Why did I sue James Patrick Holding for libel?

All the reasons I sued James Patrick Holding can be found in the First Amended Complaint which I filed with the federal court in Florida.  download here.

After reading it, it won't be hard to guess why Holding played the part of a Pharisee and invoked a technicality to escape having to answer on the merits.  Yes, that's exactly what the god of the bible wants Christians to do; if they can exploit a technical trifle to avoid honestly admitting their slanders, then by all means, do exactly what the corrupt world does, and lawyer up.  Yeah, that's the more honest way to show that you are more honest about the facts than non-Christians. 

 

Cold Case Christianity: How the Philosophy of Infinite Regress Demonstrates the Universe Had a Beginning

This is my reply to a video by J. Warner Wallace:

How the Philosophy of Infinite Regress 

Demonstrates the Universe Had a Beginning (Video)

Posted: 16 Oct 2018 01:05 AM PDT

 In this clip from J. Warner Wallace’s longer talk on the existence of God from cosmological evidence (based on his book, God’s Crime Scene), J. Warner describes how the philosophy of infinite regress demonstrates that time had a beginning and, therefore, ads to the case for a universe with a beginning.

(Wallace is wising up to his inability to prove things: he has disabled comments for this video at YouTube.  Apparently, apologetics has more to do with unobstructed preaching to the choir and less to do with answering critics.  Wallace knows about my counter-apologtics blog, and to my knowledge has done precisely NOTHING to attempt any answers, or interact with me).
 
It wasn't necessary to watch this video, the underlined portion above, showing what Wallace was arguing for, constitutes a logically impossibility, which would remain a fatal flaw regardless of what Wallace had to say about the problems of infinite regression.  Such fatal flaw can be demonstrated by comparing the Christian truth claim with other normative truth claims that are couched in grammatically equivalent terms:

Billy played baseball

Dorothy ate cereral

God created time

Notice: all verbs, and therefore those here (i.e., played, ate, created) presuppose time to already be in existence before the action they describe takes place.  Hence:

There was a time before Billy played baseball.

There was a time before Dorothy ate cereal.

There was a time before God created time (!?)

Since all three sentences are grammatically the same, whatever is logically true of the verbs in the first two, must also be true of the verb in the third.

First, "time before time" is clearly illogical because it is question-begging.  You may as well talk about the water before water.

Second, every biblical description of heaven depicts events there as taking place in no less temporal progression than they do on earth, suggesting that the bible leaves plenty of room for the supposition that God was doing things, one after the other, before creating this universe. If he was, then 'time' also limits god.

Finally, 'time' is not a fundamental component of reality, it is merely a fictional measuring device we invented to record the fluctuating distances between planetary bodies.  That's why at the same moment it is 3 p.m. in California, it's not 3 p.m. in Paris.  There is no such thing as seconds, minutes or hours, the only place they exist is in clocks.  "time" is nothing but a word that we use to help express our contentions about things past, present and future.  The idea that "eternity" is some type of different dimension where God views past and present in some unfathomable all-at-once "now" is pure fundamentalist Christian hocus-pocus, it cannot be sustained from the bible anyway, and is thus a concept worthy of nothing but ridicule.

For all these reasons, the concept of creating time itself is sufficiently incoherent and problematic as to reasonably justify those atheists who laugh at the whole business, who also demand the creationist come up with something slightly less convoluted to 'explain' why a god is 'necessary' to explain reality.

 Of course, Wallace has jumped on the Big Bang bandwagon, and will thus pretend that God's creation of time is a completely different thing from actions we engage in on earth.  Not so.  The force of my rebuttal is contained in the grammatical realities that I pointed out.  If you wish to say God created time, you must either 

a)  accept that this is a logically contradictory idea, or 

b) insist that verbs for god's action are not governed by the grammatical realities that govern the verbs describing human action (but you'd have to justify that, and blind appeal to God being so much more wonderful and unlike anything is not going to suffice), or 

c)  insist that human language is incapable of coherently expressing this wonderful truth, in which case you just admitted that the language of Genesis 1:1 is equally incapable of expressing such alleged wondrous truth.

Cold Case Christianity: Is the Problem of Evil Really a Problem for Christianity? Yes

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity: Is the Problem of Evil Really a Problem for Christianity?

