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Fractured States of America
Increasingly, we are becoming the Fractured States of America instead of the united ones. It is heartbreaking that we see school shootings in the news with alarming frequency. Gun violence is on the rise, and the problem isn’t the guns. The problem is that America has lost its sense of shared values and moral compass. Instead of unifying, we’re drifting apart.
According to ChurchTrac, since 2000 there has been a steady decline in regular church attendance marked by a similar rise in no attendance.1 Occasional attendance remains the steady. That means we keep the lukewarm, but lose the passionate ones. And the once passionate aren’t coming back.
Read the rest of this entryAnother Reason I Won’t Debate the Historicity of Jesus Christ
Hard as this may be to believe, there are actually people who don’t believe that there was ever a real, historical Jesus Christ. Their arguments are on par with people who deny Shakespeare wrote his plays, Holocaust deniers, AIDS deniers, and Jesse Ventura’s Conspiracy Theory series.
But they won’t go away. Worse, probably 95% of the Internet atheist movement counts themselves among those who deny a man named Jesus of Nazareth, described by the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and many others ever walked this planet and performed miracles before being sentenced to die on a Roman cross.
I’ve decided that I won’t debate the question of the existence of Jesus anymore. It’s really not an open question. No serious scholar of history or of the New Testament, Christian or not, actually questions this issue. Even scholars of comparative mythology question whether or not Jesus’ stories had their origin in pagan mythology! In fact, it may be the other way around.
Well, Christians, historians, and non-Christian comparative religious scholars aren’t the only ones who think that the idea Jesus never existed is preposterous. Of all people, Bart Ehrman, thinks the idea and the arguments supporting it are terrible. And he tells the Infidel Guy so during an interview:
Questions Christians Hope No One Will Ask
Through Dave Armstrong, I’ve found an ex-Christian atheist who goes by DaGoodS (I’ll call him DGS). He runs a blog discussing (naive) critiques of his former faith (don’t all ex-Christian atheists?) called Thoughts from a Sandwich.
Scanning his blog, I discovered this entry from November of last year. He has picked up a book called The Questions Christians Hope No One Will Ask. His description is apt:
The author referred to a survey where 10,000 Christians were asked, “What Questions do you find difficult to answer?” and compiled a list of the top ten; the author kindly provides Christian responses.
DGS doesn’t think that the questions in the book are very good, and I’m also guessing that he finds the answers lacking as well.
Since I’m a sucker for questions that Christians allegedly can’t answer, I thought I’d take a shot at DGS’s list. Starting today, I’ll take a poke at two questions per day, posting one first thing in the morning and one in the late afternoon.
I’m hoping we can learn something from each other. Read the rest of this entry
Back Rome Again 