@MartijnLinssen: Global Warming, IT and Christianity - the Law of Infallibility

I've been talking to a MartijnLinssen on Twitter and he posted the following blog entry. My comments are in red.

On Twitter, I do talk a lot. About anything. My monthly tweets have exponentially grown to currently over 1,200 a month, and that now is my baseline it seems.
I talk a bit with fundamental Christians at times, but that's at night time usually, somehow.
I talk mostly with IT people during the day, as I work in IT and usually operate as an Enterprise Architect who started off writing BASIC at age 11 and COBOL at career start - been there, done that.
And every now and then I do read and / or say something about Global Warming as that has become part of our everyday life

I find it easy to talk to him although we don't agree on the Bible. It's obvious why now I know that he is in IT.

When having conversation with Christians, I usually run into strict believers who have a good share of quotes and take the Bible literally or at least believe it contains absolute Truth. I challenge them on the crucifixion and say that the Bible should be taken figuratively, not literally, that Jesus' death is just a spiritual death (I believe Jesus' true words, meanings and life are according to the Gospel of Thomas) which is met with fierce resistance that it is all the Word of God, and True, and that it should be taken literally. The Bible is infallible, they say.
Then I ask them what they think of Luke 17:21, where Jesus tells the Pharisees that "the Kingdom of God is inside you". The answers always are alike "Jesus didn't mean that when he said such", "You have to place it into the context", "No that needs to be translated among, not inside or within" - much like this lengthy commentary
And before you know it, the True Word of God is being bent and interpreted right in front of you - by Christians themselves

He and I had a similar exchange. He commits two mistakes. The first is that he should try to prove that the rest of the Gospels should be read in light of  the Gospel of Thomas. It conflicts with the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The other  problem is that he misinterprets Luke 17:21 because he thinks he can take Gospel of  Thoms equal or more weight.  In the NIV, Luke 17:21 says

nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within [oR among or with] you."

He wants to interpret this verse as saying that the Kingdom of God is inside everyone including Jesus' enemies. We know that this interpretation is incorrect because inconflicts with other scriptures. His argument leads to Jesus' enemies - those who hate and work against him -  going to heaven. This makes no sense

²²Then came the Feast of Dedication at Jerusalem. It was winter, ²³and Jesus was in the temple area walking in Solomon's Colonnade. ²⁴The Jews gathered around him, saying, "How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly."

 ²⁵Jesus answered, "I did tell you, but you do not believe. The miracles I do in my Father's name speak for me, ²⁶but you do not believe because you are not my sheep. ²⁷My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. ²⁸I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. ²⁹My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand. ³⁰I and the Father are one." - John 10:22-29

The rest of  the post talks about infallibility and expresses that if something is infallible it must also falsifiable - able to be proven false. This is one of the characteristics of Christianity from the beginning. Either Jesus was crucified or he wasn't. Jesus rose from the dead or he didn't. You can't duck it. You can't call it spiritual or metaphor. The apostles claimed to be eyewitnesses to the resurrection and they pointed to evidences like the empty tomb (look at Acts 2).

[The picture is showing the 'Christian percentage by country' - although that just is counting quantity of course, not measuring quality]

@MartijnLinssen: Global Warming, IT and Christianity - the Law of Infallibility

Silencing Atheists on Twitter

Image via CrunchBase

Well it has been an interesting couple of days. I have been finding myself discussing the veracity of the Bible on Twitter. Some of the more vocal....disagreement has come from one going by the moniker "Golmer". He tried to carpet bomb me with a bunch of questions designed to show the Bible does not make sense. I promised to respond to each of them. Many of them are raised in Dan Barker's Bible Quiz which is answered and refuted on the Tekton website at Answer Key: Dan Barker's "Bible Quiz"

Golmer:

@mmcelhaney No, I'm denying the veracity of the bible because it is full of archaic, obviously ignorant crap.

Let us see if he has anything to back up his conclusion,

Golmer:

@mmcelhaney You mean you have a GOOD answer for why Genesis (even in summary) gets the order of "creation" wrong?

Of course. Genesis chapter one is a narration of the events as they happened from the vantage of a person who was in the earth's atmosphere.

 Golmer:

@mmcelhaney Do you have a GOOD answer for why the inspired word allows for slavery and debasing of women?

I am a black man -  a descendant of slaves in the United States. Having studied the history of Slavery in this country and comparing it with ancient Israel there is no comparison. Slavery in ancient Israel was important economically and no one was enslaved because of their skin color and were not looked at as less than human. Every 70 years slaves were supposed to be freed unless they wanted to stay. And neither in the New Testament nor in the Old was it okay for  slave holders to mistreat their slaves. I wrote more about this at Dwindling In Unbelief: Collision: Are Douglas Wilson's beliefs good for the world? Part 1


As for hatred towards' women, I wrote a very lengthy response quite a few weeks ago.
An "Evil" of Christianity

Golmer:

 @mmcelhaney Why, after creation, does God need to rest?