Posted: 12 Oct 2018 01:14 AM PDT

I’m honored to train the adults and students at Green Bay Community Church, investigating the reliability of the New Testament Gospels and the nature of truth. Troy Murphy has done a wonderful job assembling a powerful staff at the city’s largest church. GBCC’s youth pastor, Evan Gratz, opened up his youth group to me on Sunday night. As usual, the best part of the time with students was answering questions at the end of the evening. The problem of evil was raised by a teenager who described her recent conversation with an atheist friend. As an atheist myself for most of my life, I resonated with the objection and offered a brief response: If what we believe as Christians is true, evil and suffering are only a problem for atheists. The problem of evil isn’t really a problem for Christianity.

But since what you believe as Christians is false, you are deprived of your fluffy magically wonderful after-world where nothing bad every happens.

I have already critiqued apologist Frank Turek's attempt to show that morality is inconsistent with atheism.

Evil and suffering are typically experienced and understood within the context of one’s life.

Right.  How else?

As an atheist, I hoped for (and expected) a life of approximately ninety years. In the context of this span of time, if I had developed cancer in my forties, I would have been angered by the amount of time stolen from me as I battled the disease.

 That anger would have been the result of you finding out facts about life that were contrary to your subjective desires.  Being angry about it hardly argues that your desires arise out of some objective standard of morality that transcends humanity.

In fact, if I had been diagnosed with a terminal disease at that age, I would have been outraged by the fact it was going to deprive me of fifty percent of the life I expected. When your life is only ninety years long, anything cutting the time short is evil, and any prolonged suffering along the way is unjust and intolerable.

But what if we could live more than ninety short years? What if our lives had a beginning, but no end? How would we see (and respond to) evil, pain and suffering in the context of an eternal life?

Given the incoherent nature of the question, it hardly requires a response.  What if the tooth-fairy gave you a vision showing you what the dark side of the Bermuda Triangle looked like from the Andromeda Galaxy?  How much more time would you spend analyzing the paranormal?

How many of you who can remember the painful vaccinations you received as a child?

How many of you remember Isaiah 13:16-17, where God apparently had a morally good purpose for causing men to rape women?  If the result of the pain is good (i.e., it hurts to get a shot in the arm, but the benefits of better health justify the pain), then under your own logic, because God thought the outcome of men raping women would tend toward some type of greater moral good, this would morally justify his causing rape no less than how we justify causing pain to a child when giving them a flu shot.

If you’re reading this article at the age of thirty, the small period of your life occupied by the pain you experienced during those vaccinations has been long outdistanced by the years you’ve lived since then. As time stretched on from the point of that experience, you were able to place the pain within the larger context of your life.

Correct.  But unfortunately most rape victims cannot do the same as they look back on their having been sexually assaulted.  Trust in the afterlife merely papers over the problem.  No analogy.

You don’t even remember it now. If you have pierced ears, ask yourself a similar question. The pain you experienced at the point of the piercing is nearly forgotten, especially if it has been years since it occurred. Evil, pain and suffering are experienced and understood within the larger context of one’s life.

But not rape and child murder.  You are not doing apologetics, you are warming up an already-Christian audience for the inevitable "God's ways are mysterious but we can be sure he works all things to the good for those that love him" crap.

If the Christian worldview is true, we are eternal beings who will live forever.

 The Christian world view is not true.  Hence, your conclusion doesn't follow.

We get more than ninety years, we get all of eternity.

 Now you are merely resting upon the biblical teaching about "eternal life", when in fact the reasons to reject Christianity thereby also perform the function of showing "eternal life" to have more in common with a 12 year old girl's crush on a Hollywood actor and less to do with actual reality.

Our experience and understanding of pain and evil must be contextualized within eternity, not within our temporal lives.

 Translation:  "If Christianity is not true, there will never be ultimate justice.  You don't like that thought, do you?  Well then, doesn't it feel better to believe in eternal life and a great day of judgment?"

Reminder, the book of Revelation doesn't describe the end as the wicked finally banished, it describes them as continuing to do wicked deeds, continuing unpunished,  while others are in heaven watching:

 8 I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I heard and saw, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed me these things.
 9 But he said to me, "Do not do that. I am a fellow servant of yours and of your brethren the prophets and of those who heed the words of this book. Worship God."
 10 And he said to me, "Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.
 11 "Let the one who does wrong, still do wrong; and the one who is filthy, still be filthy; and let the one who is righteous, still practice righteousness; and the one who is holy, still keep himself holy."
 12 "Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to what he has done.
 13 "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."
 14 Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city.
 15 Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying.   (Rev. 22:8-15 NAU) 

Wallace continues:

Whatever we experience here in our earthly life, no matter how difficult or painful it may be, must be seen through the lens of forever.

 Then perhaps I can be reasonable to assume you aren't directing this toward atheists.

