Preferring the Bronze Age over the Present Age

Unbelievers often scoff and mock that Christians follow, as these unbelievers say, Bronze or Iron Age beliefs written down by ignorant peasants and superstitious persons thousands of years ago in a no longer relevant book called the Bible, and by using these pejorative and chronologically-snobby labels for the foundational text of Christian belief, the unbelievers are obviously trying to imply that Christians are fools for holding to these antiquated ideas, but, in fact, the truth, in many cases, is the exact opposite of what such unbelievers believe, for the fact of the matter is this: in this present age, where 1) we have modern academics and “thinkers” telling us that men can become women by mere verbal fiat, and where 2) we have modern academics and “thinkers”, such as modern ethicists, endorsing infanticide and bestiality and incestuous marriage, and where 3) we have modern academics and “thinkers” telling us that something can come from nothing, or that language is meaningless, or that morality does not exist, or that consciousness and the self are just illusions, or that there actually is such a thing as equality in the world between people, or any one of the other myriad of absurd and reality-denying claims made in the modern world today, then I tell you that, in many cases, I am more than happy, and I am more than rational, in preferring to believe the common-sense and time-tested wisdom of reality-hardened men from generations long past than I am in trusting some modern gender-studies professor or some “ethicist” who tells me that shagging sheep is A-OK; remember, truth does not respect chronology, and just because it is 2016 does not mean that we do not have many things insanely wrong, and it is for that reason that in many cases, I am more than happy and smart to embrace Bronze Age beliefs rather than wedding myself to the insanities of our present age.

No, Atheists Cannot Be Good Without BELIEF in God

In today's day and age, it is often contended, and very often contended by Christians themselves, that while atheists might not have a foundation for their moral values and duties, atheists can nevertheless be moral individuals without belief in God,--in the sense of being individuals who, though denying God, nevertheless follow an objective moral code of right and wrong and do, generally speaking, what is right--and yet, having thought about this matter for some time, I actually think that this contention is actually wrong, or, at the very least, not completely accurate, for consider that if the Triune God exists, and atheists do not believe in Him or acknowledge Him or give Him the worship that He is due from His creatures, then, in a very real sense, atheists are not being good, or at least not good in a very fundamental way, for they are failing to fulfill a critical moral duty / commandment that they should be fulfilling (namely, to love God with all their heart, and soul, and mind), but if, on the other hand--and for the sake of argument--we say that God does not exist, then atheists cannot be considered good in an objective sense either given that, on atheism, there are no objective moral values and duties that would allow us to call atheists 'good' in some real and significant sense, for while they might be trivially considered 'good' because they do what they wish and that is good to them, they cannot be seen as good in an objective sense, for there is no such objective good on atheism (a debatable point, I know, but one which I accept); and so, it seems to me at least, that atheists cannot be considered good without belief in God, at least not in a full and meaningful sense, for whether atheists are right or wrong about God's existence, the label 'good', in an objective sense, has trouble sticking to them either way, and so perhaps Christians should stop conceding the point that atheists really can be good without belief in God, for, as seen, a decent case can be made that atheists simply cannot be considered good without such a belief.

   

Co-opting the Atheist Talking Point about One Less God

In recent times, many of us have heard the atheist talking point that goes something like this: 

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” 

– Stephen Roberts 

...and while this is not quite an accurate representation of the state of affairs concerning the God question given the massive differences between what a god can be, there is no doubt that this is a snappy quote, and as such, it is interesting to wonder whether it could be co-opted for the rhetorically purposes of Christians; after all, could we not say something like this: 

I contend that we are both creationists and anti-evolutionists (in the "blind watchmaker" sense). I just believe in a few less extraordinary claims than you do (the universe from nothing, the multi-verse, abiogenesis, macro-evolution, consciousness from non-consciousness, language from non-language, etc.). When you understand why you dismiss so many other extraordinary claims, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

…and maybe also something like this:

I contend that we [theists and atheists] both believe in miracles*. I just believe in a sufficiently powerful miracle-worker, whereas you believe they just somehow magically happen. When you understand why you dismiss so many other absurd and extraordinary claims, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

*If a miracle is defined in the Humean sense of "breaking a ‘law of nature’", where a ‘law of nature’ is an observed regularity that we then come to believe in as a "law", then note that, in that sense, a universe from nothing, abiogenesis, macroevolution, consciousness from non-consciousness, and so on, could all be considered Humean-type miracles, and so the atheistic-naturalist does believe in miracles in the Humean sense. 