Where does the Bible say that God needed to rest?. It only says that he did. 

² By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested  from all his work. Geneis 2:2

 Golmer:

@mmcelhaney Why, according to Genesis, were the sun and moon even "placed" in the sky?

  ¹⁴ And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, ¹⁵ and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. ¹⁶ God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. ¹⁷ God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, ¹⁸ to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. ¹⁹ And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.Genesis 1: 14-19

 Golmer:

@mmcelhaney What kind of food did God eat? Especially if he didn't have a "man like" physical body?

I'll save this one for the inevitable sequel I have to write because I don't get the question

Golmer:

@mmcelhaney Just how much incest is there in the bible anyway? Why is it seemingly okay, or at the very least "normal" in context?

 When is incest okay? When u are trying to repopulate the earth! Why is it a bad idea now? The gene pool is now large enough that close genetic pairings are not only no longer needed but its dangerous!  Even if you reject the Bible you have to agree that species grow and adapted characteristics are passed on because close relatives get together and those traits are passed to the next generation. IF evolution were true, I'd gather that this would be important.

 Golmer:

@mmcelhaney Why is the bible replete with ancient PAGAN numerology (7, 40, 40,000, 9, etc.?) Astrology part of God's plan?

So he wants to know why numbers like 7, 40, 40 thousand, 9 and others like 3 show up all the time. 2 shows up a lot too. I'm not sure if I'd call it pagan. But I think it is because God is a god of numbers. Mathematics is important. It is His language. Why do factors of pi, 2, 3, and i show up in almost every mathematical equation used to describe reality? It's proof of design and how if the constants in those equations were any different we would not be here to discuss it.Answer that.one and I think you will be able to answer why there are all kinds of the same numbers everywhere in the Bible.

Golmer:

@mmcelhaney Just how many different contradictory orders of events to creation are there in Genesis?

Genesis 1 gives the overview over the entire 6 days of creation. Chapter 2 gives further details of what happened on day 6. They do not conflict. It's up to Golmer or anyone else who agrees with his assertion that the order of events in Genesis conflicts. Burden of proof is on him to show that they do conflict.

Golmer:
@mmcelhaney Just how many gods are there, according to the bible?

For this is what the LORD says— he who created the heavens, he is God; he who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited— he says: "I am the LORD, and there is no other. Isaiah 45:18

Golmer:
@mmcelhaney What is God's deal with not being able to deal with the element Iron?

Judges 1:19

"And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." Skeptics say: "Some omnipotent God! He couldn't even drive out people with iron chariots!" What's the problem here? This was the same God that the Bible says parted the Red Sea, brought Ten Plagues on Egypt, and created everything. Is it really plausible to suggest that some later Biblical writer is now going to say that this same God was limited because a couple of pagans had some iron chariots? Of course not! Obviously, something else is meant here - that the "he" in question is Judah, not God, and "the Lord was with Judah" - i.e., Judah had good tidings - inasmuch as He gave them success in the mountains, but NOT enough to take on iron chariots. The Judges writer is assuring the reader that in spite of Judah's failure in the valley, the Lord was with them. (For a comparison to Joshua 17:18, see here; for why Judah did not succeed, in accord with provisos laid out in the contract of Deuteronomy, see here.) source

Golmer:

@mmcelhaney Whom, besides Adam and Eve, was brought wholesale into existence by God without parents?

 Well, he could not be talking about  Jesus because He had Mary for a mother. Therefore he must be referring to Melchizedek.For look at Hebrew 7:1-4

 ¹This Melchizedek was king of Salem and priest of God Most High. He met Abraham returning from the defeat of the kings and blessed him, ²and Abraham gave him a tenth of everything. First, his name means "king of righteousness"; then also, "king of Salem" means "king of peace." ³Without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life, like the Son of God he remains a priest forever.

The passage is not saying that he had no parents it is pointing out that the man was a priest of God and like Jesus was not from the tribe priests were supposed to come through. Jesus is in the Melchizedek order of priests not the levitical priesthood.

 Golmer:

@mmcelhaney What does Dear ol' God think of HUMAN sacrifice?

God hates human sacrifice and never commanded anyone to go through with it. I know you may be referring to Isaac and Abraham but God stopped that. Or you may be referring to Jephthah in Judges 13. If  you look it up you will see that God never told Jephthah to make that stupid vow, but Jephthah still had to follow through because he made a promise and the whole society was looking at him.  That's why it pays to keep your mouth shut. Also recall that for human sacrifice was why all those Canaanite nations were destroyed.

