Gospel Disproof #44: The Bride of Christ and her abusive husband

[Here’s an excerpt from this week’s On Guard post at Evangelical Realism. The post is about William Lane Craig’s defense of Hell, but this one part makes a nice Gospel Disproof all by itself. I’ve added an introductory paragraph at the beginning, but the rest is from ER.]

One of the big inconsistencies in the Christian Gospel is the whole idea of a “loving” God sending His own children to Hell for the trivial offense of failing to believe He exists—as though He Himself weren’t provoking this unbelief by His consistent and universal failure to show up in real life! It’s an issue that a lot of Christians struggle with even among themselves, and more than a few have become liberals or even agnostics because of the intractable nature of the problem. And in many cases, those who try to defend Hell, like Craig, end up making a bad situation even worse.

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Oo, this is fun

Now this was actually fun, you guys should try it:

  1. Go to www.kiva.org.
  2. Pick a business or family that’s looking for a small loan in a high-poverty and/or underbanked area.
  3. Make a contribution of $25 or more.

What’s fun is that this is loan, not a donation, so the money comes back again. If you keep adding to your account, you can keep making larger and larger loans, and your money is going to promote struggling economies, and help reduce poverty. Plus check out the second-place team–the screen shot’s below the fold.

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Kickstarter for science

Crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter have proven popular for groups and individuals looking to get a consumer product, movie, music or video game project off the ground. Now a group of researchers and scientists is adopting a similar crowd-funding model to raise money for scientific research projects. The Microryza website, which launched this week, lets the public get behind research they care about and maybe help it get out of the lab.

via gizmag.com.

Oh, Hell.

Over at Evangelical Realism, this week’s post is all about William Lane Craig’s attempt to defend “The Hell with Christianity.” I think he ends up making a rather convincing argument for God being a purely imaginary deity, but see what you think, if you’re interested.

Whooping cough rising among unvaccinated babies

Via Slashdot:

In its fortnightly Communicable Disease newsletter (PDF), Oregon Public Health officials note increasing cases of pertussis (whooping cough) in infants, with 146 hospitalizations noted in the 2 year period ending March 2011, and at least 4 deaths since 2003. Most cases are attributed to lack of vaccination, with 86% of those due to parents declining the vaccine. ‘Most of our cases are occurring in under- or unvaccinated children, so getting these kids vaccinated seems to the most obvious approach to reducing illness. In principle… pertussis could be eradicated; but we have a long way to go.

Ignorance kills.

Just a few weeks ago

Thought it might be fun to look at what Rick Santorum was saying just a few weeks ago.

“What won’t they resort to try to bully their way through this race?” Santorum asked following a campaign rally at Harvest Graphics, 14625 W. 100th St. in Lenexa. “If the governor Romney thinks he is now ordained by God to win, let’s just have it out.” …

“I’m going to stay in the race because we’re doing really well,” Santorum told reporters following a campaign rally before 200 to 300 supporters on the day after Super Tuesday. “We’re winning states, and where we’re not winning, we’re finishing second, by and large.”

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Preach the controversy

Chalk up another win for the “Preach the Controversy” gambit injecting creationism into public schools. The governor of Tennessee has decided not to sign the bill, and not to veto it either. This will allow the bill to become law without necessarily making the governor personally accountable for its contents—which are pretty bad.

In any case, the legislators want to do what they can to enable science teachers to teach the controversy. To that end, they’re basically attempting to block any educational authority—school board, principal, the state board of education—from punishing a teacher for covering the “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories.”

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Mesopotamian Park

This is just idle speculation, mind you, but I was wondering the other day about time and tradition. There’s two kinds of tradition, or at least two ends of the spectrum. At the one end you have what you might call the reasonable ideas, the principles and conclusions you arrive at by looking at how things are and thinking about them and then, above all, trying them out to see how well they really work, and adjusting them as necessary to make them work better. These ideas get their strength from their adaptability and increasing accuracy over time.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the principles and conclusions that arise, not out of a search for real-world answers and understanding, just Because I Said So—ideas that get passed from one generation to the next not because they describe how the world really is, but because I’m The Father, That’s Why. These ideas get their strength from authority and constancy.

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Anything you say can and will be used

Via Wired comes word of a top secret government project with very disturbing implications.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks… It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

Note that this is not just for intercepting information with the authorization of a search warrant. This project will intercept, store, and analyze “complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter'” in general. You and me, in other words. Total government surveillance of private citizens.

Killed by Congress? Yeah, right.

A top ten list

Happy Easter everybody—I hope you all have prepared your colored eggs for Astarte, the pagan fertility goddess, and have filled your house with other fertility symbols like rabbits and such. Remember, Astarte is the reason for the season (and even gave it her name, slightly misspelled).

Oh yeah, and some guy died too. I suppose we ought to remember him. So here, by way of holiday celebration, I present the Top Ten Ways the Bible Tells Us Jesus Did Not Literally Rise From The Dead.

10.
If Jesus had been literally and physically raised from the dead, the tomb would not be empty—there would have been a living Jesus in it.
9.
If Mary had seen an angel fly down from heaven, roll away the stone, and tell her that Jesus had been raised from the dead (Matt 28:1-5), she would not have run to the disciples weeping over the missing corpse (John 20:1-2).
8.
If Jesus had been physically raised in a physical body, he would not spontaneously appear and disappear and change his shape to fool the disciples (Luke 24:28-36) and would not have needed to “prove” that he was not a spirit (Luke 24:36-43) by showing him his hands and feet and by eating their food—which angels and the pre-incarnate Jehovah can also do, even though they are supposedly spirits (Gen. 18:1-11).
7.
If Jesus had been physically raised from the dead, still bearing the wounds from his beatings, his crown of thorns, his crucifixion, and the spear thrust in his side, people would have noticed him walking to the room where his disciples were hiding, and he would not have been able to enter the room while the door was shut and/or locked (John 20:19, 26).
6.
The Sanhedrin would not have put a guard on the tomb because they had no reason to expect Jesus to rise from the dead (Matt. 27:62-65, cf John 2:19-21 and John 20:9—even the disciples were surprised!).
5.
If the priests found out Jesus had risen from the dead, they would have worried about Jesus, not about the empty tomb (Matt. 28:11-15).
4.
If Jesus had risen from the dead, the priests would have plotted to kill him again (John 12:9-11) instead of plotting to tell lies about the tomb.
3.
If the priests were going to bribe the guards to tell a lie, they would not have picked an obvious falsehood like “The disciples stole the body while we slept.” (Matt. 28:11-15.) If they were asleep, how would they know? Duh!
2.
If Jesus had literally and physically been raised from the dead, Paul would not have insisted that the body that was raised was a spiritual body rather than the body that was buried, and would not have expanded on this claim by insisting that the “last Adam” (i.e. Jesus) “became a life-giving Spirit” (I Cor. 15: 42-48).

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