Islam is Not a Race, Just Like Christianity Is Not

The fact that Islam is not a race but rather a religion and a political ideology, and the fact that Muslims come from essentially all major ethnic and racial backgrounds, and hence the fact that calling critics of Islam ‘racists’ is false and disingenuous, is so bloody obvious that it is not even worthy of being mentioned by any honest person, and yet it has to be mentioned in today’s day and age--which is a mark of the stupidity and decline and dishonesty of our times--given the idiotic and reflexive desire by certain segments of the leftist political population to label any criticism of Islam as racist; now, as stated, it is obvious that Islam is not a race and hence obvious that critics of Islam are not racists, but one further way to see the truth of this point, and one way in which to show this point to the fools and knaves who have some sympathy with the idea that criticism of Islam is racist, and one further way to know that the use of the term ‘racist’ is ultimately just about using it as a tool of power to shut down any debate about Islam, is to simply point out that no one on the left side of the political spectrum would ever dream of calling someone a ‘racist’ for criticizing Christianity, and yet Christianity, just like Islam, is a religion and a partial political ideology with members from nearly all major ethnic and racial backgrounds, and so the very fact that a critic of Christianity would never be labelled a ‘racist’ by the left, but a critic of Islam would, tells you all that you need to know about what the actual purpose of using the term ‘racist’ is in this case: It is simply about power and shutting down criticism of Islam, which is why the next time someone calls you a ‘racist’ for criticizing Islam, not only tell them that they are &$%## stupid, but tell them to go to hell as well, and then keep on talking…its the only way to keep the dishonest liars from stopping the debate.

Local News and the Gospels in Action

A few weeks ago, I remember surfing on the internet, and somehow, the following story came to my attention:

--QUOTE--

A 72-year-old man has been released from custody on conditions after historical sexual assaults were reported to the Ontario Provincial Police.

The Leeds County OPP Crime Unit launched an investigation after receiving information in October 2015. Sgt. Kristine Rae of the OPP told the Whig-Standard on Wednesday afternoon that four male victims reported being assaulted between the late 1960s and 1990. At the time of the assaults, which occurred in Ontario, the victims were between 12 to 17 years old.

As a result, officers executed a search warrant on a residence in Rockport on Tuesday.

Arrested at the residence was Ronald Howard Huck. He has been charged by the OPP with three counts each of gross indecency and indecent assault on a male as well as one count each of sexual exploitation and sexual assault. He was released on a promise to appear in court and an officer-in-charge undertaking with conditions. He is scheduled to appear in Brockville’s Ontario Court of Justice on June 10.

http://www.thewhig.com/2016/04/13/opp-charge-rockport-man-with-historical-sexual-assaults

http://www.recorder.ca/2016/04/13/police-historical-sex-assault

--UNQUOTE--

Now the reason I bring up this rather sad story is for one simple reason: it helps to analogically show us that the Gospels, at least concerning the issue of when they were written, can still be sufficiently reliable as eyewitness testimony, even if written decades after the fact, to form a reasonable belief that they are true, just like the police in this case formed the reasonable grounds to lay criminal charges against this man on the basis of eye-witness testimony even though some of the crimes he is alleged to have committed occurred approximately 50 years ago, meaning in the late 1960s. 

Now, having worked these types of cases before, I can almost guarantee that the complainants in this matter did not write their story down before they told it to the police. In fact, they might not even have told anyone else about the story until they spoke to the police for the first time. And yet their testimony was still credible enough, even after all those years, to be reasonably believed by seasoned investigators. So even if a skeptic tries to claim that the Gospels were not written for a generation or two after the death of Jesus, that fact, in and of itself, is by no means a clear or certain testament of their lack of reliability, for as we have seen, there are real-life cases today where we take very old testimony seriously enough to charge and arrest people for it.

