After her he took Maacah the daughter of Absalom, who bore him Abijah, Attai, Ziza, and Shelomith.

at 07/01/09 9:50PM
Greetings, everyone.

Peace, mercy, and grace be with you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I suppose this is the obligatory "Pleonast is all new and different" post.

I knew what was coming thanks to Betanast. On the whole, things are decent.

I'm not quite happy with the additional hoops to jump through to approve a group add request, and if I visit a new blog, return to my blog, and reload, it still shows up as if it is new.

It's aesthetically more pleasing. New features are nice. Have to get used to the new hex concept.

Some good, some not so good. Such is life, right? :D

Movie watching update.

So we watched Bill Maher's Religulous last evening. Knowing Maher, I knew what to expect. He is rather arrogant and quite the know-it-all, and he paraded that in full force.

The movie involves Maher speaking with various representatives of various religions and asking them why they believed what they believed, and why he should believe it. He would bring up various challenges and arguments against the people.

His arguments were quite easily refutable. He would make claims based on what scholars say about the Bible, which is easily challenged: on what basis do scholars have to make their arguments? It is evident that he believes that science provides all answers and that everything should be judged by scientific standards, and yet few challenged him on those presuppositions. He would enshrine doubt as the way to go, but no one ever challenged him to, well, doubt his doubts. If it didn't make sense to Maher, it didn't make sense-- and I did not hear anyone ask him to consider his "standard."

Maher's behavior was relatively unsurprising. What was truly disheartening was the general inability to refute his arguments. Most of his arguments would be answerable with a quick trip to almost any book on apologetics. Granted, some of his questions would take a bit higher level of theology to answer, but in the end, the "documentary" succeeds at making religion and religionists look bad. And as much as one may want to protest Maher and his bias, the difficulty is that the religionists provide plenty of legitimate fodder for him and his arguments.

How well would you do if he came up to you and asked:

1. How can you believe in the Virgin Birth? Why would only two of the Gospel writers mention the event?
2. How can God be Three in One?
3. How can you trust the Bible when it was written by people who never met Jesus?
4. Why did God allow evil to exist?
5. Couldn't God have just made everything about Him very evident to everyone?

As it is written,

But sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord: being ready always to give answer to every man that asketh you a reason concerning the hope that is in you, yet with meekness and fear (1 Peter 3:15).

It may not be Maher, but it may be someone else. And if we cannot provide an answer, how well will that reflect on our Lord?

May the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirits.

ELDV
  • tom_bombadil
    Maher's arguments manage to offend both my scientific and religious standards. From science, it is generally assumed that only the natural should be considered, yet even science demands that the supernatural has occurred. Conservation laws tell us that something cannot come from nothing, yet science claims that once there was nothing, and now there is the observable universe. Science agrees that the beginning of the universe cannot be accounted for by nature. The only other possible explanations are supernatural, so the process of elimination forces an honest scientist to admit the certainty that at least one supernatural event has occurred. If it has occurred, then the supernatural is a viable way to explain how things such as the virgin birth could have occurred.

    Guys like this make it look like science proves what they falsely call knowledge, which it does not. They make religion look like it is based on dumb, blind, arbitrary belief, which it is not.
    by tom_bombadil at 07/01/09 10:08PM
  • curlie
    Sadly, academia (among other segments of the world's population) is FULL of Bill Mahers.
    by curlie at 07/01/09 10:29PM
  • deusvitae
    Granted, according to the proper use of Baconian scientific methodology, even the "scientific" arguments of Maher fail. The problem is, as Sarah indicates, that a significant and vocal section of modern science has freely entered into territory to which it has no right and makes philosophical and ontological claims it cannot substantiate or even begin to substantiate.

    If there is a "war" going on between religion and science, it's the latter group that's been fueling it.
    by deusvitae at 07/01/09 10:50PM
  • mer
    Good post and great questions for us to consider. I recommend John Lennox's book God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, in which he addresses many issues of the naturalist/materialist worldview.
    by mer at 07/01/09 11:06PM
  • preacherdavetx
    I'm with you on the fact that many could not answer coherently, but I also keep in mind who is editing the thing. I wonder how honest they were in editing.
    by preacherdavetx at 07/02/09 12:49AM
  • 71lespaulcustom
    ^^ Oooh! Good point!
    by 71lespaulcustom at 07/02/09 1:37PM