Problem of Pain video response and some summer updates

This has been one of those summers, I’ll tell you.  I suppose it has been noticed that I haven’t been contributing to the blog very much, or sending out newsletters, or debating very much on the forum.  September is on its way and I for one am looking forward to ‘vacation’ being over so that I can get back into the groove!

I had several speaking engagements this summer and a couple of them I had recorded on video.  I thought I would make some of this available on Youtube in anticipation of the day when I really open up a video ministry.  The clip below is a snippet from a question and answer session (ie, the whole presentation was sort of like a ’stump the apologist’ presentation) and I was asked how I would respond to someone enduring grief or sorrow.

Enjoy.

To read the comments on this entry or post one of your own go to the Comment Forum.

Posted in Blog, General | Use the Comment Forum

PETA Sex Education Commercial Tells the Truth Just not the Right One

Have you seen on the news the PETA sex education commercial?  On Fox News it’s getting hammered for being grossly inappropriate.  Possibly Youtube agrees, since it looks like it has been pulled.  That means I have to explain it, I reckon.

Basically, the commercial has a mother and father (gots to give them credit for arriving at that arrangement) encouraging their daughter to have sex with anything that ‘has a pulse.’  When the girl protests that she might get pregnant, the parents tell her not to worry, after all, there are places for unwanted children- forgetting I guess, that some elments within the human species thinks aborting unwanted children is a perfectly acceptable solution.  The ad ends with something like “We don’t treat our children this way, why do we treat our pets this way?”

The ad ends with a plea to spay and neuter the family pet, which of course a quick survey of human history over the last century refutes the notion that we humans don’t treat ourselves that way.  Eugenics got a bad rap but it’s coming back into vogue.  But that is not what caught my attention.

Anyway, I wasn’t offended by the ad at all.  Instead, I thought that on a cultural level, the message given to the daughter is exactly the message communicated.  Perhaps parents don’t just come out and say ’sleep with anything that moves’ but young people are clearly getting that message.  You don’t need “Let’s do it like they do it on Discovery Channel” to perceive that.  The simple fact is that American society is saturated in the message to have sex with anything that ‘has a pulse.’

So, the PETA commercial does really capture a real truth.  Only that truth is not that we don’t treat our own children the way we do animals.  In fact, we do.  In fact, you might say that we still treat the animals a shade better, for we only spay and neuter them, we don’t abort their offspring for them.  Forced abortion is the humane solution to human over-population.  Or so they believe in China.  I suppose you might argue that the unwanted animals are eventually euthanized, so maybe they do get more of a bum deal, but euthanasia is on our doorstep too, isn’t it?

I suppose if you believe we humans are mere animals such logical progressions are inevitable.  Pretty soon PETA is going to have to turn its attention to the humane treatment of humans.   Ok, don’t hold your breath.  The rest of us should be thinking about it, though.

To read the comments on this entry or post one of your own go to the Comment Forum.

Posted in Blog, General | Use the Comment Forum

Release Date for Book 2 of Birth Pangs Series, Spero, and Excerpt

I am very pleased to announce that book 2 in the Birth Pangs series, Spero, will be released in hard cover on October 20th, 2008.  The soft cover will be released around Thanksgiving, 2008.

I am very pleased to make available an extended excerpt of the book.  You may download it below.  Feel free to pass it along and share it!

Review copies are available.  Email me at author@birthpangs.com.  Please provide details about the venue that the review would be published in.  Review copies can be purchased by fans for a limited time through this site.

Click here for an extended excerpt of Spero.

To read the comments on this entry or post one of your own go to the Comment Forum.

Posted in Blog, General | Use the Comment Forum

A 1,000 Word Argument for Christianity

I was once asked to provide a concise, no more than 1,000 word essay, on why I believe Christianity to be true.  I think the hint was that I can be a little too verbose.  :)  As I recall, this essay was well received, if only because it met the terms of the request.  I just found it on my hard drive, sitting around and playing video games, and otherwise being unproductive.  No sense in having that.  It was originally posted on my forum.  Feel free to use it yourself (with appropriate crediting, of course) and if you have questions, drop by the forum.  Feel free to count the number of words. 

Christianity in 1,000 words or less.

Any worldview that demands consideration needs to be consistent with the following elements:

1. It must be affirm the actuality of our existence, the reliability of our sensory perception, and reasonable interpretation of that perception.

2. It must affirm the existence of something eternal, as to believe that something can come from nothing strictly speaking undermines #1.

3. It must affirm the reality of our ability to make free choices, which again speaks to #1.

4. It must acknowledge and account for the observed fact that humans do bad things and consider the concept of ‘bad’ to be meaningful.

Christianity meets pre-requisite #1 and #3 by accepting that humans are created by God, and were declared ‘good.’

Christianity meets #2 by affirming that it is God that is the eternal thing, which consequently means the universe is contained within him, and yet is not him.

Though meeting #1-3 serves as important pre-requisites, it remains necessary still to demonstrate that Christianity is actual, and not merely consistent with a cogent epistemology.

#4 addresses a set of facts we observe, thus in Christianity’s addressing of those issues, this forms two areas of observational corroboration for Christianity’s worldview, rather than just being important propositions required for any cogent worldview.

Given the above, we can form some expectations we might have about how such a being might interact with his creation, and seek out evidence of the sort of revelation that can be reasonably expected within such a set of presumptions.

