This blog is all about bringing information to your ears (and to your mind) that you might never have heard (or understood) before.
If you ever wondered "What is the Bible all about, anyway?", "What's the big deal over it?", or "How can any person dedicate themselves to a religion?" then you will have all those basic questions answered.
Also on this page will be certain perspectives on a few serious problems in the world that people rarely see or get to understand.
(-news2urears)
All your children (you're married/with kids in this scenario) – who you actually like – and your spouse – who's not too bad either – were shot dead in your living room.
As you open the door you see the guy starting to cut up their bodies. Your jaw and grocery bags hit the floor and police rush in from behind you to arrest the murderer.
As they're exiting the room you say "Wait!" and have them uncuff the criminal, cuff you, and bring you to prison in the back of the cop car. Then you sit in the electric chair and are waiting to be shocked to death.
P.S. A little information is left in the public Google Doc that I didn't carry over into this blog. (This blog is an expansion of what I typed there.) It includes stuff on Manuscript Veracity and a hand-full of really good links (articles and podcasts).
The field of Textual Criticism helps get to the
original writings and the original claims of the writers.
P.P.S. This should be my final blog post. Dig in to all the linked and embedded information. Enjoy!
The conclusion of all my studying:
The only worldviews that I see as tenable are the Biblical one and Deism.
In my mind, the only way Deism could make sense is if its god is free of moral attributes (is neither good or bad) and just fabricated feelings of morality as a novelty to install in humankind. In that case, although you might not prefer murder to happen you can't logically say it's bad or wrong for someone to do it. You can't if there's no absolute standard.*
How can you account for the reasonability of any of YOUR moral pronouncements without an objective standard? With moral relativity there can only be preferences – no real right & no real wrong. But you know that’s not right. There are moral absolutes. What is their source?
In the Biblical worldview, our sense of morality comes from God. That's the origin. "Being in God's image" means we naturally have some of God's character (although it's twisted by sin). And that would be why we have court systems.
As humans we make moral pronouncements and place value on humanity and the idea of non-violence. Although societies do just carry things on, where did all of these values begin in the first place? The God presented by the Bible (or the God who presents Itself to people nowadays primarily through the Bible) would say that the source of all our different individual and imperfect moralities is a real objective and absolute standard. We all just inherently recognize and then borrow from that ultimate standard – altering it to fit ourselves. Making deviations in certain points. If you're still siding with moral relativity, why is it that you criticize anything? We've got consciences. And Justice can't be just an illusion, right?
As an aside, Genesis 1-11 doesn't weaken the tenability of the Biblical worldview. In my mind, that alone does not shatter everything with a single, crushing blow. Here's why. There are basically two groups of people who say they've been actually changed by the gospel: those who believe those first few chapters are figuratively/spiritually true and those who believe it is literally/historically true – the former group saying that most people aren't reading it the way the author intended (more on that throughout this episode of Stand to Reason), and the latter group saying that many scientists are getting the science wrong. Other theories exist in-between those two. (Have all the scientific questions been answered? Here are John MacArthur and Stephen Meyer on unanswered questions.)
And regarding miracles: wouldn't the Power that created matter and organized all life and existence be able to interfere with the natural order of things?
Regardless of your amount or lack of study, the root cause of your objections to the Bible might be that you don't want moral accountability (being held responsible for certain things you've done). An emotional reaction and not an intellectual argument.
Another edit/addition:
Deism and Theism are the only tenable options, as long as it's a logical form of it. Just listen to some of Dr. Ravi Zacharias' lectures. :)
My paraphrase: "No matter how much you section down physical reality, you find a quantity that doesn't account for its own origin." No object is self-existent. Its cause is OUTSIDE of itself. (See the Kalam Cosmological Argument.) There's one other argument I've seen that seems to reveal a high probability of a Creator (which shows that faith in a deity may be entirely reasonable and not a totally blind step): There can't be an infinite regression of time or else we would have never reached this current moment right now. So time had a beginning.
To illustrate: If you have an infinite number of black dominoes before a white domino – each falling, one after the other – the white one will never fall.And for there to be something existing in time there had to be a First Cause that's outside the bounds, or "dimension," of time.
And if something timeless can't be bounded by the spacial restrictions we live with, this first cause has to be immaterial and omnipresent. In addition to all this, some people put forward good arguments that DNA must have its origin in intelligence – not an unguided process.
"Well then who created God?" From a human perspective, everything MUST have a beginning. That's just logical to us since we have to deal with causes, effects, and time everyday. But for there to be any effect (time, matter, the universe) there had to be a cause. One that's timeless (eternal) and self-existent without being an effect of something, itself.
One might say, "The universe happened by chance."
But let me show ya somethin':
Flip a coin and see the result. Is it heads or tails? Okay.
What was the chance that it came out the way it did?
50%
Here's a question: How much influence did chance have on the outcome of the coin toss? Read that again. Chance didn't exert any power on the coin. Chance isn't a force. It doesn't DO things.
Rather, the flick of a thumb and physics cause the result. The proper definition of the word "chance" is just simply the probability of an effect occurring.
"Chance is only our ignorance of real causes."
— David Hume
If you've never studied a book of the Bible such as Romans or Hebrews, or studied the smallest bit of systematic-theology, then you probably have a preconceived notion of Christianity.* A version of it in your mind which you are either rejecting or just aren't that fond of. If that describes you, then the interesting thing is that the God of the Bible also rejects it. God's right along with you on that one. Learn what the real thing is.**
Watch a portrayal of Jesus teaching against hypocrisy: Jewish Humor
So Christianity-rejecters are right when they point out that hypocrisy is a sin. But if you feel like you're superior to a hypocrite (whether they are a real christian or not), aren't you being self-righteous?
And here's an interesting question: Would you take a bullet for a self-righteous person?
In the Bible, imputation is the opposite of self-righteousness. Once someone's really a Christian they will live a life of obedience and desire to sin less. But they're not doing that do look good to people or to God; God gets all the credit for saving them. (See the second footnote to get what that means.)
* It's really easy to slide into that – even for people who grow up in religious environments for years (that was me, kind of). And it's especially easy to stay in that mindset if you've seen crazy things like this and this on TV.