 Golmer:

@mmcelhaney Which are the REAL 12 tribes of Israel? Which are the REAL "10" Commandments? Are there Ten?

According to Genesis,  Jacob had 12 sons and each son founded a tribe. Joseph counts twice because he had 2 sons and each one founded a tribe. Therefore 13. There are 613 commandments in the Torah. And if you break one of them you have broken all of them.

Golmer:

@mmcelhaney Using just a bit of deductive reasoning, and the biblical description, what ACTUALLY destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah? (not God) 

Are there natuaral explantions for the destruction? I think it was a meteor storm from the way it was described. There is no way to explain something that large happening at that paticular time under those circumstances. How do you explain it without realizing that God intervened in history.

So did Golmer really offer proof the Bible is in error. Nope. And none of his ideas or questions are original. Pray for him, he can't help it,.

Responding to Atheism vis Twitter part 2

Here is the second part of my series. Here I will discuss the 4th point:

4. Asking them to prove there is no God is logically errant because you can't prove a negative.

I think that this is a disgenuous play on words, so let's flip it and asks can they disprove a positive? In other words, "Can one disprove that that there is a God?" When you apply the question the God of the Bible, you can disprove His existence if you can prove that the Bible is false. If the Bible is false then we have to toss out everything it says. It's not God-breathed and should be ignored. The issue is that I have searched and looked for holes in the Bible and can't find one. So let's look at one of the attempts made in the past month by atheist I've interacted with in the past month. I made point that there is good evidence for the Bible being true. When challenge to provide it, I gave 10 archaeological finds that support the Bible. Also thanks to the Apologetics 315 blog I found the following quote

“It may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference. Scores of archaeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or exact detail historical statements in the Bible. And, by the same token, proper evaluation of Biblical descriptions has often led to amazing discoveries.”

- Nelson Glueck

The ten I provided are just the tip of the iceberg there is way more evidence than that.

Responding to Atheism vis Twitter Part 1

Image via Wikipedia

Here is the introduction to this series of posts answering the common charges and challenges made against the Bible and Christianity while interacting with Atheists. I'm not going to cover these in the order I gave them in the initial post but I will get to all of them, maybe not everyday but maybe one or two a week. For this post I will discuss number five on my list

5. There is no historical evidence for Jesus outside the Bible.

I think that people say statement like this because if they can convince themselves that there is no Jesus then they can easily dismiss his claims and teachings and use their own ideas and concepts as the standard for their lives. I've made the following arguments but as of yet have received no great rebuttal or explanations.

1. No modern, recognized historian today claims that Jesus never existed. Even Bart Ehrman agrees that Jesus' life is a historical fact. The most liberal and secular scholars agree that there was a man from Jesus of Nazareth, who preached and lived in Palestine during the early part of the First century CE The agree that Jesus was put to death by Roman crucifixion around about 30 CE and afterward, the tomb Jesus was in was found empty, and Jesus' followers went around saying the Jesus was raised from the Dead and carried on the teaching. These are indisputable facts. We may disagree on Jesus' virgin birth. The miracles He is said to have performed. The teachings He taught. And even the resurrection itself. However, Jesus' existence is not up for debate.
2. Paul Maier who is an expert in 1st Century CE history believes and persuasively argues that Jesus existed. So what if Maier is a Christian. Consider just the fact of His existence for a moment and you will see that at least you must agree that Jesus did personally live. I have provided following lecture by Maier but no one interacted with it.
3. Paul Maier is so convinced that the historicity of Jesus can be so thoroughly defended the he debated noted atheist Dan Barker on the issue and trounced him. By the way, it was Maier's first debate!
4. My brother-in-Christ, Mariano, once posted an article that lists 236 citations of Jesus from the first three centuries of the common era. Historical Jesus
5. Jesus the Christ is one of the best-attested personage from the 1st century CE. I'd like to name someone better attested to than Jesus.
6. Some say that the four gospels are a liability in accessing the historical Jesus, but if you study them you really see that they are great historical documents.
a. Early dating - what other such ancient biographies can be dated within 2-3 generations of the events being written about?
b. Record eyewitness information
c. Contains embarassing information - meaning that they must have been true
i. Women finding the tomb Easter morning.
ii. Jesus' male followers initally giving up
d. We have thousands of copies of the manuscripts spanning nearly 2000 years and through textual criticim we know what the original manuscripts say - scholars agree with this. Most texual variations are spelling differences and word order which change nothing in the meaning of the text. The other major variations deal with a few large sections of the Gospels being missing from the earliest manuscripts. These missing pieces do no damage to the Gospel message itself.

These 5 points are why I believe that the Bible's testimony of Jesus is accurate and able to be trusted. If someone disagree with anything I have written here provide sources that disagree "and let us reason together".

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

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.