you like that it's better to not press it and just remember that they are paying attention to everything you say and do. .

Debunking Christianity: How Do We Know Christians are Delusional?

It is shocking to me that people claim Christians are delusional. This video attempts to say that because we reject Mormonism and Islam we should also reject Christianity. The video skips the question about what reasons are there to believe Christianity over Mormonism and Islam and instead asserts that there is no good reason to believe Christianity is true and tries to make it seem like the Bible is full of magic and superstition. It ignores the scientific studies that show the prayer is effective and all of the positive evidence for the Bible. I find the analogy of people who believe false things as living in a bubble very interesting because how do atheist know that they are not in a bubble or just traded one bubble for another? We all have biases and presuppositions that are not true. The God of the Bible promises us freedom from those by freeing us from ourselves.Unless an atheists desires to claim that everyone is deluded but themselves, he/she has no proof that that they are not in a bubble of their own and unable to see reality outside of it. Until you have been freed from your bubble of sin and separation from God you can't see that you are imprisoned in it. The Gospel is that Jesus came so that you may be freed. Let God burst your bubble so you can be free. You can't think your way out of it because you don't even see that you are in the bubble.





Debunking Christianity: How Do We Know Christians are Delusional?

Calvinistic Cartoons: Don't Drink That

Brother Eddings has posted this interesting video that denounces racism by showing how utterly stupid it is.




Calvinistic Cartoons: Don't Drink That

Video: Someone Made A Real-Life ‘Star Wars’ Laser Blaster « : Crushable - Crushable gives you the celebrity news, style and scoop on the stuff you care about.

Image via Wikipedia
My friends,we live in interesting times!!!! Of course, I realize that this could be a hoax, but if it is, it is a cool hoax!





Video: Someone Made A Real-Life ‘Star Wars’ Laser Blaster « : Crushable - Crushable gives you the celebrity news, style and scoop on the stuff you care about.

FacePalm of the Day #67 - Debunking Christianity: Harry McCall on the Lies of God

John Loftus posted the following list from Harry McCall alleging that the Bible contains instances of God lying. Some would ask why even bother responding to such a clear and present mistaken understanding of what the Bible says and at least Loftus provides a reason why this is important. I'm going italicize my comments.

Does God lie? He most certainly does according to the Bible. If so, how can we trust anything in it? Maybe God's plan is to send skeptics to heaven and gullible believers to hell? ;-) Ya just can't know.

At least Loftus is correct about the stakes. If God has lied in the Bible, we have no reason to think that He has told us the truth about our own salvation. There are two scriptures that come to mind where God explicitly tells us He does not lie.

¹⁹ God is not human, that he should lie,
not a human being, that he should change his mind.
Does he speak and then not act?
Does he promise and not fulfill? - Numbers 23:19

He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a human being, that he should change his mind.” - 1 Samuel 15:29

McCall seems to think that he has found contradictions in the scripture itself. Let's see if he is right.

The Hebrew Bible on the Lies of God: by Harry McCall.

In 1 Kings, Yahweh has his 400 prophets lie to Ahab:

6 Then the king of Israel gathered the prophets together, about four hundred men, and said to them, “Shall I go against Ramoth-gilead to battle or shall I refrain?” And they said, “Go up, for the Lord will give it into the hand of the king.” (1 Kings 22: 6)

Jehoshaphat feels God has His prophets lying to Ahab and tells him to send for the prophet Micaiah who again confirms that God is a lair[sic]:

19 Micaiah said, “Therefore, hear the word of the LORD. I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right and on His left. 20 “The LORD said, ‘Who will entice Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?’ And one said this while another said that. 21 “Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD and said, ‘I will entice him.’ 22 “The LORD said to him, ‘How?’ And he said, ‘I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ Then He said, ‘You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do so.’ 23 “Now therefore, behold, the LORD has put a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; and the LORD has proclaimed disaster against you.”
(1 Kings 22: 19 – 23)

McCall makes a few mistakes:
1. The lying prophets were not God's prophets. Look at verse 23 carefully. The spirit says that he would lie through Ahab's prophets.
2. Jehoshaphat was a good king who followed God
3. Ahab rejected God.
4. Micaiah was not one of Ahab's prophets and Ahab did not like Micaiah because he never told Ahab what he wanted to hear.
5. God did not lie to Ahab but used Micaiah to let him know that his 400 prophets lied about their victory. God had proclaimed disaster again Ahab.
6. Ahab and Jehoshaphat chose to ignore the warning and went into battle anyway leading to Ahab's death.
7. Moral: Don't be like Ahab.

