Critics of the Bible begin with the premise that they know more about the geography and times of the Bible than those who actually lived during the history of the period. Dogmatic claims are often made based on incomplete archeological evidence. This has been happening for a long time. How many years have we heard there was no mention of David outside the Bible? In 1987 archeologist Kathleen Kenyo [...]
“Is God Dead?” With a black background and bright red lettering, Time magazine’s April 8, 1966 cover**[1]** dared to question the existence of God in a nation where “In God We Trust” is its motto. Screenwriter Edward Anhalt, quoted in the Time issue, sums up the worldview of the God-is-dead worldview: “God is an infantile fantasy, which was necessary when men did not understand what lightning was. [...]
The latest attempt by an elephant thrower to pass off fiction as fact is a bogus statement supposedly made by James G. Watt. (More about this below.) Watt was Secretary of the Interior during the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1983 until he made the following remark to a group of lobbyists in which he said that his coal commission’s decisions would be upheld because, quoting Watt, “I have a bl [...]
What does it mean to “throw the elephant”? A person responds to an argument by dumping loads of seemingly relevant information on it, calls it a “refutation,” and declares himself the winner, all the while hoping his opponent won’t notice how faulty much of the information is. The internet has made throwing the elephant a favorite tactic of anti-Christian bigots. It used to be that a response requ [...]
How should Christians respond to reform efforts under political regimes where they have no rights, no freedom of religion, speech, press, or assembly? For the most part, prior to the fall of most of Eastern Europe’s Communist governments and the former Soviet Union, Christians behind the iron curtain had little say in the way their nation operated. This was true of nearly all citizens. Christians [...]
Ever since human beings first walked the earth, they have attempted—whether by extension of logic or through the use of magic—to divine what the unknown future holds in store for them. For a variety of reasons—to comfort themselves, to prepare themselves—human beings have been eager to know what tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the next month, the next year, the years to come, will do to them and [...]
“You can’t get away with blaming the Holocaust on a person who was dead for decades before this event occurred. This is a blatant attempt to obscure the role of your religion and its inbred anti-Semitism in the Holocaust. Trash like you cannot be aloud [sic] to get away with these kinds of inflammatory untruths on the public airways. You need to get on the air and apologize for this lie and do it [...]
“The ‘atheist nation’ of China mourns for their dead and undertakes a huge humanitarian effort which proves their system of shame and honor is vastly superior to the Christian system of dogmatic and silly superstitions. Christians absolutely hate it when other people show more concern for their fellow humans than the Christians do. Christians only pretend to love their fellow humans and do so only [...]
We saw in yesterday’s article “Whose Common Sense?” that the call for a Common Sense approach to apologetics is naïve and counterproductive. Competing worldviews are not “willing to work inductively, from particular facts to general conclusions” unless both sides agree (maybe) on the starting point of inquiry. Of course, establishing the starting point is the fundamental problem, the very thing th [...]
For some time now I have been receiving emails from a belligerent atheist. Some of his emails are so vile that to describe them in general terms would be enough to offend you. Atheists are like a tube of toothpaste. The harder you squeeze them to be consistent with their operating assumptions, the more they spill what is really contained deep in their God-hating soul. Jesus described it this way: [...]
While checking out the Borders bookstore at a new shopping center in our neighborhood, I came across 2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt in the religious section. Without even needing to look to see who published it, I knew Prometheus Books was behind it. If you want to know what the humanists are up to, scan the pages of a Prometheus Books catalog. The humanists keep [...]
“The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method,’ with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology,”[1] argued Stephen Jay Gould. Gould (1941–2002), who served as professor of geology at Harvard and New York University, stated that “no factual discovery of science (statements about how nature ‘is’) can, in principle, lead us to ethi [...]
The Children of God (COG), a cult founded by David (Moses David) Berg, used sex as an intoxicant to keep the cult together. Homosexuality, lesbianism, incest, and group sex were all legitimized by the COG cult. Berg’s daughter, Deborah (Linda Berg) Davis, writes in The Children of God: The Inside Story, of how her father justified his perverted view of sex because he first perverted Scripture. He [...]
It’s been said that you can tell a book by its cover. You can also tell a book by those who endorse it. Consider Alan Dershowitz’s Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking our Declaration of Independence.[1] The book is endorsed by at least two high-profile published atheists (Steven Pinker and Sam Harris), the president of the ACLU (Nadine Strossen, who speaks to atheist groups and may be [...]
As you know, American Vision rarely asks for donations. And when we do, all of the donations we receive go 100% to ministry projects and not to staff salaries. Like most Americans, however, many of you are cutting back over concerns about our slowing economy and the upcoming presidential election. We’re not. Now is the time to recapture ground that has been lost to liberals. There’s no better time [...]
In Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints v. United States (1890), the Supreme Court declared: “It is contrary to the spirit of Christianity and the civilization which Christianity has produced in the Western world." In an earlier decision that year, the court declared in Davis v. Beason that “Bigamy and polygamy are crimes by the laws of all civilized and Christi [...]
On a flight to New Mexico last year, the in flight movie was Fracture (2007). It starred Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling. Hopkins had killed his wife, and while all the circumstantial evidence pointed to him, there was no actual physical evidence to link him to the murder. The detectives and the prosecutor, played by Gosling, looked at all evidence over and over again and could not figure out how [...]
The New York Times is known by the slogan and masthead logo as “All The News That’s Fit To print.” A more accurate slogan would be, “all the news we say is fit to print.” But even this isn’t quite right. For the Times and every other newspaper and magazine, it’s all the news and our opinion about that news that’s fit to print. Christians have fallen into the trap set by secularists that facts and [...]
The next time you hear someone predict environmental doom, remember Paul R. Ehrlich. In his book The Population Bomb, first published in 1968, Ehrlich made a number of predictions about the future of our planet based on a faulty understanding of population growth and food supplies. Ehrlich’s projections were not new. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), a British political economist and mathematicia [...]
The following comment was in response to my article “Trying to Account for the Invisible in the Atheist World”: “Atheists claim that only physical things exist.” Straw man argument. You set up a bad foundation so you can tear it down. And if morality in your argument can’t come from atheists, then explain the Christian worldview of the morality of slavery in the Bible. Claiming that only “ph [...]
