my reply to James Patrick Holding's idiot-followers

 James Patrick Holding "warned" me that he "wasn't playing anymore" and that he'd post more videos about me should I dare to speak disparagingly of him to third parties.  So I took up his challenge with a prior blog post wherein I show the world that I recently spoke disparagingly about Holding to a church pastor that knew him back in 2007.  See here.  I then advertised this post to the comment section of one of his YouTube videos about me, to make darn sure he knew about my violation of his warning as quickly as possible.

Holding, as usual, makes good on his libelous "warning" by posting yet another defamatory video about me.

This is my reply to various comments James Patrick Holding's followers post to this libelous YouTuBe video.  Because they are libelous videos, this is an exceptional situation where I will not give the link to the original video, otherwise in jury trial Holding will simply argue that the jury should reduce the amount of damages he must pay since I, by posting links to his libels, helped the public find such defamatory posts..

First, in most of Holding's prior videos about me, he included a link to his secondary website devoted exclusively to libeling me.  But in this current video, which I respond to below, he didn't give that link.

I would be reasonable, even if not infallibly so, to conclude that Holding got schooled the hard painful way when he read my current 97-page complaint, and like a mean dog that has been bapped in the eye with a shovel, has decided that changing his ways is probably going to make life easier for him, and maintaining a steady consistent course of libeling me to the degree he did in the past, can only cause the jury to hate him with great passion.  

And since Holding posted this most recent video out of sheer spite and hatred toward me (i.e., he says "I'm not playing anymore"), his followers do not have the option of speculating that Holding voluntarily chose to leave out that link to the secondary libelous website merely because he wished to give me a "break".  

Holding's pathological hatred of me is well-known.  Unless he had been slapped in the head by me or his own lawyer about the libelous nature of that secondary website, he goddamn sure would have included the link to it with this newly posted video.  He has only chosen to break with his recent pattern of libelous activity because he is genuinely frightened that he really is guilty of libel, he is past the point of no return, and the best thing he can do at this point is to act in ways that might motivate the jury to give him some leniency. 

And like all stupid guilty people, his prior wrongs are so extensive, the jury will be suspicious that he only changed his ways for the better this recently because he was afraid of the damages a jury would impose, NOT because he was genuinely remorseful for defaming me.  People like Holding are incapable of genuine remorse, they are too busy, as Pharisees, trying to morally justify every character flaw they manifest.  

Let me know when you find evidence that James Patrick Holding has ever apologized to anybody for anything he ever did in the last 20 years (yeah right, you seriously think Holding, with his 20 years of slandering people, never crossed the line into the actual sin of reviling or slander?).  I suggest you get a seat cushion and place about 2 weeks worth of water and food near your computer, you'll be on the internet for quite a while trying to locate things that never existed.

here are my replies to the comments Holding's babies posted to said recent video:

Published on Feb 22, 2019


Inari19872 hours ago
I haven’t watched the entire video all the way through, but the thing on John Doe being a fraud is perfectly valid to you. Because it’s an indication of dishonesty. And you can use that to poke holes in his honesty all the way through.

 Yup, just like one would expect, a follower of Holding draws quick negative conclusions about somebody's credibility before viewing any source document in full.  I also commented there with:

Barry Jones1 second ago

It's only an indication of my dishonesty if I invented this John Doe. I didn't, but of course, you cannot distinguish yourself from God, which is why you think there's nothing more to say about the issue after you've drawn your infallible conclusions about it. A reasonable mature respectable adult would first ask for my side of the story. Holding did not serve any discovery on me during that 2015 case, telling you how interested his lawyer in that case was in confronting me with this alleged "zinger".

DecKrash34 minutes ago
It just looks like this guy is so desperate for attention that he's trying to pull any & everything out of his backside to try to take you to court just to find something that sticks.

 Sorry, but my 97-page Complaint is available for free download from this blog (see here), and you don't make any rebuttal to any of its actual arguments.  You just talk shit and posture. 

That's the sign of somebody who is mentally deranged.

Making you are even dumber than a mentally deranged person, because you obviously cannot refute their legal arguments.   I authored 97 pages of legal arguments.  Get to work or shut the fuck up.

Can't the courts look over his past suits and find that he's lobbed so many frivolous lawsuits against so many people that they can give him an injunction against making any more lawsuits?

You've now committed the civil tort of libel per se, because your accusation that I filed "frivolous" lawsuits in the past, is false, and tends to cause others to view me with contempt, disgrace, etc. 

If you don't understand how your comments that my prior lawsuits were "frivolous" constitutes the tort of "libel per se", its probably because you missed the bottom of page 4 of the Complaint.  If I really wanted to, your engaging in libel would justify me to file a John Doe Subpoena to force Google to reveal all information. they have about your real name and contact information.  Go ahead, keep playing with fire, and maybe you'll get first-hand knowledge of what Holding is currently suffering.

Or at least demand that he have psychiatric evaluation?

Unfortunately for you, I've never filed a frivolous lawsuit, so the Courts won't be requiring me to undergo psychiatric evaluation.

Something has to be done to shut down this clown's idiocy for good.

And the fact that you cannot think of a way to do it, might caution the reader to consider that my lawsuits in the past and my current one against Holding are not frivolous, and lead to the further conclusion that YOU are the "idiocy" here.  Holding cannot think of a way to do it either, that's why he's been scrambling around for the last two weeks unsuccessfully trying to convince his Christian lawyer friends to rally in support of his lost cause.  If Holding was smart, he'd realize "Christian" lawyers think him guilty, and he'd use his time more productively finding an non-Christian lawyer who has less more scruples than  Christian lawyer. The secular lawyer only cares about winning.  The Christian lawyer won't defend the Defendant if they feel he is morally and biblically guilty of sin.  They don't want to be defending somebody else's "sin", and of course, Holding's libels of me are the sin of "slander" or  "reviling", which require that other Christians expel him from their fellowship:

 11 But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler-- not even to eat with such a one.
 12 For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church?
 13 But those who are outside, God judges. REMOVE THE WICKED MAN FROM AMONG YOURSELVES.   (1 Cor. 5:11-6:1 NAU)

The Greek word for "reviler" is loidoros, and The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament says it refers to those who verbally abuse others:

449 
λοιδορέω loidoreÃoÒ [to revile, abuse],
λοιδορία loidoriÃa [abuse],
λοίδορος loiÃdoros [reviler],
ἀντιλοιδορέω antiloidoreÃoÒ [to revile in return]
 This common word group has the secular sense of reproach, insult, calumny, and even blasphemy. In the LXX it carries the nuance of wrangling, angry remonstrance, or chiding as well as the more usual calumny. Philo has it for mockery or invective. In the NT the verb occurs four times and the noun and adjective twice each.
 1. loiÃdoros occurs in lists of vices in 1 Cor. 5:11 and 6:10. In Acts 23:4 Paul is asked why he reviles the high priest, and in his reply he recognizes a religious duty not to do so. In Mart. Pol. 9.3 the aged Polycarp cannot revile Christ; to do so would be blasphemy.
 2. Christians should try to avoid calumny (1 Tim. 5:14), but when exposed to it (cf. Mt. 5:11) they should follow Christ's example (1 Pet. 2:23; cf. Mt. 26:63; Jn. 18:23), repaying railing with blessing (1 Pet. 3:9). This is the apostolic way of 1 Cor. 4:12: “When reviled, we bless” (cf. Diog. 5.15). By this answer to calumny the reality of the new creation is manifested. [H. HANSE, IV, 293-94]

B. W. Powers, Ph.d is Dean of New Testament and Ethics, Tyndale College, The Australasian Open Theological College (20 years).  This is from his 2009 Commentary on 1st Corinthians


              
The biblically literate Christian lawyer would never agree to defend Holding from the civil charges accusing him of what the bible calls "reviling". 

tektontv43 minutes ago
His state isn't that interested in shutting down frivolous lawsuits. Florida is, though.

