My reply to R. L. Solberg on Jesus' resurrection

 I posted the following in reply to R. L. Solberg's comments about his debate with Rabbi Tovia Singer:  See here:

I don't understand why you find Jesus' resurrection significant.  I can tell from modern Christianity and from the NT that if I become interested in Jesus, there is a greater than 51% chance that I will get suckered into a "cult".  Doesn't it make more sense for skeptics to limit their sins to just the sin of unbelief, and to avoid adding "heresy" to their account?

Sure, you can say God will surely reveal doctrinal truth to his sincere followers, but that logically requires a presupposition that all Christians who end up interpreting the bible differently than you do, were therefore not sincere.

If you refuse to say most of today's Christians are insincere, then how DO you explain the fact that millions of equally sincere seekers of Christ disagree on how to interpret a bible verse?

In other words, how do YOU explain the fact that another Christian who is equally as sincere and saved as you, disagrees with your interpretation of a bible verse?

You won't like the hypothesis that God has different strokes for different folks, but aside from that, I'm not seeing what's so unreasonable with that hypothesis.  If you reject it, it would seem you are forced to either admit God may want certain sincere Christ-seekers to interpret the bible incorrectly....or you are forced to insist that those Christ seekers who adopt what you consider to be "heresy" were never sincere toward God in the first place.

The last hypothesis makes sense enough, but it's also horrifically bigoted and makes your own interpretations of the bible a judge on whether some other Christ-seeker is sincere or insincere.

Can skeptics be reasonable to conclude that after 2,000 years, the NT's message is locked in fatal ambiguity, a thing that would justify today's skeptic to characterize the whole business as unprofitably convoluted and not worth one's time in taking seriously?

My reply to Brendon Naicker on Paul's apostleship

 When I downloaded Mr. Naicker's pdf "Apostles" from Academia, I sent him the following message:

Hello,
I have two criticisms of your paper:
You say of Paul in your pdf page 12:

He did not fulfil the qualifications of Acts 1:21, but the Damascus Road experience was a resurrection appearance (1 Cor. 15:8), and he could claim to have “seen the Lord” (1 Cor. 9:1); he was thus a witness of the resurrection. 

I don't understand why you would believe Paul's claim to have "seen" the Lord, as Acts 9 and 22 make clear, Paul was blinded by the light, and nothing in those stories ever expresses or implies that Paul physically saw a risen Christ.

The second criticism is:  you admit on the same page that Paul

"...did not fulfil the qualifications of Acts 1:21...."

That is correct, but I don't understand why you felt that Paul's alleged experience on the road to Damascus qualified him anyway.  The original apostles in Acts 1:21 made it a criteria of apostolic office that the person in question must have accompanied Jesus "from the beginning".

If you admit Paul didn't fulfill that criteria, then what makes you think his alleged "seeing" the risen Christ on the road to Damascus was a sufficient substitute?

The criterion in Acts 1:21 does not express or imply any exceptions.   You either accompanied Jesus and the apostles "since the beginning", or you don't become an apostle, period.

Worse, if you think Paul's "seeing" the risen Christ was a sufficient substitute, then do you say the 500 who saw the risen Christ at the same time (1st Cor. 15:6), means there were 500 "apostles" while Paul was still alive?  If their seeing the risen Christ didn't suddenly make them apostles, then why do you make an exception for Paul? 

In short, can skeptics be "reasonable" even if not infallible, to insist Paul was a false apostle?

No, Mr. J. Warner Wallace: Hell is NOT "reasonable"

This is my reply to J. Warner Wallace's video on hell:

Is Hell Reasonable?

In the comments section I posed this on August 1, 2022----

Barry Jones0 seconds ago

I'm sorry, but there are numerous conclusive justifications for unbelievers to be skeptical of biblical "hell": 

First, Wallace is assuming that something written in a 2,000 year old books"applies to" people today. No historian has ever said the theology in an ancient book "applies to" today, so if Wallace thinks the bible is an exception, he has the burden of proof. And in my 25 years of counterapologetics, I've never seen any Christian apologist or scholar even get near showing that biblical "hell" applies to anybody today. 

Second, it wouldn't matter if biblical hell was intended as a modern-day warning to unbelievers: too many conservative Christians are abandoning the eternal conscious torment model and adopting the Annihilationism model. Why then should skeptics care? They already believe on naturalism that death constitutes permanent extinction of consciousness. 

Third, spiritually alive Christians disagree on whether hell is or isn't permanent extinction of consciousness. Clark Pinnock was one of the signers of the inerrancy-definition created by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, but he denied the literal interpretation of hell and favored conditionalism. See Pinnock, “The Conditional View,” in Four Views on Hell (Zondervan Academic, 1997). The debate appears to have no end. See Four Views on Hell (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology; Zondervan Academic; Second edition. March 8, 2016). if spiritually alive people cannot even agree on the nature of biblical hell, they are fools to 'expect' spiritually dead skeptics to discern the matter with any greater accuracy. 

Fourth, in the view cases in the gospels were Jesus deals directly with a Gentile, he never preaches hell at them, and if they do show faith, Jesus apparently prefers to keep his fellowship with them as short as possible. See the racist Jesus who seems to grant a miracle to a "dog" merely to shut her up. Matthew 15:22. 

Fifth, the traditional view of hell says God "must" judge sin either in the sinner or their substitute, but he cannot simply "let it go" because he is too holy. This is absurd: in 2nd Samuel 12:13-15, God "takes away" David's sin in the sense of exempting him from the mandatory Mosaic death penalty for murder. If God is holier than the Canaanite gods, the you might wish to think about it before you construe God's killing of David's baby in the following context as God accepting child sacrifice. Then in Acts 17:31, apostle Paul tells the pagan idolaters that God has "winked at" or "overlooked" their idolatry (The Greek word is hupereidon, and it means "overlook"). 

It doesn't matter what the bible thumper has to say about these texts, we skeptics are going to be reasonable to interpret them as proof that god can get rid of sin with a mere wave of his magic wand. That reasonableness will not disappear merely because a fundamentalist comes along and offers criticism. Christianity's inability to preach a consistent doctrine of hell has persisted too long in history, to justify thinking that some quick clever comment by Wallace is going to overturn it. 

The question is not whether the Christian can be reasonable to view hell the way Wallace does. Maybe they can. The question is whether SKEPTICS and UNBELIEVERS can be reasonable to view biblical hell as little more than an ancient abusive fairy tale. We can. 

And why does Wallace make his videos more dramatic than they need to be? Does he deny god's existence, and does he seriously believe the only plausible way to 'reach' today's unbeliever or Christian is through adoption of modern marketing and presentation methods that appear geared toward people afflicted with attention-deficit-disorder? If the Holy Spirit could bless Paul's ministry without all these bells and whistles, why does Wallace think these necessary?

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I reposted the same comments to Wallace's reply page too, here's a screenshot:

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For obvious reasons, there won't be any Wallace-followers or apologists offering any substantive rebuttal anytime soon.  When I hit back, I hit hard.