As our eternal life stretches out beyond our struggles in mortality, our temporal experiences will become an ever-shrinking percentage of our consciousness. The suffering we may have experienced on earth will be long outdistanced by the eternal life we’ve lived since then.

 Yeah right.  What else are you gonna say?  God loves you?  Well, if it sells books, I guess one man has just as much right to sell Jesus as another one does.

Our life with God will be a life without suffering, without pain and without evil. “God will wipe away every tear from (our) eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4). It will also be a life where justice is realized, “for the Lord loves justice; he will not forsake his saints,” (Psalm 37:27-28) and He “will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work” (Ecclesiastes 3:17). As our glorious eternal life with God stretches beyond our temporal experience, whatever suffering or injustice we might have experienced here on earth will seem like it occurred in the blink of an eye.

 The only problem being that if we truly do have a spirit that doesn't desire food, water, material possessions or sex, God could have created mankind on earth without bodies, and if he had, about 99% of the sins in this world would have been preempted, all without violating anybody's freewill.  This bit of bad news means you are no longer allowed to hide behind "because god respects our freewill" to "explain" the existence of evil.  And if you think somebody we'll go to heaven and never desire to sin again, then apparently you believe it is indeed possible to create a world in which free creatures authentically love and worship god, but are guaranteed to never sin.  If god can achieve that in heaven, he could have created Adam and Eve with the same constitution of the will, they would never have eaten the forbidden fruit, and sin would have been permanently preempted.  If your doctrine of freewill forces you to leave open the possibility that saved Christians might sin even after they get to heaven, perhaps apologetics isn't your calling.

In the context of the Christian eternal life, pain, suffering and evil can be faced and endured with strength, hope and confidence unavailable in an atheistic worldview.

 The Mormons can boast the same thing about Mormonism.  Under your logic, that would reasonably justify the recently raped and depressed women to go join the Mormons.  Would you encourage this if she asked you?  Or would you bother the nice lady with all of your criticisms of Mormons while this lady is living with unaddressed emotional trauma?

What used to seem so unjust to me is now less egregious.

Perhaps explaining why most Christians don't really give a shit about trying to make the world a better place.  That time can be better spent evangelizing, because somebody soon a giant Jesus will float down from the sky on a galloping horse to make everything all better, amen?

What used to seem so unbearable can now be faced with hope. The problem of evil, from my new Christian perspective, isn’t the same kind of problem it was from my old atheistic perspective, because the problem of evil isn’t really a problem for Christianity.

 Bullshit, your god caused men to rape women, by his own admission.  Search for "Isaiah 13" in one of my articles.

If your god can cause rape on earth, consistent with his allegedly infinite righteousness, then causing rape for people in heaven would also be consistent with said alleged infinite righteousness.  You will say nobody in heaven deserves to be raped, but you already say that about women on earth (don't you?)  And if God is infinitely wise, the spiritually mature person is more likely to accept God's judgments without question, so that the more spiritual you are, the less you care about whether God's ways conform to universal standards of fairness and justice.  If you see god causing a man to rape a woman in heaven, the mark of spiritual maturity is to just shut up and avoid asking "why?", see Romans 9:

 18 So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.
 19 You will say to me then, "Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?"
 20 On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, "Why did you make me like this," will it?   (Rom. 9:18-20 NAU)

Follow that trail of unquestioning devotion down the road apiece and you wind up becoming an abortion clinic bomber, a hijacker, or some other idiot extremist who cannot be reasoned with, because they are so sure that God's ways are mysterious.

Demolishing Triablogue: Calvinist Steve doesn't like God's ways

This is my reply to an article by Calvinist Steve Hays entitled

Friday, October 05, 2018

Must we earn the right to be heard?

In a recent interview with Christianity Today, Tim Keller said:

    Because the church has got so many of its own skeletons and so much coverup of sexual abuse and so on, I don't know how we can adjudicate…right now we don't have any kind of credibility for a lot of reasons…As the church tries to speak publicly to social issues…we have to do it with repentance. 

    https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/october-web-only/tim-keller-politics-news-midterms-united-states.html

That's true at the level of public perception, which makes it necessary to correct that misperception. I disagree with how Keller frames the issue. Christians don't need to apologize for "the church". I'm not "the church". I don't speak for "the church". And I shouldn't be saddled with what "the church" did before I was born. Moreover, I don't control "the church". I'm just one guy.