Barry Jones1 second ago
And yet a Florida court already found that the allegations in my Complaint, if true, DO state a legally valid cause of action for libel. I filed this 2019 lawsuit "in forma pauperis", which requires the Court to delay approving the case for filing until they decide that the case is not frivolous. See Figueroa v. Orange County Public Schools, Dist. Court, MD Florida, 2019. That is, IF you really did talk about my prior lawsuits the way my Complaint says you did, that really IS "libel per se". In other words, you either respond by saying you never posted the things the Complaint says you did ( a lie), or you allege that the Complaint misrepresents what you posted (a lie), or you pay a lawyer of lot of money to advise you that you'll be losing the jury trial. 

DecKrash33 minutes ago
@tektontv so does Florida have the power to nullify the validity any further lawsuits made by this guy?

Barry Jones1 second ago
Yes, but only if they reach the conclusion that I'm a "vexatious litigant". I'm not, no court has ever found I was, and the fact that a prior court opined I had "abused the discovery process" is about as damaging to my reputation as "we find the lower court judge abused his discretion in excluding this evidence" is damaging to the credibility of the judge whose ruling was overturned. Holding also doesn't tell you that the Washington Court in 2015 ordered him to answer my jurisdictionn and non-jurisdiction related discovery requests before the question of jurisdiction had been settled. So the more Holding chides me for seeking non-jurisdiction discovery before the jurisdiction question was settled, the more he chides the judge.

Peasant Scrublord36 minutes ago
Doscher is a clown.

Barry Jones1 second ago
Yeah, but, can you actually REFUTE any of my ACTUAL legal or factual arguments in the 2019 Complaint? NO. What a fuckhead you must be, you cannot even refute the arguments made by a "clown".

Once again, Holding is a very stupid cocksucker:  If, as he admits, his own lawyer in the 2015 case cautioned him to take down a similarly libelous "Internet Predator Alert" he had posted about me, we have to wonder:  have any lawyers Holding contacted since then, similarly told him what laywers typically DO tell new clients (i.e, to quit making negative public remarks about the case or the other party)?

My answer to CerebralFaith on Age of Accountability and Abortion

This is my reply to an article by CerebralFaith entitled

Addressing The Number 1 Objection To The Age Of Accountability

Posted by Evan Minton on April 09, 2015

 If you’ve read my writings, you’ll know that I believe in “The Age Of Accountability”.

Well you shouldn't.  The bible nowhere states that age explicitly or even implicitly, and it's very controversial, so that as a conservative you should pay more heed to the conservative hermeneutic  'where the bible is silent, we are silent' instead of trying to answer a question Christianity hasn't given a consistent answer to in 2,000 years. 

By the way, suppose some atheist girl reaches the age you say is the age of accountability.  then afterward she goes to church, rejects the gospel, and dies in a car accident on the way home.  Does she go to hell?

You've got serious problems if you set the age of accountabilty too high, such as 16-18, because most parents are quite aware that kids know the difference between good and evil long before that age, so it will look like you arbitrarily increase the age merely to avoid making god look sadistic.

If you agree with most Christians through the centuries that the age of accountability is somewhere between 7 and 13, then you necessarily create the high probability that many of the people in hell went there before reaching age 14. 

Can you really stomach the idea of God wanting a 12 year old girl to suffer mindless agony in eternal flames?  Or are you one of those fanatics that that thinks correct theology is more important than common sense?  Guess what happens when other people think that way?  The stupidity of flying jets into buildings doesn't slow them down at all from barging ahead anyway. Since sacrificing common sense for the sake of "theology" appears to lay a foundation for more unnecessary violence and willful stupidity, I choose common sense, and use the bible to practice kicking 80-yard field goals.

(snip)

 This blog post is meant to address the number 1 objection to the age of accountability that skeptics often bring up. They argue that if babies go directly to Heaven when they die, then it would be more moral to kill people before they ever have a chance to grow up. After all, if they’re allowed to grow up, there’s a good chance they’d sin and reject Jesus Christ as their Savior. If they reject Jesus Christ as their Savior, then they’d go to Hell. Therefore, it’s more loving to be pro-choice.

Exactly.  Well said.

This is the argument the skeptic makes; that The Age of Accountability logically entails an absurd view (i.e that infanticide/abortion is moral) and therefore, The Age Of Accountability must also be absurd. This is what’s known as reductio ad absurdum. However, if we reject The Age Of Accountability then we must conclude that God is evil. After all, it’s obviously unjust to punish someone either for something they couldn’t help, or for something they’ve never done. Babies can’t do anything sinful, so how can it be just for God to send them to Hell? So we run into a dilemma here. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t (pun intended).

Is there any way to accept The Age Of Accountability without running into this problem? Obviously, any view that logically entails the conclusion “infanticide is moral” must be rejected. Does the skeptic’s reductio ad absurdum succeed?

I don’t think it does…for several reasons.

God Is Sovereign Over Life And Death, We Are Not

The Bible explicitly tells us

 Ok, then you are not addressing the skeptic's challenge...you are merely giving other bible-believing Christians a biblical excuse to duck this challenge.  You are essentially saying that the common sense that would otherwise make the age of accountability doctrine appear to evince a sadistic god, doesn't, because the bible says thus and so...

Well, that's not very convincing to a skeptic, and they are reasonable if they consider your bible quotes at that point to constitute your surrender.

The fact is that people of normal common sense normally do refrain from having kids if their circumstances make them feel any kids born into the situation will stand a good chance of failure, hurt, misery, starvation, etc.  Refusing to have kids because of fear of their going to hell is about as "unreasonable" as the strung out crack whore who refuses to have kids because she doesn't want them to become homeless bums.

The Bible explicitly tells us not to murder innocent people (see Exodus 20:13).

 But it also tells you God is responsible for all murders (Deuteronomy 32:39).  So when a woman has an abortion, the bible requires that this is much more than merely a doctor and woman committing a murder...this is also, quite literally, God causing that baby to die.  If that is the case, then God demanding that we refrain from murder is logically equal to God demanding that he himself refrain from taking life by the act of murder.

God tells us not to kill another human being. This is one of The Ten Commandments. As such, abortion and infanticide are both moral abominations, they’re evil.

 Which would then mean God is evil since he takes full credit for all murders, Deuteronomy 32:39.

It is evil to kill a baby or anyone else for that matter.

 Then God must be evil because he chose to torture a baby with sickness for 7 days before killing it:

 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. (2 Sam. 12:15-18 NAU)

Minton continues:

Now, God is the author of life and as such He has the right to take life as He sees fit (See Job 1:21, 1 Samuel 2:6, Psalm 75:7, Deuteronomy 32:39).

 But that just creates a problem for you:  How can God be the one "taking" life during a murder, if the act that causes that life to be taken, is "evil"?  What exactly is God doing while the sinner is in the act of pulling the trigger?

God has a right to decide when we enter the afterlife, we do not.

 You seem to be implying that if a woman has an abortion, she is therefore sending that child into the afterlife sooner than God intended.

Is that what you are saying, yes or no?

Since He's the author of life, He has the right to take it. The Bible even says that God has ordained the date of our deaths (see Job 14:5 and Psalm 139:16). Therefore, only God can decide when a fetus or an infant comes into the afterlife. Not us. We are human beings. We are not the authors of life. God is.

 If those bible verses are theologically correct, then the reason a woman has a successful abortion is because your God decreed that this baby not live any longer than the date the abortion gets performed.  

