I have notified Lee Strobel of James Patrick Holding's slanders

 Back in 2016, Lee Strobel on Twitter gave other people links to James Patrick Holding's articles.

That was one year after my original lawsuit against him.  

So I recently sent Strobel the following email:

It is my understanding that you sometimes recommend James Patrick Holding's apologetics materials.  For example:

https://twitter.com/LeeStrobel/status/737039671688060928

Lee Strobel

@LeeStrobel

May 29, 2016

Hey @NelsonKingHD -- Here's rebuttal the atheist didn't want you to know about: http://ow.ly/6kHE300HGXO

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Apostle Paul required you to disassociate yourself from so-called "brothers" who commit certain sins, one of them being "reviling".  1st Cor. 5:11-13.

Mr. Holding has "reviled" me so much, I had to sue him for libel, and the Complaint was required to be 534 pages long merely to document it all.  You can download it for free here.

https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2020/06/james-patrick-holding-has-committed.html

or here

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16r_O0yRBKrFNfZR7DVG9d2NknOM1LuX7/view

Since you clearly supported Holding's work in the past, and I don't know whether you've withdrawn such support since 2016, I might need to secure your under-oath testimony for purposes of trial.  I rather prefer to gain that testimony by email and thus spare everybody some expense.  The slanderous language of Holding which I documented in the Complaint, is sometimes sexually vulgar, so this is notice that you should make sure no kids are near the computer when you read this Complaint.

Since around 2016, Holding has been intentionally ambiguous about the exact legal basis upon which he can solicit and receive "tax-deductible" donations, and he says this is somehow allowed because of the fact that he works with other organizations that have 501(c)(3) status.  But he never publicly names these other organizations, leaving the donor to guess as to how exactly the money will be used, and to guess about whether the money will go to some other ministry Holding has refused to disclose.  So for all I know, he might do work for you, or you do work for him, or did in the past, etc, and perhaps Holding's tax-scheme has some relation to you or your ministry.  Your supporting of his work certainly raised an eyebrow.

Because I claim actual and presumed damages in this lawsuit against Holding, this gives me the right in the discovery-phase of the litigation to find out just how extensive Holding's slanders about me were.  Thus the extent to which you do or don't work with Holding, is relevant, discoverable and admissible.

This is a good faith effort to gain facts within your personal knowledge for purposes of currently pending litigation.  I can subpoena you, of course, but I'd rather avoid doing that.  If it be true that you have ceased recommending and/or supporting Holding, a simple comment to me by email explaining what motivated you to cease that activity will be sufficient.  

It is truly mystifying how in my experience,  most of the people who name the name of Christ and recommend Holding's apologetics, find his consistent 20 years of sinful libels and slanders against me and even against other Christians to be utterly unimportant....as if the bible would justify them keeping in their ministry a Christian teacher who lives in perpetual sin, because his great knowledge of apologetics somehow "outweighs" those actions in his life that biblically disqualify him from ministry (!?)

If there is anything I can do to minimize the degree to which you are involved in this lawsuit, please let me know.   Your emphases on spiritual maturity cause me to presume in good faith that you do not knowingly support ministries led by people who mistake spiritually evil conduct for holy conduct.

Sincerely,

Christian Doscher

barryjoneswhat@gmail.com

 

My reply to Lee Strobel's YouTube video about Jesus' resurrection

 I posted the following comments in reply to one of Lee Strobel's videos about Jesus' resurrection and the allegedly "early" nature of the "creed" in 1st Corinthians 15:3-4.   That video is here.  I had to post my reply in two parts because it was too long as a single message.

First, even assuming the skeptical theory of legendary development is wrong, the reasonableness of resurrection skepticism does not require that the resurrection accounts be late legends. How many people who attend a Benny Hinn crusade testify just a few days later about how Hinn healed people? How soon after the alleged appearances of Mary in Fatima were they first reported? Very soon, And yet you couldn't care less, the early nature of the miracle testimony doesn't sway you in the least, you are STILL skeptical. So you have no right to pretend that if the late-legend hypothesis is refuted, this forces the conclusion that the reports are truthful. AS IF THE ONLY TIME TESTIMONY CAN CONTAIN LIES IS WHEN IT IS LATE (!?) You will say the rumor about Paul in Acts 21:18-24 was false, so apparently, thousands of Jews within the mother church CAN screw up the truth within the lifetime of the person in question. The ending of John's gospel admits that a misunderstanding of Jesus had prevailed among the "brethren". So apparently, testimony being "early" does precisely nothing to intellectually obligate an unbeliever to be more trusting that the testimoy is true. And Irenaeus says John wrote a gospel to refute Cerinthus, which logically requires that Cerinthus' more gnostic version of the gospel was even earlier than John's gospel...yet Christians today insist that Cerinthus was wrong, no matter how early his version of the gospel was. So stop telling yourself that "early" means "truthful". YOU don't even believe that.