Fail #1

The Prophet Jeremiah accuses God of lying. In Jeremiah 4: 10 he accused God as being a deceiver and a liar:

10 Then I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Surely You have utterly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, ‘You will have peace’; whereas a sword touches the throat.”

And again repeats it later:

7 O LORD, You have deceived me and I was deceived; You have overcome me and prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; Everyone mocks me. (Jeremiah 20:7)

Jeremiah was frightened and frustrated. Things didn't happen the way he thought they should. Like us, he thought that if he was really called of God than he would not be going through the suffering he was experiencing. God didn't promise him respect or ease or peace or a good time. What you can see in this instance is that following God will cause people to mock and hate you. You will face opposition. Fail 2.

In Ezekiel 14: 1-11, God will lie to anyone He fails to like:

…the LORD will answer him by myself: 8And I will set my face against that man, and will make him a sign and a proverb, and I will cut him off from the midst of my people; and ye shall know that I am the LORD. 9 And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the LORD have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel. 10And they shall bear the punishment of their iniquity: the punishment of the prophet shall be even as the punishment of him that seeketh unto him; 11That the house of Israel may go no more astray from me, neither be polluted any more with all their transgressions; but that they may be my people, and I may be their God, saith the Lord GOD. (Jeremiah 7b - 10)

The reason that God is pronouncing punishment. McCall left this little fact out. Idolatry isn't just about God not liking you. IT is about turning your back on Him. Israel was supposed to be his chosen people. One reason why "marriage" is often used as the analogy for the relationship between Israel and God is because it was supposed to be that close. Idolatry is tantamount to adultery. Same thing today. When you turn your back on God you are "turning tricks". Why should you surprised when disaster comes? One can deny that the reality of what the Bible is talking about all they want, but at least get what the scripture is saying correct. Fail #3.

In Genesis 2: 17, God lies when He tells Adam and Eve that the very day they eat of it, they shall surly die and they don’t (notice the NISV “dynamic equivalent” avoided the word יום “day”).

The text reads: אכלך ביום which matches closely to the LXX: δ' ἂν ἡμέρᾳ φάγητε.

The lie of God is the fact that יום and ἡμέρᾳ are both used in a literal sense just as it is in the six days of creation.

Christians apparently have better morals and ethics then the God they love and worship!

What is the one of the certainties of human life? The one thing that all humans have in common identically - no matter where/when you live, how much money you have, or what you know? The common denominator is that one day we will all die! Genesis 2:17 is correct. The day Adam chose to reject and disobey God, we all fell in him. He died. He became a prisoner of sin and death. All the signs point to that death was not in his future before he disobeyed God. It took 930 years for Adam to experience physically what happened to him spiritually, psychologically and in his relationship and connection to his creator. McCall is trying to make the argument that God implied that Adam would drop dead as soon as ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. However the truth is way more profound than that. IT was far worse than dropping dead. Loftus, McCall, and others like to ask why is it they can't experience and interact with God just like we do with each other? Thank Adam for that one. Fail #4. Additionally, McCall ignores the evidence that the six days of creation was not six literal 24 hour days but six unspecified long periods of time. Taking that in consideration it could have been 930 years in the case of when Adam would die and a few billion years for each day in the creation breakdown in Genesis 1. Fail #5

Has Harry McCall proved his point. Alas, no. Not even close. God is not a liar. People however are. Instead of saying McCall lied, I'd prefer to refer to his being misinformed.

Debunking Christianity: Harry McCall on the Lies of God

My Common Sense is Tingling: Debunking Christianity: The Danger of Belief is Thinking You Believe What God Does

John Loftus offers the following quote:

And yet that's exactly what believers think according to new studies:

[P]eople's own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God's beliefs than with estimates of other people's beliefs...reasoning about God's beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person's beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God's beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one's own existing beliefs. Link

The studies seem to ignore some very fundamental facts about what the Bible actually says about what God thinks and how people think. You cannot simultaneously believe that you know what God thinks and believe the Bible is true. If you believe the Bible than you know that God isn't even on the same level as we are on. We are not thinking his thoughts. We don't know God because of what is in us, but because of what has been revealed to us by God himself. There are no scriptures that should lead us to think we believe what God believes. The information flows from him, not back and forth.

⁶ Seek the LORD while he may be found;
call on him while he is near.
⁷ Let the wicked forsake their ways
and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
⁸ “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the LORD.
⁹ “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
¹⁰ As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
¹¹ so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. - Isaiah 55:6-11


¹² For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. - 1 Corinthians 13:12


² Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know. ³ But whoever loves God is known by God. - 1 Corinthians 8:2-3

Debunking Christianity: The Danger of Belief is Thinking You Believe What God Does