You could escape the dilemma by saying we can cause human life to be shorter than god intended, but that turns you into a liberal, and we can't have that.  When the bible says God ordained the days you will live, it means he ordained the exact amount of days that all persons shall live, and that this decree cannot be deviated from by the sin of human beings.  Therefore if a woman has an abortion, it is because God ordained that this infant not live longer than this.

Whenever a human being takes a life, he is putting himself in the place of God.

That doesn't make your problem disappear:  When you murder somebody, this is proof that God didn't want the victim to live any longer than they did.  I'm afraid your bible is contradictory:  It tells you that God decides how long people shall live in all cases, but then tells you it is "wrong" when you commit murder.  Gee, I didn't know it was wrong to fulfill God's eternal decree!

God is the author of life and therefore only He has the right to take it.

A sentiment that makes people who are already Christian feel comfortable, but does precisely nothing to disturb the skeptical position.

God has the authority to bring His children home when He wants to.

And according to your bible and your own interpretation, he is doing that every time a woman chooses to get an abortion.  You don't have the biblical option of saying abortion cuts life shorter than God intended...so abortion is no less in fulfillment of God's will, than is the natural death of an elderly person.

The question, then, is whether only a sadistic lunatic would insist that it is immoral to carry out his will exactly the way he intended?  And the biblical answer to why God faults people for doing what he wanted them to do, is "shut up", Romans 9:20.  In light of such desperate anti-intellectual answer, I call victory.  Gee, how many other heresies can be successfully refuted by simply telling the heretic "who are you to answer back to God?" ?

We do not. God has not made us the judge over them.

That changes nothing.  Abortions only cut life short in harmony with the length of life God decreed from all eternity that such persons should have. Labeling abortion as "sin" at this points is sort of like saying "you are breaking company policy when you do what the company wants you to do".  Only in theology would such inconsistency be tolerated.

God Has A Plan For Every Human Life

It’s true that if everyone had an abortion, or killed their infants, that they would send them to Heaven, but they would also be likely radically altering the future for the worse!

 Wow, who'd a thought conforming to God's will only makes things worse! 

Yes, they (the babies) would be far happier in Heaven than they ever would be living in this horrible world, but God has plans for those babies.

And according to your earlier bible quotes, like Job 14:5, his plan for the aborted baby was that it be aborted right when it actually was.

Each human being radically effects the lives of those around them. This was beautifully illustrated in the movie “It’s A Wonderful Life”. Each human life affects the lives of those around them…either for better or for worse. Think about the possible consequences of ending the life of an unborn child. That child might have become a firefighter who would have saved many lives in a burning building, one of those lives being that of a child who would grow up to be a police officer, and that police officer would save the life of a child from a serial killer, and the child saved from the serial killer would grow up to be a scientist who discovers the cure for blindness or cancer or something. By ending the life of that unborn baby, yes you’d be sending them to Heaven, but you would also rob the world of a great gift. In this illustration, you would prevent the cure for blindness being discovered. If only you chose not to have the abortion.

Or even worse; what if the child would grow up to be the next Billy Graham? In this case, hundreds or thousands of souls who would have been saved actually end up damned because the child wasn’t able to grow up and become a preacher! So yeah, you sent that child to Heaven. But at the same time, you’d ended up sending far more people to Hell…because perhaps the only possible world where these people would have given their lives to Christ is a possible world where that unborn baby grows up and holds Billy Graham type crusades.

Would you really want to risk the souls of hundreds or thousands just to send 1 person to Heaven?

 That child might also have grown up to be a Hitler.  All of your above argument is thus defused by an equally powerful counterpoint.  Smart people don't look only at the benefits, they also consider the risks.

Think about it...do you really want gangsters, thugs, and mentally retarded people, getting pregnant?  I can be honest enough to say that whenever such women get abortions, I think this is better than their giving birth in circumstances that will more than likely result in a child that thinks gangs and violence are the highest ideals in life.  If could have my way, I'd sterilize everybody living in the "poor" section of every city.  They have no more business procreating than do the starving teens of Ethiopia.

And once again, unless you accuse married couples of stupidity for citing their poverty as a reason to avoid pregnancy (and thinking the chances are too great their child will amount to nothing) then you are forced to agree that if the couple reasonably anticipate a horrific future for the child, yes, it is better to just avoid having kids.  

Well gee, you are a conservative Christian, and thus are not permitted to have any other view of the world than the negative cynical one expressed in the NT.  See Romans 3:10 ff and 1st John 5:19.  Having kids because of the chance that they'll turn out to be good saved Christians, is about as gullible as going to Wal-Mart expecting to find high-quality products.  Possible?  Barely.  Likely?  Not in the least.

If The Swords Cuts At All, It Cuts Both Ways

Most of the time, I receive this objection from Atheists. It usually happens after I tell them that the Canaanite children went to Heaven. So this next objection wouldn’t affect the Calvinist who makes this same argument.

But for the atheist who makes this argument, I would like to tell them that they could justify abortion even on the atheistic view (in which there is no such thing as Heaven or Hell). Think about it, since we all go through great suffering in this life, every time a baby is born into the world, abort it. Why let it live? It’ll just go through a lot of suffering.

 That might be a good idea if the specific pregnant mother you are talking to lives in circumstances sufficiently comparable to the shitty state of affairs the bible says humanity and earth are currently in.  But for couples who have decent income and life-style, the possibilities of the child's suffering are quite diminished and become comparable to the risk of getting hit by a car as you walk to the store .  Most children are not born with cancer or genetic defects.  Sorry, but the reasons abortion are preferable under Christian theology, are not analogous to the reasons abortion is preferable under atheism.

This is the rationale some women have for getting an abortion in the first place (i.e “I don’t want to bring a baby into such a horrible world”).

 Yes, but I would say they lack critical thinking skills, as it would have been less drastic if they have simply used protection or been abstinent. Either way, they are using common sense.  This world is getting more and more flipped out every year.  And I see nothing wrong with atheists preferring to be childless because of how stupid, strung-out, materialistic, overpopulated, consumerist and superficial this stupid world currently is.

It’s also possible that they could grow up to be serial killers, burglars, or thugs who engage in gang violence. Maybe they should be aborted to ensure that that doesn’t happen. Oh sure, he or she COULD be next Stephen Hawking or Mother Teresa but let’s abort him or her anyway, after all, we would be doing the child a favor. The child wouldn’t have to live in a world of meaningless suffering (I don’t believe it’s meaningless on the theistic worldview by the way), and would also ensure that the next holocaust and the next 9/11 never happens. By robbing them of all the opportunities that this life has to offer, we’d be preventing them from living a life of suffering. We also might save lives just in case this fetus becomes the next Jack The Ripper. Tell me, would you seriously advocate the killing of children regardless of whether the theistic or atheistic worldview is true? I wouldn’t. As you can see, this argument, if it cuts at all, it cuts both ways.

 No, in the atheist context, aborting the child does not increase the child's happiness.  In the Christian context, it does (they go to heaven to live with Jesus forever).  Big difference.  

But regardless, whether to abort or not within the first several weeks of pregnancy, is the mother's choice.  If that were not so, you'd have to come up with laws and rules by which sub-committees could decide whether a woman's miscarriage was accidental or intentional...which would mean a shitload of money would have to be spent monitoring pregnant women every moment of their lives, given how easy it is to move, fall, or eat something that will cause miscarriage.  That's the political swamp of hopelessness you wind up in if you wish to push your "abortion = murder" sentiment to its logical conclusion.  More especially so at this point in American history, where women are conditioned to think abortion is nobody's business but their own...thus increasing the likelihood they'd put forth effort to hide their intent to disobey such laws.  Sorry, but in the current world, "abortion = murder" cannot be practically defended.

The same argument that the atheist uses against advocates of The Age Of Accountability also can be used against him.