Second, the truths in Mark 3:21 and John 7:5 are earlier than the "creed" of 1st Cor. 15:3-4, and those gospel texts show that Jesus' own family didn't find his miracles convincing. There is nothing unreasonable in saying, on the basis of these texts, that Jesus couldn't do genuinely supernatural miracles, and so, like with so many other religious fraudsters, Jesus might have been able to wow large crowds, but they were stupid and gullible. A messiah who cannot do real miracles, probably wouldn't be selected by God to rise from the dead, nor to die for anybody's sins.

Third, even assuming Jesus rose from the dead, Deut. 18 warns that even false prophets can possibly perform true miracles. Of course the test is whether the prophet spoke consistently with Mosaic law. Jesus did not, he forgave sins often in contexts neither expressing or implying he wanted them to obey the Mosaic ritual. You will say Jesus was god and could change the rules, but I deny he is god, so your presupposition of Jesus' divinity does not impose an intellectual obligation on a skeptic in any degree. I call Paul a liar, so I don't really care whether he was calling Jesus god in 50 a.d., Paul's word is not the end of an argument, but the beginning.

Fourth, if we cannot find fault with ignorant teens who accept Christ and thus make an ultimate judgment call about Jesus' resurrection before they even know about, much less have any ability to refute, all the skeptical arguments, then fairness demands that YOU cannot find fault with ignorant skeptics who reject Christ and thus make an ultimate judgment call about Jesus' resurrection before they even know about, much less have any ability to refute, all the apologetics arguments. Is it written in the stars that only Christians are allowed to benefit from ignorance? No.

Fifth, the NT portrays James as a Judaizer leading a large church of legalistic Christians (Acts 21:20), and Josephus reports that the more scrupulous Jews were angered when James was put to death, which would hardly be the case if James had been preaching to them things they considered blasphemous, such as "Christ died for your sins" or "Jesus rose from the dead". And this legalistic church shows by their dumbfounded response in Acts 11:18 that they would never have guessed God granted repentance to Gentiles unless Peter revealed his vision story to them. And contrary to Christian scholarly trifles, apostle Paul is a liar, the rift in Acts 15 and Galatians 2 wasn't between him and some ultra-conservative faction of the Jerusalem church, it was between him and the entire Jerusalem church, period. So since it is reasonable to say the original apostles were Judaizers, who therefore continued seeing divine significance in Temple ritual and animal sacrifice, would never have viewed Jesus' death as an atonement, therefore, we can be reasonable to say the first part of the Corinthian creed (i.e., "Christ died for our sins") wasn't given to Paul by the original 12 apostles during the critical early period.

Sixth, Paul, using language identical to the "creed" in 1st Cor. 15:3-4, says in 11:23 that he received "from the Lord" actual words of the historical Jesus at the last supper. That is, even if Paul really did get gospel facts from the original 12 apostles, he was not willing to properly credit these human sources, he just characterizes these as facts which the "Lord" revealed to him. So the issue is not the actual historical truth, but merely what Paul meant with his words, since you as a bible believer are stuck with whatever Paul meant, you don't have the option of saying Paul got the gospel wrong, or lied about which sources he got it from. So Paul is being somewhat dishonest in 1st Cor. 15:3-4, if by "received", he means "from other apostles". But see next argument for why that's probably not what he meant.

Seventh, Paul in Galatians 1 speaks about how he "received" the gospel, and in vv. 11-12 explicitly denies that the method involved the input of any other human being. It was SOLELY by divine telepathy, at least according to Paul. So there cannot be anything unreasonable in the skeptical hypothesis which infers on the basis of Galatians 1, that when he says "received" in 1st Cor. 15:3, he does NOT mean "from other people", but rather "solely from God". All attempts to make the Corinthian creed originate from apostles earlier than Paul, are abortive.