Sounds like the kind of reasoning atheists use to accuse the bible-god of injustice for causing later humanity to be infected with original sin that nobody else was responsible for except Adam and Eve.  I'm afraid your western sense of individualism is quite opposite from the earliest detectable Hebrew views set forth in the OT.  We have to wonder what David and Bathsheba's baby was telling itself as God tortured it to death for 7 days because of David's sin, a sin the baby himself obviously wasn't responsible for:

13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die.
 14 "However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die."
 15 So Nathan went to his house. Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David, so that he was very sick.
 16 David therefore inquired of God for the child; and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground.
 17 The elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them.
 18 Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for they said, "Behold, while the child was still alive, we spoke to him and he did not listen to our voice. How then can we tell him that the child is dead, since he might do himself harm!"
 (2 Sam. 12:13-18 NAU)

 Maybe the baby was telling himself I shouldn't be saddled with what my dad did before I was born.  It's nice to know the one Calvinist on the internet who mistakes his blog for having an actual life, is so caught up in word-games he can't even tell any more when the crap he believes contradicts biblical teaching.

It suffers from a fallacy of personification, as if the church is just one thing, as if the church is identical in time and space, so that whatever was done at one time or place somehow transfers to "the church" at another time or place. 

 It does:

 26 And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.
 27 Now you are Christ's body, and individually members of it. (1 Cor. 12:26-27 NAU)

Sorry, Steve, but your modern individualist viewpoint is quite contrary to many passages in the bible that presuppose corporate responsibility.  That's tragic because it is Calvinists who would need to specialize in that doctrine, given their belief that Jesus' didn't just die for sinners, but that his death actually saves all for whom it was intended, which is not everybody (i.e., Limited Atonement).

"The church" is an an abstraction. That's a necessary abstraction for ease of reference, but it's becomes an overgeneralization when individual distinctions in time, place, and person are swallowed up by an indiscriminate category.

If you were spiritually mature, you'd care less about linguistic gymnastics and more about obeying 2nd Timothy 2:14.   Don't miss the "solemnly" in that passage, apparently, Paul thinks it VERY important that Christians abstain from wrangling words.  You don't have a choice...which should be music to the ears of a fatalistic hyperCalvinist like you, who believe in a god who predestined you to love the sins that he wanted you to also feel bad about.  You'll excuse me if I think a mean little boy torturing ants is an appropriate analogy to your god and humanity.

I don't speak and act as a representative of "the church". My positions should be evaluated by whether they are right or wrong, true or false, backed by reason and evidence, rather than fallacious guilt-by-association, which is a lazy anti-intellectual shortcut.

 On what other basis did God punish David's baby for sins the baby didn't commit, except the stupid doctrine of original sin which arises out of guilt by association?  Apparently if you had been one of the young boys among the prisoners of war which Moses required death for (Numbers 31:17), you would have said Moses has engaged in fallacious guilt by association.  Sorry, Steve, but your Calvinism is far to cavalier for any smart atheist bible critic like myself to think it the least bit threatening to what I believe.  If God predestined you to do whatever you do, it logically follows he'd want you to praise him for making you do whatever you happen to end up doing.  Only in Calvinism is it "wrong" to praise God for the way his absolute sovereignty actually works.  I think you are looking into a mirror when you accuse others of anti-intellectualism.

You can get out of that by saying the male babies Moses ordered killed had also participated in the previous sexual sin at Peor, but only at the price of opening ancient pedophilia-doors you'll be later wishing you hadn't opened.  That's right Steve, just continue mistaking your blog for real-time human contact, and you'll sink deeper and deeper into that I-run-away-from-challenges-because-I'm-afraid-of-winning delusional mire that you apparently can't clean off the bottom of your shoes.

The situation is rather different with Catholics since they do acquire a corporate identity in a way that Protestants don't. Catholicism is fundamentally and pervasively institutional in a way that the Protestant faith is not,

 And their idea of corporate identity is more biblical than the Protestant version.  It doesn't matter if apostle Paul said divisions are good (1st Cor. 11:19), he also plainly declared, without qualification, that there should be NO divisions in the church (1:10, 12:25).  Jude 1:19 ascribes evil to those who "cause divisions".   I say Paul contradicted himself.  You ready to debate biblical inerrancy?  Or did God predestined you to think that only one reply per person was the foundation of immortality?

so Catholics can't disassociate themselves from what their denomination does in the same way Protestants can disassociate themselves from institutional Protestantism.

 Try reconciling that with Paul's metaphor that the entire body suffers when one member suffers, supra.

Of course, I also forget that as a staunch Calvinist, you believe your thoughts are infallibly predetermined.  I remember Calvinism...what a pile of demented shit that was...we are supposed to believe God predestined us to sin, but we should nevertheless live as if we think he didn't. FUCK YOU.