In conclusion, I don’t think that the view that all babies go to Heaven logically entails abortion and infanticide being good things.

 But under normative reasoning, we usually do conclude an act is 'good', if one of its effects is guaranteed to produce a good, or if its good effects outweigh its bad effects.  That's why you think having a job, feeding your kids, making them go to school, and allowing doctors to operate on them, are "good" things.  These can also and often do produce bad effects, but these are outweighed by the good intended effects. 

At this point Romans 8:18 kills your argument.  If the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory of the afterlife, it only stands to reason that the sins of the present time are not worthy to be compared to the morally good results those sins will achieve in the afterworld.

Now you can simplistically quote the bible and pretend that it makes sense to call murder a sin while acknowledging the other biblical truth that murder always achieves God's will for the victim, but in doing so you'll be ceding victory to the skeptic, and you'll only be giving an answer that makes Christians feel better about their current theological presuppositions, you won't be giving an answer that would intellectually compel the skeptic to change his mind.

As long as your theology guarantees a good outcome for all aborted babies, you are neglecting the more important spiritual/eternal perspective (aborted fetuses go to heaven)  when you act as if the temporal/earthly perspective (abortion = murder) is all that counts in the moral analysis.  Under Christian theology, abortion produces more good than evil (i.e., a child's guaranteed eternal salvation in heaven outweighs the temporal sin of murder).

It's funny but the NT even supports that type of reasoning.  It would be sinful for Paul to become cursed of God merely to save Israel, yet Paul, while allegedly inspired by God, expressed exactly this sentiment:

 3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, (Rom. 9:3 NAU)

The same with Jesus' death:  It didn't matter to God that the death was the unjust murder of an innocent man, God ordained that the greater spiritual benefits to mankind should be conferred in that specific sinful fashion:

  23 this Man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death. (Acts 2:23 NAU)

 27 "For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel,
 28 to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose predestined to occur. (Acts 4:27-28 NAU)

Minton continues:

They are still very much bad. God still prohibits human beings taking the life of other human beings (Exodus 20:13), This is one of The Ten Commandments.

 To repeat: your bible is contradictory.  If babies die exactly when God's prescribed number of days for them runs out, then God is no less involved in the abortion than the mother and doctor.  In fact all they doing is fulfilling God's will by preventing the baby from living longer than God intended.  Chuck your theological bullshit in the garbage, and such embarassing inconsistency disappears.

As such, abortion and infanticide are both moral abominations, they’re evil.

 They are also acts that fulfill God's will for every fetus involved.  God is rather stupid to bitch about people who do the very things he wants them to do.

It is evil to kill a baby or anyone else for that matter.

 Then God was evil for killing David's baby (2nd Samuel 12, supra).

Now, God is the author of life and as such He has the right to take life as He sees fit (See Job 1:21, 1 Samuel 2:6, Psalm 75:7, Deuteronomy 32:39). God has a right to decide when we enter the afterlife, we do not.

 That sounds like you are saying when a mother aborts a baby, she is causing the child to enter the afterlife sooner than God intended.

Is that what you are saying, yes or no?

James Patrick Holding's threats are laughable

Last week Holding posted this comment to one of his videos:

DecKrash1 week ago

If it's possible, you ought to use Weird Al's song, "I'll Sue Ya" as background music for the next video about this scumbag. :-P

tektontv1 week ago

I actually did refer to that song as exemplary of his work in a TheologyWeb thread in 2015. It offended him so deeply that he referred to it in his home state complaint. Just so everyone knows, I will be putting out at least one video/blog entry on Doscher every two weeks until he stops harassing me with lawsuits. In addition, if I find out or hear that he has written to anyone about me disparagingly, they will be sent links to any relevant documents such as the expert witness testimony on his bus "accident". I'm not playing any more.

First, I think Holding is a being irrational here:  He says he'll be posting one video/blog entry about me per week until I stop harassing him with lawsuits?  That doesn't even make sense: he knows this third libel lawsuit is going to remain in active litigation for at least the next year.  it isn't like I file lawsuits against him on a weekly or even yearly basis.

Second, he's also irrational because now that he has my 97-page Complaint, he knows exactly why I characterize as libelous his reports of my prior judicial proceedings.  If Mr. Holding continues to misrepresent those proceedings in future posts, I will be amending the Complaint to add new charges.  If his future reports on those judicial proceedings are not libelous, I'll be arguing that because Holding knew after February 21, 2019, how to report on those proceedings in a non-libelous way, he likely also knew how to do this in non-libelous fashion before that date, therefore, the libels as currently alleged in the Complaint were not the result of his mistaken understanding of libel law, but his willful flouting of it.

And given Holding's proud boasts in 2015 about what a legal scholar he is with his 7 years of running a law library, and the fact that he was sued twice in the past for libel, he likely won't be telling the jury in 2019 or 2020 that his misrepresentations in 2017-2019 of my prior court cases were because he was honestly ignorant of what the law required of him.  No sir, Mr. Know-It-All cannot plead ignorance...unless he wants the jury to think him dishonest.  That's the price you pay when you are a know-it-all...when you fuck up, you cannot plead ignorance, and at that point you look as culpable as it is possible to look.

Third, I must assume that Holding finally figured out that the cheapest lawyers (i.e., the Christian lawyers Holding went to first, who thus are the most likely to feel sorry for him and offer him a discount on legal fees in the name a' Jesus) felt that he was wrong, told him he was wrong, and as a result, he won't be misrepresenting my prior court cases anymore because he doesn't desire to lose more Christian friends.
(Holding has also already admitted in one of his YouTube posts that his own lawyer during the 2015 lawsuit told him he could gain an advantage by removing a libelous article about me...clearly this lawyer did not agree with Holding's morality or his interpretation of the law...leaving the readers to wonder:  Did Holding then call his own lawyer and 'dumbass' and 'moron', the way Holding calls names at anybody else who disagree with his infallible opinions?  If not, why not?  Is his name-calling arbitrary?  Does he play favorites the exact same way that any atheist would?).

Fourth, for those who wish to know how "scared" I am of Holding's threat to post more about me every time he finds out I talked about him with some new third-party, here is my response:

I recently did a google search for Holding, found out he gave a speech in 2007 at the Shepherd's Fellowship Baptist Church, so I emailed the senior pastor there and warned him about Holding, and we had a discussion, which included me providing said pastor with a copy of the 2019 Complaint.  When the pastor said he knew Holding's apologetics were harsh but didn't know he did anything wrong, I then sent the pastor a copy of the 2016 Florida Complaint...you know...the one which extensively documents Holding's repeatedly employing pornographically filthy slurs that show him to have the emotional maturity level of a demented 12-year old juvenile delinquent.

You know..the sins of abusive speech and slander that Holding has never, and will never, repent of?

Here is the email exchange so far:

a 3rd libel lawsuit against James Patrick Holding

Barry Jones <barryjoneswhat@gmail.com>

Feb 17, 2019, 3:33 PM (4 days ago)

to clifflea, pastor

Hello,

I understand that James Patrick Holding is or was a member of your church, according to

http://www.sfofgso.org/apologetic.asp.

Don't know if you are aware, but Mr. Holding's sins of reviling and slander are utterly out of control.

I had to file a civil lawsuit against him for libel.  You can keep up with the case here

https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/26884971/Doscher_v_Apologetics_Afield,_Inc

The 97-page complaint is attached for your convenience.

I would ask that you start the Matthew 18 process, given that Mr. Holding's sins of slander have been on-going without ceasing for the last 20 years, he isn't known for much more.

 15 "If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother.

 16 "But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that BY THE MOUTH OF TWO OR THREE WITNESSES EVERY FACT MAY BE CONFIRMED.