A system where the entity does have the desire to reveal itself to its creation must consist of order, patterns, and consistent physical laws. That way, the entity can satisfy a high epistemological threshold to verify that it is really this entity doing the communicating. I.e., for ‘miracles’ to exist, there have to be laws to be broken that we are unable, ever, to break.

That is the system we observe, and accounts of miracles exist, too. This is consistent with Christianity, and serves somewhat to provide empirical evidence for it in the sense of the physical laws being stable. Miracles could not be ‘empirical’ by definition, except insofar as they appear via the senses to those who observe them. Repeated ‘miracles’ would be indistinguishable from natural laws. Read the rest of this entry »

To read the comments on this entry or post one of your own go to the Comment Forum.

Posted in Blog, General | Use the Comment Forum

Sunday School Christianity Is Dangerous to the Faith

I received a forwarded email that originally was sent by some media guy who lost his faith reporting on religion.  In that email the following excerpt was provided, abbreviated already, and I abbreviated it more:

… Having been raised to believe in a just God, my faith was shaken when my husband and I lost our ten-year-old child to Cystic Fibrosis, a congenital disease for which there is no cure.

We felt betrayed that a loving God could bring such pain to parents who lived by the Golden Rule and followed the Ten Commandments. As we coped with our grief, we couldn’t help but wonder why our love for our child wasn’t enough to keep her alive and why our faith wasn’t bringing us any comfort.

After losing another child to the same illness, we came to the conclusion that we were naïve to believe in the Sunday School version of a deity that sits in a place called heaven and doles out rewards for good behavior and punishment for bad. We have only to look at world events and know this isn’t true.

So, who to pray to? An impersonal deity who lets bad things happen to good people? We still haven’t figured that out. But it is difficult to abandon a life-long belief.

First of all, I am sympathetic to the woman who wrote this.  I don’t think I blame her for her reactions.  She merely compared the version of Christianity she received with the world as she experienced it.   What she describes as the ‘Sunday School version’ of God is in fact what many people receive growing up, and what they receive even as adults.  This is anecdotal evidence for a state of affairs I’ve been calling attention to repeatedly.  For example, many of the nonChristians I discourse with also have ‘Sunday School versions’ of God floating around in their heads. Read the rest of this entry »

To read the comments on this entry or post one of your own go to the Comment Forum.

Posted in Blog, General | Use the Comment Forum

New Archeological Find Proves Christianity is a Fraud. Again.

You hear about these kinds of things every now and then.  I’m blogging on an article I saw today on a tablet they are calling “Gabriel’s Revelation.”  Here it is.

This is the first that I’ve heard of this tablet and haven’t seen the text allegedly inscribed on it.  I only have what is in the article, so I’m going tread lightly on the stone’s implications as evidence for or against Christianity.  What I found really interesting was the glimpse into the scholarly community and its approach to research into the Historical Jesus.  Let me just issue some running commentary.

Let’s start with the first paragraph.

A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

A nice opening paragraph.  Too bad the whole rest of the article softens this considerably.  In the first place, the article goes on to say only that they are confident that the tablet dates to the first century.  The sole justification for placing it ‘decades just before the birth of Jesus’ is analysis of the style of the text.  And the whole business about rising from the dead after three days turns out to be the pet view of what one scholar thinks the hard to read words should be construed.

Here we have an example of a provocative opening that is basically false, but you only know that if you read on, and how many people will read on?  Give it time and this will be leading the news and trumpets will be blaring that Jesus’ resurrection was just borrowed Jewish mythology, one more reason it can’t be true!  A month later after all the truth comes out, you won’t hear about it on the news, leaving hundreds of thousands witih the impression that the tablet means just as it was first presented.

Moving on. Read the rest of this entry »

To read the comments on this entry or post one of your own go to the Comment Forum.

Posted in Blog, General | Use the Comment Forum

Random Thoughts on Four Day Work Weeks and the Price of Oil

Did you hear that there are businesses and state agencies moving to a four day work week?  The idea is to save on energy costs… the business’s, of course.  It has the side effect of saving normal people some costs, too.  In some cases, the extra day at home is still supposed to be dedicated to work.

I think a four day work week is a good thing.  As a teacher, Friday was almost always a waste, anyway.  Neither teachers nor students had much focus.  This doesn’t seem to be true only of teachers and students.  Two day weekends never seem to be enough to really recharge, either.  You spend all of Saturday recovering, maybe getting to a project, and then Sunday getting ready for Monday.  With three days off, you actually get your day of rest, which I’m convinced we need.  I need it, anyway.

It makes me think about our ideas about productivity in this country.  I bet we get done twice as much in a day today than we got done in 1950.  In some cases, I bet it’s three times as much.  Having increased our ability to do more in a day, did we culturally decide to diminish how many days we worked?  Nah, we just patted our backs on our increased productivity and had higher expectations placed on us.  Not only that, but by thinking in terms of the hourly investment of the employee’s time rather than what the employee is able to accomplish in that hour, businesses were able to justify paying the employee the same (or less) even though they were producing more.  CEO’s, of course, received fat bonuses for the increase in profit.

I like the idea of the four day work week but I like even more the idea of re-evaluating where we as a society our going to put our resources and time.

To read the comments on this entry or post one of your own go to the Comment Forum.

Posted in Blog, General | Use the Comment Forum