Eighth, that the NT texts are too ambiguous to justify Christian dogmatism is clear from the fact that even Christian apologists disagree with each other about how reliable the sources are. Lydia McGrew denies bible inerrancy, but says a resurrection case should include the witness of all canonical gospels. Licona, on the other hand, explicitly refuses to characterize the resurrection testimony of Matthew and John as "historical bedrock", because he thinks apostolic authorship of the gospels is "fuzziest" when it comes to Matthew and John.

Ninth, Paul cursed other Christians whose gospel disagreed with his own (Galatians1:6-9), which means "accepting Jesus" is nowhere near as safe as you pretend when you do apologetics or evangelism on unbelievers. According to Galatians 1, and Jesus' similar warning in Matthew 7:22-23, lots of sincere people who thought they were Christians will be getting a nasty surprise on Judgment Day despite their ability to truthfully say they performed many wonderful works in his name. The Galatian churches Paul founded obviously knew him personally, yet STILL abandoned his gospel in favor of the legalistic Judaizer gospel. So the atheist is only being reasonable by refusing to do anything that might cause him to commit the additional sin of heresy. And yet doctrinal divisions in Christianity for the last 2,000 years makes it reasonable to infer that the NT text is fatally ambiguous as to meaning, and therefore, remaining an unbeliever is an evil that is less serious than the idiot who take a chance and finds out he didn't accept the right Jesus, and ends up in hell forever.

======================== 

Tenth, you preach that God wants a personal relationship with me, which means you are committing the fallacy of equivocation. You intend for us to define "personal relationship" normally but in fact you mean a relationship with an invisible man who never interacts with his followers except through writings of dubious text, origin and authorship from 2,000 years ago, and who apparently seems to think that leaving his sincere followers in the dark about important aspects of their daily lives is best...which must mean that Christian apologists are more eager to promote divine/human relations than God himself. A skeptic could not possibly be unreasonable to demand that if God wants me to make a radical commitment to Jesus, he first show me radical authentication of the relevant evidence. The arguments of apologists do not "radically authenticate" that evidence, they merely show that the evidence often conforms to rules of historiography.

Eleventh, you will insist that all skepticism toward Jesus' resurrection is unreasonable, but you are simply overstating how wonderful your "evidence" is. Reasonableness can be consistent with accuracy, but by no means demands accuracy. Not all jurors who convict an innocent person were necessarily stupid, blind, drunk, biased, bribed, etc. So even assuming skepticism is "wrong", that doesn't automatically mean skeptics are "unreasonable".

Twelfth, it is acceptable to say that this or that skeptic was unreasonable, but it is illogical to jump from there to "skepticism is unreasonable". Just like if I hear stupid arguments from stupid Christians, i should not jump to the conclusion "Christianity is unreasonable". One particular skeptic, myself, has very strong arguments showing the reasonableness of doubting Jesus' resurrection. You'll probably never know how Lee Strobel would hold up under cross-examination, because he refuses to debate informed skeptics. At my blog I've been challenged resurrection apologists for years. Aside from a few anonymous YouTube know-nothings, nobody has dared accept the challenge.

Thirteenth, more and more conservative Christian scholars are rejecting the eternal conscious torment view of hell for Annihilationism, which says God will extinguish your sense of self-awareness. Since it is reasonable to adopt that interpretation, you are deprived of the ability to use "hell" to scare the skeptic into heaven: the skeptic has already accepted that nature will extinguish her consciousness, so that rejecting Jesus is about as dangerous as rejecting Mormonism. Therefore, the skeptic cannot be said to be ignoring any serious danger "warnings".

Finally, Given that your god is hidden and allegedly infinite in his ways, you don't have the first clue what he wants me to study first, nor for how long. So you forfeit the right to balk if I answer those questions for myself. I've decided that studying Christian apologetics for 20 years justifies me to draw ultimate conclusions about the reasonableness of Christianity.

I've challenged Christian apologists for years to produce the one miracle they think the most impervious to falsification, and they never respond.