 17 "If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.    (Matt. 18:15-17 NAU)

 Attachments area

Cliff Lea           

Feb 19, 2019, 12:09 PM (2 days ago)

to me

Barry,

                I’m sorry for what you are going through in this case.  I know JP, but he has not been associated with our church in several years.  He attends a church in the Orlando area now…so I don’t sense the need for church discipline from us.

Sincerely in Christ, Pastor Cliff

Barry Jones <barryjoneswhat@gmail.com>  

Feb 19, 2019, 1:15 PM (2 days ago)  

to Cliff

Thank you for your response.

Well, do you have any ideas about what I might do?  Has Mr. Holding done anything that would warrant Christians in praying that God move him to repentance?

Cliff Lea        

Feb 19, 2019, 1:23 PM (2 days ago)  

to me

I don’t really have much to offer.  I have heard that he can be harsh in his apologetics, but I’ve never observed anything personally that caused me concern…

Barry Jones <barryjoneswhat@gmail.com>  

AttachmentsFeb 19, 2019, 1:40 PM (2 days ago)     

to Cliff

Ok, then FYI, attached is the 2nd libel lawsuit Complaint I had filed against Holding in 2016.

Go to page 23, paragraph 106 and following, I had to document Mr. Holding's immoral language.

Holding is not merely "harsh" in his apologetics, but so pornographically filthy that even other Christian apologists such as Steve Hays and Dr. James White have objected to it.

Any conservative evangelical would likely find Holding's slanderous abusive speech to be in violation of Ephesians 5:4 and Colossians 3:8----

 3 But immorality or any impurity or greed must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints;

 4 and there must be no filthiness and silly talk, or coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks.

 5 For this you know with certainty, that no immoral or impure person or covetous man, who is an idolater, has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.

 6 Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. (Eph. 5:3-6 NAU)

 6 For it is because of these things that the wrath of God will come upon the sons of disobedience,

 7 and in them you also once walked, when you were living in them.

 8 But now you also, put them all aside: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive speech from your mouth.

 9 Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices,

 10 and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him--   (Col. 3:6-10 NAU)

Once you read the attached 2016 Complaint, you'll likely find that Holding for the last

20 years has been that "brother" who constantly slanders or "reviles" others, the "brother"

whom Paul said must be expelled:

 11 But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler-- not even to eat with such a one.

 12 For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church?

 13 But those who are outside, God judges. REMOVE THE WICKED MAN FROM AMONG YOURSELVES. (1 Cor. 5:11-13 NAU)

I am constantly flummoxed at how Holding can have such a filthy reputation and yet so many upstanding evangelical conservative Christians apparently either don't know or don't care about his many sins of slander.

    

Feb 20, 2019, 7:55 AM (1 day ago)

to me

HI Barry,

Thanks for reaching out. I haven't had a chance to look at your complaint yet, but I just wanted to let you know that the link you sent is just to a conference that took place back in 2007 in which he was one of our speakers. He was not then, nor has he ever been a member of our church. As far as I am aware, we have had no contact with him nor have we promoted him or his ministry in probably ten years. Sorry to hear about your situation though, I pray it is resolved.

Barry Jones <barryjoneswhat@gmail.com>  

Feb 20, 2019, 11:16 AM (1 day ago)

to Jeff

Might I get your scripturally based opinion then?

Do you believe the morality requirements in Ephesians 5:4 and Colossians 3:8 are absolute upon all genuinely born again Christians in all times, places and circumstances?

Or would you side with Mr. Holding and argue that such passages are limited in scope, and that using pornographically filthy language to slander and revile critics of Christianity is allowed for in the bible?  And thanks for praying about the situation.

------------------------------------------

Let's be generous:  I responded to this pastor FOUR times.  Therefore Holding can feel free to create 4 new posts/videos about me...as long as they show that he has, since I filed this latest lawsuit, learned how to stop violating comment F to the Restatement (Second) of Torts § 611.  (Once again, if his future posts report on those prior court cases in a fair, accurate and impartial manner, I will be arguing that Mr. Know-It-All knew how to do this between 2017-2019, the time when he composed the libelous posts now at issue in the current Complaint.  If his future posts about my prior court cases continue his pattern of misrepresentation, I'll be amending the Complaint to add new charges.  He will either comply with my wishes, or suffer legal penalties).

For obvious reasons, I fear Holding's threat to continue posting about me, about as much as I fear a newborn gazelle might possibly brutalize a pack of hungry lions.

Once again, James Patrick Holding is a remorseless obstinate pretentious cocksucker, who clearly thinks preserving his pride is always more important than honestly admitting his sins of slander and reviling.  But like a rabid pit bull, not even recent experience with getting kicked in the head ($21,000 in legal fees to get rid of my 2015 lawsuit) has any effect on him.  He bites the live electrical cords, sparks fly, he eyeballs melt, but animal instinct compels him to just keep chomping down regardless.


Like a reptile, he can do no other except repeat the past behavior that resulted in him sustaining serious injury.   I'd have more luck teaching an alligator to stop being a carnivore, than in convincing Holding to quit playing with fire.

I also strongly suspect that the Christian lawyers he's already contacted, conveniently became "too busy" to represent him after they read the 2019 Complaint.  While Holding has a lot of contacts within the Christian world, I'm betting $50 the exact lawyer that he ends up hiring in this case won't themselves be a Christian. Defending this bitch would require the services of a person who cares more about generating billable hours and less about whether his client is actually guilty as charged.  You won't find too many "Christian" lawyers like that.

What a scumbag, not even Christian lawyers will take his case!

Cold Case Christianity: God is unloving for sending people to a traditional hell of eternal torture

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

A loving God wouldn't send people to hell, would He?

Thu, Feb 7, 8:27 AM

On Thu, Feb 7, 2019 at 8:27 AM J. Warner Wallace

<jim@coldcasechristianity.com> wrote:

How would you respond? 

Wikipedia describes the idea of hell as "an ethical problem in religion in which the existence of Hell for the punishment of souls is regarded as inconsistent with the notion of a just, moral, and omnibenevolent God." Is that true?

 Yes.  When you have to redefine love so that it can also correctly describe the person who allows his "loved ones" to suffer torture by fire forever, you have a serious problem.

Does the notion of hell contradict the existence of a loving God?

 When you define love by normative convention? Obviously yes.  When you toy with the definition of love so that even sadistic pedophiles could be said to be "loving"?  No.  Standard thesauruses correct the fools who trifle that only apathy is the opposite of love.  No, "hate" is also an opposite of love.  See standard thesaurus here.  And your god "hates" the workers, not just the works, of iniquity.  See Psalm 5:5 and 11:5.

How would you respond to someone who makes such a claim?

 Hopefully the Christian would respond with  "yes, I can understand why you'd automatically suppose the person who causes mindless torture to children in hell is unloving by any reasonable definition of love."

You will say "we never said God sends children to hell!"

Well Jehovah's Witnesses never call themselves heretics, so is that option off the table?  Obviously not.  You might be teaching or believing things that logically necessitate your belief that your god sends kids to hell, even if you don't actually pursue your own teaching to its furthest logical implication.

Ok...when does a child reach the age of accountability?

You can escape this dilemma by insisting the age is 18, that way, if they die as atheists at age 17 or before, your loving god forgives them by fiat and lets them into heaven.  And correspondingly, the 18 year old person who dies and goes to hell seems to be less sadistic to us than if the 11 year old child died and went to hell. 

But the cost of doing this is very high:  I cannot find any Christian that puts the age of accountability as high as age 18.  Any full-time parent, teacher, or other person who routinely works with kids and teens is quite aware that kids learn right and wrong very early. How many parents punish the 8 year old boy for throwing food at his brother?