One Way to Minimize Both the Mass of Migrants and Their Progressive Enablers

There is no doubt that Europe is presently in the throes of a serious struggle with migrants, and there is also no doubt that this issue is being exasperated by the many individuals of a liberal and progressive and even anarchist persuasion who are encouraging both the migrants and the mass quantities of immigration into their European lands rather than trying to help these individuals in their own homelands, and now since the wave of migration into Europe is, in my view, something that is seriously undesirable and will cause massive problems in the near future--problems which are eminently avoidable through a sane migration policy--but also given that we do not necessarily wish to restrict the desires and freedoms of those European progressives wishing to have migrants enter their country, then one way that I propose to both solve the migrant crisis and to make the pro-migrant cheerleaders put their money where their mouth is, is to offer the simple solution that migrants are welcome into a European country, but they are only welcome so long as a European person is willing to sponsor them and have them live in the same residence as the European for a set period of time, such as one-to-two years; by doing this, we would achieve two things, the first of which would be exposing, once again, the utter hypocrisy of the leftist liberal progressive given that few of them would actually offer their own homes to house migrants even though they are more than ready to “compassionately” offer other people’s towns and neighborhoods for the migrants so long as the progressive himself is not personally affected by his own “benevolent” policies, and the second outcome, derived from the first, would be a massive drop in the amount of migrants flooding into the country given the lack of progressives who actually would be willing to personally do what they demand so many other people do, and so, in this way, we could, so to speak, kill two birds with our one stone, for we would expose the progressives for the hypocrites that we all know that they are and drive immigration down to a trickle…and yet because this idea would be so effective, it is obviously one of the reasons that it won’t be done in Europe today, which, sadly, means that the eventual cultural collision that all this immigration will bring will be much worse than most of us realize.

Smart-Ass Cartoons: "Then a Miracle Occurs...the Atheist Edition"

It IS About Attacking Christianity

In our modern time, in this, the twentieth and sixteen year of our Lord, it has now become quite clear that the attacks that traditional Christians in the West face from both liberal leftist “Christians” and secular progressives against our common-sense Christian morality and our orthodox ethical views are not, primarily, done for the purpose of seeking equality, or fighting against discrimination, or seeking tolerance, for what these attacks are primarily targeted at is our Christianity itself, and these attacks against our Christianity are thus meant to be insidiously couched in more pleasant language about toleration and diversity and so on, in order to lull us to sleep while the enemy strikes, and while I do not contend that this is necessarily some type of concerted or coordinated or conspiratorial effort on the part of the opponents of the Christianity, it is still nevertheless true that these are attacks against orthodox Christian theism, and the way that we can know this to be true is quite simple, for consider the following facts:

1. First, we see liberal progressive leftists actively seek out and target Christian bakers, or florists, or whatnot in an effort to be able to bring cultural and societal sanctions against these people, but we do not see one iota of effort from the same people in seeking out Muslim or Orthodox Jewish businesses that would refuse the same services as the Christian parties do;

2. Second, after every Muslim terror attack, we hear calls from the left not to be ‘Islamophobic’, and that not all Muslims are like that, and that, most likely, the attack was “somehow” caused by the far-right, and that the worse thing would be an anti-Muslim backlash, and yet when some Catholic priests are convicted of sexual abuse, there is no cry to avoid ‘Catholicophobia’, and no calls not to paint all priests as abusers, and no attempts at making excuses, but rather, the progressives actively and joyously use the sexual abuse crisis as a stick with which to beat the Catholic Church as a whole, something that they would never do with Muslims;

3. Third, and linked to the last point, it is also the case that when a Muslim causes an attack or commits a horrible crime, the progressive media tries to avoid mentioning the Muslim’s religion for as long as possible, but if a “Christian” or a “right-winger” causes an attack, it is almost the first thing mentioned, and it is repeated over and over and over again, even if the link between the attacker and Christianity is tenuous at best;