Come get you some:

https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2017/12/my-questions-to-dr-craig-keener.html

My challenge to Lee Strobel: Isaiah 13:13-18, God causes rape

Here's my challenge to Lee Strobel at one of his Youtube videos:

Barry Jones1 second ago

Dear Mr. Strobel, Read Isaiah 13:13-18. 13 Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, And the earth will be shaken from its place At the fury of the LORD of hosts In the day of His burning anger. 14 And it will be that like a hunted gazelle, Or like sheep with none to gather them, They will each turn to his own people, And each one flee to his own land. 15 Anyone who is found will be thrust through, And anyone who is captured will fall by the sword. 16 Their little ones also will be dashed to pieces Before their eyes; Their houses will be plundered And their wives ravished. 17 Behold, I am going to stir up the Medes against them, Who will not value silver or take pleasure in gold. 18 And their bows will mow down the young men, They will not even have compassion on the fruit of the womb, Nor will their eye pity children. (Isa. 13:13-18 NAU) Has God ever caused men to rape women, yes or no? In the context, who is responsible for causing men to rape women? Is it not the "fury of the Lord" (v. 13)? Is it not God's having "stirred up" the pagans to commit this atrocity (v. 16-17)? Does blaming God for these men raping Hebrew women, violate anything in the grammar or immediate context? Can you think of a convincing reason why you don't feel comfortable limiting yourself to the exact wording of the OT prophets, when you comment about God's relation to evil? If Isaiah 13 is better than anything a sinner like you could possibly say about God's sovereignty, why do you feel compelled to "explain" God's perfect choice of words with your own sinful commentary, especially given that you don't claim to be inspired by God to anywhere near the extent you think OT prophets were? Could it be that the reason you refuse to speak as simply and plainly as the biblical prophets did on such matters, is because you care more about making the bible-god attractive to modern western audiences, and care somewhat less about honoring your alleged belief that God's word, without your commentary, is **sufficient** for faith and practice?

  

Cold Case Christianity: J. Warner Wallace's errors on the problem of evil

This is my reply to J. Warner Wallace's article

Why Would a Good God Allow Moral Evil?

Posted: 09 Jun 2017 01:18 AM PDT

For many, the presence of moral evil is evidence against the existence of an all-powerful, all loving God.

This is illogical.  God's being an asshole doesn't mean he doesn't exist. 

The problem of evil is perhaps the single most frequent objection I hear when speaking to unbelievers, and it has been uttered by thousands across the span of history.

 It has also been a serious problem for serious Christians, and has caused plenty of them to leave the faith.

Epicurus (the ancient Greek philosopher, 341-270BC) expressed the problem clearly:  “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing?”  There you have it: If a good, all-powerful, all loving God does exist, and we, as humans, are allegedly created in His “image”, why are people be so inclined to do immoral things? 

The bible says God takes personal responsibility for all murder (Deut. 32:39), and that he not only causes the worst of evils, such as rape and parental cannibalism, but gets a thrill or "delight" out of watching people commit such horrific atrocities, Deut. 28:30, 53, 63.

And why doesn’t this all-powerful God do something to stop evil, immoral behavior? 

 Why would he stop himself? 

A God such as this is either too impotent to stop evil, doesn’t care enough to act, or simply doesn’t exist in the first place.  But think about it for a minute. Which is more loving: a God who creates a world in which love is possible, or a God who creates a world in which love is impossible?

 It is more loving to protect your loved ones from evil to the extent that you have ability and opportunity to do so.

 It seems reasonable that a loving God (if He exists at all), would create a world where love is possible.

Then you cannot have any problem with atheists whose arguments proceed under the same "seems reasonable" criteria.

 A good God would create a world where love can be experienced and expressed by creatures designed “in His image”. 

 And a perfect god would have been perfectly content with the way things were before anything was created, in which case this god would have had no motive or desire to change up this happy equilibrium.  If God was perfectly content with the pre-creation state of affairs, he would not have created anything.

But this kind of “love-possible” a world is, by necessity, a dangerous place. Love requires freedom. True love requires that humans have the ability to freely choose; love cannot be forced if it is to be heartfelt and real. I cannot force my children, for example, to love me. Instead, I must demonstrate my love for them, provide them with the knowledge and moral wisdom necessary to make safe and loving choices, and then allow them the personal freedom to love one another and do the right thing.

 No, you think the people that have already died and gone to heaven, cannot chose to sin, yet you believe they still authentically love and worship god.  So freedom to sin and the possibility of evil are not necessary to get creatures to authentically love god.  If God can impose that state of affairs in heaven, he could have imposed it on Adam and Eve, in which case they would never have chosen to sin, and God would have avoided all the future situations that made him so angry at mankind.  God has only himself to blame for giving us freewill and the mess it created, when freewill was not necessary to successfully creating loving creatures.

 Eventually, as a parent, I have to let go, and this process of letting go is dangerous.

 Strawman; you believe your god is omnipresent, so he never "lets go" of anybody the way parents let go of teenagers.

 In order for my kids to have the freedom to love, they also need the freedom to hate.  Freedom of this nature is often costly. A world in which people have the freedom to love and perform great acts of kindness is also a world in which people have the freedom to hate and commit great acts of evil. You cannot have one without the other, and we understand this intuitively. Let’s consider an example.  Every year, millions of scissors are manufactured and sold in countries across the world. Everyone knows how valuable and useful scissors can be. No one is arguing for laws to prevent the manufacturing or sale of scissors; we understand how beneficial they are. Yet every year, hundreds of homicides and assaults are committed with scissors (I’ve actually investigated some of these). While scissors were designed for a good and useful purpose, they are often used to commit great evil. In a similar way, our personal “free agency” is a beautiful gift that allows us to love. It was intended to provide us the means through which we can love one another and even love God. But this freedom, like a pair of scissors, can be used for great evil as well if we choose to reject its original purpose. 

Irrelevant, creatures can authentically love god without having any ability to sin.  See above.

As Christians, we believe that God created us in His image.

 There were no other words the Hebrew author could have chosen to express the idea that we physically resemble god.  This whole business of the image of god being "freewill" is total bullshit.  The god of the early parts of the OT was physical even if also invisible.  Christians only insist that "divine image =  freewill/conscience" for no other reason than because they wish to harmonize Genesis 1:26-27 with the rest of the bible, which says god cannot be likened to anything on earth.  But a more objective approach is to ask what the original biblical words for "image" and "likeness" meant in their own limited contexts.  Jehovah Witnesses also like to use scripture to interpret scripture, but that obviously doesn't benefit them in the least, as all they end up doing is justifying their own heretical theology thereby,  so its pretty safe to say that grammar and immediate context are paramount, while biblical inerrancy (i.e., scripture interprets scripture) does not deserve to be exalted in our mind to the status of governing hermeneutic, given that Christians are disagreed about whether it is biblical, and if so, what version is correct.  

 We have the freedom to love and we are eternal creatures who will live beyond our short existence on earth. Our free agency allows us to love and perform acts of kindness, and our eternal life provides the context for God to deal justly with those who choose to hate and perform acts of evil. God will do something to stop evil, immoral behavior, He is powerful enough to stop evil completely, and He does care about justice. But as an Eternal Being, He has the ability to address the issue on an eternal timeline.

 The modern Christian notion about God being "eternal" is contradicted by every biblical description of heaven, which asserts things going on there, with God, in a way that necessarily presupposes the same degree of temporal progression of events that exists on earth.  This idea that your god lives in some eternal "now" that is fundamentally different than the "time" dimension we live in, is not biblical.

It’s not that God has failed to act; it’s simply that He has not chosen to act yet.

 The more biblical answer is that horrific evils occur because God causes them to happen, see Deut. 28:63.  Read everything between vv. 15-63, then you tell me that anybody who causes parents to eat their own kids, is "good". 

  1 John 4:7-8 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

 This biblical logic is faulty, because according to the bible many of those who do not love, lack that love precisely because God wanted it that way:  David hates idoloters themselves, not just their idolatry, in Psalm 31:6, and god forbids the Israelites from doing anything nice for certain other people in Deut.23:6.

Compared to eternity, this temporal, earthly existence is but a vapor, created by good God to be a wonderful place where love is possible for those who choose it.

 Again, all biblical descriptions of heaven assert that events take place there with no less temporal progression than they do on earth.  Again, if God was perfect, he'd have been perfectly content to exist without creatures, and thus would never have become motivated to think that changing the original solitary perfection-state was "better".