How many times does law enforcement reasonably seek to have preteen kids charged as adults when they commit crimes?.

If you leave the age of accountability where it normally resides, that is, somewhere between 7 and 10, then that logically requires that if the 11 year old girl is an atheist, rejects the gospel invitation, then dies in a car accident on the way home from church, then she went to hell forever, because she was at or past the age of accountability and had already positively rejected the gospel, leaving her no other biblical option.

So if you don't like the mental image conjured up in your mind of an 11 year old girl being tortured in the flames of hell forever, remember two things:  it's perfectly biblical, and your sense of outage is something you attribute to God putting his laws into your heart...so there's a chance that if you have any disgust toward the traditional concept of hell, this is for the same reason you have disgust toward pedophila...God has put it into your heart to hate all such things.

So when I say your god torments children in hell, you are stuck with this unless you make the age of accountability higher than any Christian in history has ever made it.  There is also biblical precedent that God tortures children in hell even when they die before the age of accountability.  Paul said the children born to unbelieving parents are "unclean",

  14 For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband; for otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy. (1 Cor. 7:14 NAU)

He'd hardly have a point unless "unclean" was something very urgent and important to correct.  What's so bad about "unclean" here?  Read the context...it is the opposite of "holy". 

By the way, Paul's Greek word for unclean is ἀκάθαρτος/akathartos, the same Greek work Jesus used to describe demons (Matthew 12:43) as well as the same Greek word Paul uses in admonishing his followers to avoid touching any "unclean" thing (2nd Corinthians 6:17).  Clearly, Paul's description of the children of unbelievers was horrific and in no wise merely ritualistic or ceremonial.

Let's just say it's obvious that I'm so ignorant of the grammatical and contextual realities of this issue that I'm really scared to mount any skeptical attack on hell.  Hell, I probably couldn't even find any Christian authors who attack the tradition concept of hell.  I tried and all I got was links to the Giant Spider Invasion dvd.

 Yet as pointed out in Christianity Today, the attack on hell is coming from within evangelical ranks (see here and here...apparently one's being genuinely born-again and sincere toward God and walking in the light doesn't necessarily motivate the Holy Spirit in the slightest to make you believe the truth, the way he apparently is easily capable of doing in the case of unrepentant idolatrous pagans (Ezra 1:1).

For a good laugh, read about Sampson (Judges 16:1). Immediately after getting a blow-job he apparently had sufficient supernatural strength to not only remove a 2 ton city gate door off its hinges without waking the guards, but he also carried that door to a higher hill about 40 miles away (Judges 16:3).

And you "expect" people to take your bible seriously?  FUCK YOU.

 A "quick shot" response:

Only because "quick shot" sells well in this age of unavoidable attention-deficit disorder.  You don't close the sale in 5 seconds, you don't close the sale at all.  Probably has something to do with the infallible work of the Holy Spirit on people's hearts.  No wonder you need all these marketing gimmicks to make Jesus sound more plausible to non-Christians...you have the most powerful force in the cosmos working to help you sell this shit.

There are a number of ways to answer this objection.

 And all of them fail.  Bring it on.

Here is just one suggestion (of three) from the Quick Shot section of our phone app:

“What do you mean by ‘loving?’

That's actually YOUR problem, Wallace.  YOU are calling God "loving", but you obviously don't mean it with the same definition the average person on the street has in mind when they say "loving", so right away, your telling them "god is loving" has already started the game of equivoation (using the same term but intending a very different meaning without explicitly saying so).  Regardless, since most people don't think mindlessly painful eternal torture could possibly be "loving", it will always remain reasonable to reject the traditional concept of hell, regardless of whatever semantic gymnastics you can employ in your effort to convince others that night really is day.

A loving God must also be just,

 No, parents can be loving without being "just". They'd be loving to force their 16 year old daughter out of the RAVE party and do nothing more.  "Loving" does not require an element of being "just" or meting out justice.  Otherwise, every Christian who knew his friend stole a candy bar and got away with it, could not be "loving" toward that friend unless he did what "justice" requires, and ratted him out, a bullshit concept in the eyes of most reasonable educated adults.

And "loving" can often be the opposite of justice, such as when the loving parent chooses to forgive their child, when they don't have to, and relax the restriction that they'd normally impose for disobedience.  What fool would say you aren't loving your kids unless you always impose discipline each and every time they disobey?  Gee, the only Christian parents that can be loving are those who run their houses like a drill Sergent?

And you are only pretending a loving god must be "just", solely because you know most of your Christian readers are classical theists, and would automatically applaud any argument that used the presuppositions of classical theism..such as here, where you invoke the  "justice" of your "all-just" god.

or His love is little more than an empty expression.

 Then you must think parents who show their love for their kids without also showing "justice" are just giving empty expression.  Sorry, but it is incoherent to pretend that "love" is empty unless always coupled with "justice".  I "love" my friends, even though I'm aware one of them stole a candy bar last week, and I remain unwilling to report it to the police.  Well gee, if I'm not willing to rat them out, then my "love" for them is nothing but empty expression?  I might be aware that to involve the cops would create more bad than good. FUCK YOU.

If everyone was offered the same experience in the afterlife, how loving (or fair) would it be for Mother Teresa and Hitler to receive the same reward?

Mother Theresa was a scam artist whose concern for the poor had more to do with publicity than with genuine love.  See here.  And a non-authoritative intro to the subject here.

It wasn't loving or fair by our own standards that the innocent Jesus should die for our sins, but that's your God's eccentric idea of love anyway.  So now your problem is that you have a lot of work ahead of you if you wish to pretend that because something doesn't "fair" to us humans, God also wouldn't think it fair.

Most of us can think of someone who should be punished: serial killers, child molesters, rapists. How loving would God be to reward these criminals rather than punish them?

 How loving is God to forgive the sins of the murderer Saul who became Paul?

 12 I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because He considered me faithful, putting me into service,
 13 even though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor. Yet I was shown mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief;
 14 and the grace of our Lord was more than abundant, with the faith and love which are found in Christ Jesus. (1 Tim. 1:12-14 NAU)

If God can be "loving" to forcefully show himself to such a murdering blasphemer as Saul, (and according to Acts 9, 22 and 26, God did so before Paul ever manifested the least bit of repentance or contrition) then your God can also be loving to show himself with equal force to other equally or more violent people who, like Saul are currently not showing the least bit of repentance or contrition. 

So because your God doesn't do that, it is reasonable to call him unloving and arbitrary.  I'm sure Hitler was loving to his own kids, but that hardly argues that therefore "loving" is a correct way to remember Hitler.

How fair would that be to their victims?

 How fair is it that your god allows to be born people whom he infallibly foreknows will end up in hell?  Do you commit the act when you infallibly foreknow the outcome will be disaster (i.e., allowing children to play with matches in a gasoline soaked bedroom, letting go of a baby as you hold it out over the edge of a cliff, etc)?  No.  Then your god is just as unloving to allow circumstances to come together to effect sending a person to hell, as is the drunk mother who knows her kids in the bathtub are playing with the plugged-in hair dryer, yet does nothing about it.

How fair is it that your god just stands by the bed watching, doing nothing, while the pedophile rapes a child to death? 

And you think appealing to the human sense of fairness is a convincing apologetic for your god?  FUCK YOU.

Can a loving God be completely unjust and still considered loving?”

No, because true love requires some degree of justice.  However, it doesn't require full justice because we are reasonable to define love as sometime being the willingness to foregoe justice.  Yes, a coherent definition of love requires a presupposition of some level of "justice", but the biblical information about your god requires a radical redefinition of normative reasonable definitions of love/justice, making it reasonable to be suspicious that it has more to do with ancient theological delusion than actual reality.

