Nabeel Qureshi is great; he is a great resource for critiquing Islam, Muhammad, the Qu’ran and the Hadith. He is an ex-Muslim who converted to Christianity and now runs and MA course at Biola and runs his own ministry. His knowledge of Islam is super and his videos have certainly helped me in my exegesis and talks on Islam.
Tag Old Testament
Apologist Matthew Flannagan has criticised my points made on the recent post “Inter-Testamental Moral Relativism” which can also be expressed as “Covenantal Moral Relativism” as Justin Schieber has stated it. In this post I declared that the moral obligations being different between the Old Testament (OT) and the New Testament (NT) amounted to moral relativism (MR). Here is what Flannagan had to say:
Theists hate moral relativism. They often accuse atheists and secularists of having it. For them, only the pseudo-moral absolutism of…
Another little piece from my friend Julian Haydon. This one succinctly documents the issue that God seems to have entirely…
I have spoken about Joseph of Arimathea before, in the videos linked below. Just reading a chapter by Robert M. Price in The End of Christianity, I came across this very simple aspect which shows, to me at any rate, that Matthew’s sole job seemed to be to contrive as many random prophecy fulfilments from the Old Testament as humanly possible.
It’s been known since the 19th century that there are striking parallels between the Ark story contained in the Bible and a narrative episode included in the Mesopotamian story of the Epic of King Gilgamesh. In Gilgamesh, a hero Utnapishti is tasked with saving both human and animal life from a destructive flood (for which somewhat surprisingly, no reason is given) by the god Ea. Like Noah, Utnapishti builds a boat, fills it with animals, and finds himself lodged on the top of a mountain. What’s more, just like Noah, Utnapishti sends out birds on three test flights to establish that the flood waters were receding:
Genius
Jayman, occasional Christian commenter here has replied to my post, The Problem with Yahweh #2. That itself was a second part…
My last post in this series looked at the idea that Yahweh, as the parochial Jewish God of a particular section of the Middle East in time, bears no resemblance to the God that Christians believe in, and is supposedly that exact same God. The Janus-styled god who appears to flip personality, characteristics and general existence at the turn of the New Testament, is fundamentally different from the present-day Christian God. We are all atheists on this god, except Christians don’t seem to realise it.
I am writing a post in reaction to something about which I was talking with my Christian friend (let’s call him Colin). We were talking about homosexuality and his approach to it given his Christian background. Some points were interesting and some I fundamentally disagreed with. Here are his views:
As according to the Bible, homosexuality is wrong.
This morality is grounded in God.
He is not homophobic and detests that label as it automatically halts any further informed discussion.
People can have genetic or environmental variables which help to influence a persons likelihood to homosexuality.
However, to commit to a homosexual act is an act of free will, and thus falls within the moral sphere.
As a result, it is not necessarily the disposition of being homosexual which is wrong, but the decision to act upon it.
He has no ‘problem’ with homosexuals and has / has had homosexual friends.
Hopefully I am not building up a straw man of his position, but it does demand some serious unpicking.
Many people believe ridiculous things. Most of the time, we eventually shuffle off such beliefs. But some remain. In the case of Christianity, this is the belief in Yahweh. I don’t mean to be overly rhetorical, but the belief in Yahweh is patently ridiculous, much more so than the belief in God.
A Tel Aviv University Press Release has built on work hinted at in Israel Finkelstein’s The Bible Unearthed which claimed that camels were not domesticated in the Ancient Near East to long after they are claimed to be existent and members of a goodly number of biblical stories. In other words, these anachronisms strongly suggest that the claims of the Bible are made up. Here is the story:
Here are some notes I made from Tim Callahan’s “The Secret origin of the Bible” some 5 years ago. Excuse the note form and any spelling / syntax errors. It’s still interesting reading and shows how clearly the account is mythological. Samson makes no sense as a stand alone tale, and has no allegorical or symbolic meaning at all, begging the question as to why it’s in the bible at all, if not a story lifted from a nearby culture and adopted to Yahweh.
Yup, you heard it here. The plagues. God getting involved right up to his neck in magic stuff. People and animals dying all over the shop. Frogs; gnats; darkness; rivers of blood; boils; hail; firstborns of Egyptian families and animals dying. AND THEN the army getting destroyed by a parted sea coming down on their heads.
I have been kindly asked to give a talk to the Dorset Humanists next month, They seemed to enjoy my last few talks so much as to want me to create a talk to deliver. I am gratefully obliging.
I will be looking at arguments for and against God, starting off with the wide deistic arguments from philosophy, and then narrowing down to particular arguments concerning the historicity and probability of the Judeo-Christian God. Here is something I am working on with regards to the ridiculousness of the Exodus account.
Last week, I introduced you to John W. Loftus and Randal Rauser’s new debate-style book, God or Godless? I am now going to furnish you with a review. I commend Baker Books for sending me a review copy.
I was recently sent a link to Thomas L. McDonald’s piece “The Origin of Man, Original Sin, and Why It’s…
WARNING. Watch this video will disturb you. It is horrific. But I ask that you do so, Christian, Muslim, atheist or other. You will never watch it again, and it will scar you. But remember, this activity was divinely decreed by an all-loving God. Yes, all-loving. And for what? For all of the actions below.
Having seen theist after theist squirm and perform mental gymnastics in order to make sense of the countenancing of slavery within the Bible, it’s about time Nonstampcollector produced a knockdown video on this subject.
Psalm 137 is one of the most famous Psalms, it has been set to music by many composers (you have most likely heard the famous interpretation by Boney M), but virtually always, the last verse is omitted. Why is that? Well, let´s look at the Psalm: