Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Cold Case Christianity: Why is formal bible study so depressing?

This is my reply to a video from J. Warner Wallace entitled


Haden Clark from Help Me Believe interviews J. Warner Wallace for the Help Me Believe YouTube Channel. Haden comments that one common observation of seminary students is that rigorous theological study, especially when it aims at the creation of term papers and studies, can sometime make bible study feel like labor. How can we address this reality? 
Easy:  God doesn't honor his word, that's why for many Christians formal study of the bible is about as scintillating as a calculus mid-term.  

My Canaanite child sacrifice challenge to Ryan Leasure, of "jesusisnontfakenews.com"


Ryan Leasure is pastor at Grace Bible Church and writes apologetics articles online.

I'm suspicious that, in his effort to make the divinely ordered genocide of the Canaanites appear more morally good in the eyes of today's Christians, he has repeated Frank Turek's error of falsely accusing the Canaanites of using fire to kill their children.

This is the challenge I sent to his "contact" page:
Hello,
In your article on Molech, at https://jesusisnotfakenews.com/tag/child-sacrifice/
you say
"During the sacrificial process, the Canaanites would light a fire inside or around the statue to heat up the statue as hot as they could. Then they would place their newborns into the red-hot arms of Molech and watch the children sizzle to death."
I would like to know what ancient historical evidence or testimony you think justifies your claim that these children were "sizzling to death" during such sacrificial rites.  Reply to barryjoneswhat@gmail.com  Thank you, Barry

I've already written a piece showing that Frank Turk made the exact same claim, and he has no historical evidence to support it.  See here.

So it seems to me, Christian "apologists" only assert something so heinous because they are responding to Christians who are bothered by the divine atrocities of the OT.  Apologists wish to make it sound as if the Canaanites "deserved" such extreme measures, that is, nothing less than full-scale genocide was required to take care of this social scourge, hence, they accuse the Canaanites of acts we today consider egregiously disgusting, such as using fire to kill children.

Getting Christians to be more confident in the goodness of God's judgments is apparently more important than basic honesty.

Jason Engwer doesn't appreciate the strong justification for skepticism found in John 7:5

Bart Ehrman, like thousands of other skeptics, uses Mark 3:21 and John 7:5 to argue that Jesus' virgin birth (VB) is fiction.  Jason Eng...