Sorry Wallace, you've done precisely nothing to intellectually obligate non-Christians to find the traditional concept of hell the least bit compatible with "love".  In fact, the desperation in your contrived arguments makes it seem that the traditional concept of hell really is contrary to any reasonable definition of love.

And as you hopefully know, we aren't required to be infallibly certain, before we can be reasonable to consider your views to be nonsense.   In our day to day experience, we often call things "unreasonable" before we obtain encyclopedic knowledge of the situation.  Jurors are reasonable to take less then 3 days to reach a verdict, we don't require them to just sit on the fence for 80,000 years merely because it always remains possible that they will put an innocent woman in jail. 

You yourself would have to agree, Wallace...with your "quick-shot" answers wherein you expect your readers to believe you can successfully adjudicate the traditional concept of hell in your favor in less than 5 minutes.

Cold Case Christianity: Is God Real? God is the Best Explanation for Objective Moral Laws

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

Cold Case Christianity:

Is God Real? God is the Best Explanation for Objective Moral Laws         

Posted: 20 Feb 2019 01:56 AM PST

We live in a world populated with self-evident, objective, transcendent moral laws.

 Thus indicating you aren't trying to convince atheists or skeptics, only bible-believing Christians.  Should you ever feel up to the challenge, grow a pair of balls and actually have a debate with an informed atheist the way Turek does.  Something tells me you are too afraid to do this.  Why threaten your fan base you've worked so hard to get?

“It’s never OK to torture babies for fun”

But the burden is on YOU to show that this is an objective moral.  You are assuming, without argument, that because most people agree this is morally wrong behavior, then presto, it must be objectively wrong. Not so.  You are assuming without proof that whatever morals are agreed to by "most people" are therefore representative of transcendent objective moral standards.  But it could just as easily be that most people think torturing babies for fun is wrong, for much the same reason that gorillas and other higher mammals don't go around torturing their own babies for fun.  It's mere natural instinct to survive.  The question of why we have that instinct goes beyond the moral question and gets into the muck of "intelligent design".

And regardless, your own bible shows God requiring his followers to torture kids (when the bible says you must hit your child with a "rod" its authors probably wouldn't think that leaving bruises and lacerations on the child's body was too much, see Pro. 20:30, and remember that many proverbs are strung together without concern for theme or context, so you cannot automatically assume v. 30 must be interpreted in a way harmonious with the "immediate context".

How torturous do you suppose it is for the child who watches as strangers over run their village killing everything in sight?  How long can a child fend off the man trying to murder it?  How much torture does that child endure in those horrific moments?  Where else could the Canaanites go after be chased out of the promised land, except to barren places already occupied by slave traders, where survival required criminal acts, or selling kids into slavery, or prostitution?

or (my new favorite from a blog reader) “It’s never OK to torture non-believers just because you don’t like them?” are two examples of such transcendent laws. How do we account for laws such as these?

 The better question would be to avoid begging the question of transcendence and ask instead "why do most people think it immoral to torture babies?" or "why has human history exhibited a pattern of disapproving of baby-torture?" 

Of course, I'd disagree that humans have agreed throughout history that baby torture is immoral.  That Israel found some babies expendable is clear (Numbers 31:17, 1st Sam. 15:2-3), and as already pointed out, if all Israel was doing was "dispossessing" the Canaanites, they were chasing them off the promised land and thus into dangerous barren territory where crime or worse would be the only way a family could stay alive.

We are mammals, and we instinctively avoid doing things that inhibit the survival of our young.  Furthermore, in our mammalian minds, any "benefits" we could get from torturing babies would be outweighed by the cost of inhibiting survival.  The fact is most mammals simply lack a desire to torture babies just like they lack a desire to torture forgotten invisible dust particles. What fool would pretend this cannot be accounted for except by positing space aliens controlling our minds with their beam-weapons?  How's that any different than your invisible god who can read minds?

Their existence points to a reasonable inference: the existence of a Transcendent Moral Law Giver.

Not if you define that TMLG as spaceless, timeless, immaterial, invisible, other-dimensional, and the other mantra that Turek repeats ad nauseum to his mostly Christian audiences.  That's nothing more than an incoherent definition which we are reasonable to dismiss.   The only theory you have, to justify such nonsense talk, (i.e., the big bang) is a theory that is manifestly not what the originally intended addressees of Genesis 1-2 would have thought when reading the creation account.   Try again.

But there are other alternatives typically offered by those who reject the existence of such a Being. Is God real? The insufficiency of the alternative explanations strengthens the argument for the existence of God:    

    Are Objective, Transcendent Moral Laws A Product of Genetic Evolution?

When you ask a loaded question like that, no.  If a moral was objective and transcendent, then no, mere genetic evolution would not create it.  Evolution cannot create something whose nature extends beyond the physical.

    As one friendly skeptic said recently, “We share 99.999% of our physical traits with our fellow humans . . . so why would our mental traits not be similarly shared?” Are moral truths simply part of our genetic coding?

 Yes, that's why newborn babies don't need to be taught to breastfeed.  Your theory that "god puts his laws into our hearts" is bullshit anyway, as testified to by billions of children, who obviously don't already have such morality, who only acquire it by learning from their mammalian caregivers.

There are good reasons to reject such an explanation. When someone claims self-evident moral truths are simply a matter of our genetic evolution, they are assuming the same evolutionary pathway for every people group. What are we to make of cultures that behave in a manner different than our own?

 It's called cultural conditioning.  We all seek after food, water, shelter and companionship, we just tend to go about it in different ways in different periods of history.

How can we justly adjudicate between the myriad of people groups, all of whom have their own genetic evolutionary pathway? This form of emboldened relativism is powerless to judge any form of behavior, good or bad.

 No, you are assuming that if all morals are relative, that we have no "right" to judge others.  That's total bullshit.  One "relative" moral instinct we have is to criticize others who do things differently than we do.  Our "right" comes from our innate desire to criticize outsiders.  Just like there is no "right" for one junkyard dog to bite another, nevertheless, they still do.  It's purely instinctive, as nuanced by a person's environmental conditioning.

There is no objective moral truth governing the carnivores chasing the herbivores on earth, but that hardly means we accuse them of being "inconsistent" for foisting their morals on each other.  It's just what creatures of instinct do when they have different ideas about survival, yet have to live together.

In fact, how can we judge any behavior if it is so connected to our genetic nature?

 The same way one junkyard dog decides to attack another junkyard dog.  If we feel uncomfortable with another person being in what we consider our personal space, we react.  We aren't reacting merely because we first figured out how to prove that our moral view was more "objective" than theirs, we simply "react".

We don’t blame people for being brunettes or having blue eyes; if our genes are the cause of our moral understanding, what right do we have to blame people when they simply express genetic moral wiring different from our own?

Because we all innately resist the attempts of others to harm the ability of ourselves and our favored groups from surviving and thriving.  Instinct. And since I deny freewill, yes, I think society is wrong to pretend that a criminal had a "choice" or ability to resist the temptation to do a crime.  Why some boys in a group shy away from stealing while the others go through with the plan, has to do with the boys having very different genetic predispositions and environmental conditioning.  $50 says in the group of 5 boys playing to steal from a store, the one who will actually not puss out, but go through with it, will be the kid whose genetics make him more aggressive, and/or the kid who is lacking any serious discipline at home.

Perhaps most importantly, even if my skeptical friend is right and commonly accepted moral truths are merely a product of our genetic encoding, we still must account for the source of this encoding. 

No, that gets into the question of intelligent design, which doesn't get you off the hook.  Your attept to prove that some morals can only be accounted for by a transcendent moral lawgiver, has failed.  You cannot correct that problem by simply insisting on intelligent design.  That's called moving the goal-posts.  The "moral argument" for God fails.  The "intelligent design" argument for God is another matter.