4. Fourth, progressive feminists, who, under the law, enjoy full equality in the formerly Christian West, spend inordinate amounts of time whining and complaining about the most idiotic and minor things that happen in Western societies while not only ignoring the horrors against women that occur elsewhere in the world, such as in Muslim countries, but even tacitly cover up for crimes against women committed by these other ‘victim groups’;

5. Fifth, history and facts are utterly distorted by leftist progressives in order to make what was formerly Christendom and Western Civilization and Western culture seem abhorrent and horrendous, when, in reality, the West’s sins were absolutely no greater than those of any other culture, and were arguably much less so, and were also readily offset by the great cultural and political benefits that the West brought to the rest of the world which no other culture did, but this latter fact is almost never mentioned, of course;

6. Sixth, we see leftist progressive politicians and businesses in the West condemn and refuse to do business in areas and states that enact laws to protect Christians from secular progressive discrimination, and yet, all the while, these politicians and businesses are happy to do business in countries that are actively hostile to both progressive ideas as well as to Christian worship—countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Cuba, Iran, etc.—and so it certainly seems that so long as Christians are somehow receiving the lash–both literally and figuratively–these progressive politicians and businesses are happy;

7. Seventh, while secular progressives are happy to attack crosses in public spaces or prayer in schools due to the need for the ‘separation of church and state’, they dutifully ignore Muslim segregation of girls and boys in schools while Muslims are literally praying in school cafeterias and they ignore the chanting from minarets across all public spaces, just to name a few issues of this sort;

8. Eighth, while Christians are routinely harassed and stopped and punished under hate speech laws enacted and enforced by progressives in the West, these laws, strangely, never seem to be used by progressives against Muslim hate-preachers or secular bigots, but mainly against orthodox Christians;

9. Ninth, while progressives will claim that criticism of Islam or other non-Western religions is racist–a claim which is nonsensical to begin with–they would laugh if you called their criticism of Christianity racist or discriminatory;

10. Finally, tenth, while we see leftist progressives talk about aiding the needy and helping the destitute, we almost never hear them speak about the fact that the most persecuted victim group in the world are ‘Christians’, for Christians the world over are harmed and killed by their non-Christian country-men more so than any other religious group, and yet about this, you will rarely hear the left make a sound;

…and so, it is for reasons like these, and others, that we can reasonably come to believe that the progressive left is not aiming to use their social tools and cultural strength for the creation of a “better” world, but rather, they use their power to seek a world without traditional Christianity…but of course, to the progressive left, those two things are synonymous, and the sooner that Christians realize this, and take firm action to counter it, the better.

Is 'Jesus Denial' for the Psychologically Weak

It is interesting to note that from a psychological point-of-view, denial is a well-known and rather primitive psychological defensive mechanism, and it is true that all too often, and in a great many people, it is simply easier and even desirable, from a mental perspective, to deny the truth of an uncomfortable and challenging and disconcerting fact than it is to accept that truth but then struggle against it—this is much like an alcoholic who would rather deny his broken condition instead of accepting his problem and dealing with it, for while the latter option is mentally challenging, the former choice is psychologically easy—and so, in light of this psychological fact about denial, it is thus not irrational to wonder, or even to reasonably suspect, that perhaps one of the main reasons why certain unbelievers wish to deny that the man Jesus Christ ever existed, even though they do so in the teeth of all the historical evidence, is because they know that if they do admit to the actual existence of this most influential historical figure, then, at the same time, they cannot but contend with the various historical evidences that also support the inference that this man Jesus resurrected from the dead, and so the sheer denial of Christ’s existence as a historical person suddenly becomes a quite desirable psychological option if one does not wish to contend with the other historical claims that flow out of his existence, and thus it would not be surprising if some unbelievers of mentally weaker stock actually took this option as the way to ease their psychological burden and mental challenge that his existence poses to them; and while my claim concerning such unbelievers is, of course, little more than speculation at this point—although not necessarily an unreasonable speculation—it is an idea that could ostensibly be tested in some type of empirical manner, and it would indeed be fascinating to see just what the results of such empirical tests would be…one can only hope that at some future date, such tests are indeed carried out, for the results might surprise both theists and atheists alike.