DNA is information rich. As Stephen C. Myers observes in Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, there isn’t a single example in the history of the universe in which information has come from anything other than an intelligent source. If our genetic code contains information about moral truth, we still must ask the foundational question, what intelligent source provided this code? All codes require encoders.

 Meyers is debunked here.

But I don't really care if a "god" exists, the NT provides evidence that makes it more likely Jesus stayed dead, so given that Christianity is a failure, whatever 'god' exists, is nothing to worry about. 

And it wouldn't matter if Jesus did rise from the dead, the idea that God will send to hell all those who fail to live up to whatever Christian light they had, is total bullshit and is denied by enough liberal Christian scholars  to justify the non-religious person in turning away from such an exercise in futility as "What does the New Testament teach?"  You people have been asking that for 2,000 years, you couldn't agree with each other in the lifetime of Jesus, the lifetime of Paul, by the second century many sects of Christianity were competing as "the" truth and calling each other "heretic", and the only thing Christianity did for the next 2,000 years was get more splintered and more complex.

    Are Objective, Transcendent Moral Truths a Matter of Cultural Agreement?

When you ask the question in loaded form like that, the answer is obviously "no".  Cultural Agreement cannot produce some invisible moral law that "transcends" humanity itself.

    If societies are the source of objective moral truths, what are we to do when two cultures disagree about these truths?

You are assuming there is a higher moral law to answer that in an objective way, and there isn't.  When we find other cultures with morals opposed to ours, then whether we attack or leave them alone is largely conditioned on the current generation's genetic predispositions and their environmental conditioning. Once again, there's no higher moral "truth" to govern when two dogs choose to fight, so its pretty stupid to ask what moral law governs when you confront another person whose morals are opposite to our own.  But that fact that human history has exhibited a tendency to war or to just stay away from those of differing persuasion makes a good case that there really are no higher moral truths to it, and what we "should" do goes no deeper than what we feel like we should do at the moment.

How do we adjudicate between two competing views of a particular moral claim?

By using our relative morals. When we all gasp about the criminal who was caught torturing children, this shows nothing more than that a bunch of people have formed a city, state or nation and they all pretty much have the same moral disgust for hurting kids.  While we may often act like putting such people in jail aspires to some higher moral law, this is not true, such act only aspires to the moral law that a bunch of mammals agree on.

If objective moral truths are simply a matter of “shared morality”, the societal majority rules; “might makes right”.

 Which is precisely what we have in our democratic "Christian" nation.  You either obey the majority's morals, or they will send their strongest representatives after you to put you in jail even if you don't wanna go.

In a world like this, anyone (or any group) holding the minority position in a particular moral argument is, by definition, immoral.

Yes.   A minority of men in America approve of homosexuality and/or pedophilia. Not really strange that they are automatically accounted "immoral" by the majority.

In fact, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson made this clear in his early career as a prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials following World War II. When the German soldiers who committed atrocities in the Jewish prison camps were brought to trial to face criminal charges, the issue of moral relativity was tested directly. The lawyers for the German officers argued that these men should not be judged for actions that were actually morally acceptable in the nation of Germany at the time of the war.

Those lawyers were just asking for consistency. 

They argued their supervisors and culture encouraged this behavior; in fact, to do otherwise would defy the culture and ideology in which they lived. In their moral environment, this behavior was part of the “shared morality”. Jackson argued against such a view of moral relativism and said, “There is a law above the law.”

 Jackson was wrong if he meant there was a moral law transcending humanity.  The fact is that before WW2, not everybody in the world agreed that they should go involve themselves in the affairs of other countries.   But then that's why they call it "war".  Us mammals tried but could not achieve peace, so we just fought it out.

    Are Objective, Transcendent Moral Truths a Consequence of “Human Flourishing”?

Not when you ask the question in that loaded way.  Once again, if the moral truth "transcends" humanity, than humanity's flourishing obviously did not create said law. 

    Sam Harris (author of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values), argues we can establish the moral value of any particular action by simply evaluating its impact on human well-being (something Harris typically refers to as “human flourishing”).

 And Harris was wrong on the point, as are most moral objectivist atheists, since he fails to provide an objective definition of human well-being.  And indeed he cannot.

Harris likens the establishment of such truths to a game of chess. In any particular game, each player must decide how to move based on the resulting effect. If you are trying to win the game, some moves are “good” and some moves are “bad”; some will lead you to victory and some will lead you to defeat. “Good” and “bad” then, are evaluated based on whether or not they accomplish the goal of winning the game. Harris redefines “good” (in the context of human beings) as whatever supports or encourages the well-being of conscious creatures; if an action increases human well-being (human “flourishing”) it is “good”, if it decreases well-being, it is “bad”. What, however, do we mean when we talk about “flourishing”?

Good question, which is why I say atheist moral objectivists are just being silly.  If humanity is the highest form of life, then it us US, and nobody and nothing else, that decides whether a given act constitute moral goodness or moral badness. 

It’s one thing to evaluate a behavior in terms of its impact on survival, and if we are honest with one another, this is really what drives Natural Selection. But Harris recognizes survival, as a singular goal, can lead to all kinds of morally condemnable misbehavior.

 Condemnable only because of Harris's subjective and relative morals that he brings to the moral investigation table.  Harris might think the way the Nazis chose to 'survive' in WW2 is condemnable, but his basis for such criticism cannot be anything greater than his naturalistic relative morals.

Harris suggests the goal is something more; the goal is “flourishing”. Human flourishing comprises a particular quality of life; one in which we honor the rights of others and seek a certain kind of character in order to become a particular kind of human group that has maximized its potential.

That sounds nice, but doesn't solve the problem:  "Should" we allow the Taliban to "flourish"?  If not, then apparently "flourishing" is not a sufficient criteria for morality.

See the problem here? Harris has already imported moral values into his model, even as he seeks to explain where these values come from in the first place. One can hardly define the “maximization” of human wellbeing without asserting a number of moral values. What, beyond mere survival, achieves our “maximization” as humans?

Good question, I don't think Harris can answer it.  Dan Barker tried to answer it with "pain" by saying we naturally recoil from pain, which is true enough, but he draws back somewhat by acknowledging that some pain is required to achieve good, such as the doctor who sets the broken bone, or cutting off one's hand that is stuck between two huge rocks so that one can survive.

The minute we move from mere survival to a particular kind of “worthy” survival, we have to employ moral principles and ideas.

Correct.

Concepts of sacrifice, nobility and honor must be assumed foundationally, but these are not morally neutral notions. Human “flourishing” assumes a number of virtues and priorities (depending on who is defining it), and these values and characteristics precede the enterprise Harris seeks to describe. Harris cannot articulate the formation of moral truths without first assuming some of these truths to establish his definition of “flourishing”. He’s borrowing pre-existent, objective moral notions about worth, value and purpose, while holding a worldview that argues against any pre-existing moral notions.

Good for you.  You refuted Harris.  But you didn't refute me.  I've based humanity's morality in each human's mammalian instinct for individual and group survival, as flavored by genetic predispositions and environmental conditioning.  These naturalistic explanations account for all known moral issues.

    Try as we might, the alternative explanations for objective, transcendent moral truths are desperately insufficient.

Dream on.

    Try as we might, the alternative explanations for objective, transcendent moral truths are desperately insufficient. The moral law transcends all of us, regardless of location on the planet or time in history.

And there you go again, proving you aren't talking to skeptics but only to Christians just looking for anybody that can professionally articulate what they already believe.  Try having a live debate with an informed atheist, then take a poll of your fan base and see how many think you survived.

Or....continue running away from challenges and just tell yourself that periodically preaching to the choir must be something inspired by God because it happens to boost book sales.