Author: Papa Giorgio

“Judge Not” | Abusing Matthew 7

Published by Papa Giorgio

So, I realized because of the below comment on my RUMBLE that I do not have a post dedicated to answering the charge that one “should not judge…”, often in response to critiquing cultural norms. So this comment was on my RUMBLE video titled: “You are Homophobic if You Mention How Badly LGBT People Are Treated in Gaza” — here is the comment:

I will be asking some questions when the time comes, but, for now? I am filling an apologetic pothole in my posts. So here is a short and sweet answer that stands on its own… so you could quit there. Anything after that are merely other answers from apologists that broaden the possible responses for the researcher.

Do not judge. Judging others comes far too easy for most, but in Matthew 7, what does Jesus mean when he says Judge not least ye be judged? Are we to judge not, or Judge righteously? What’s the difference? What does the Bible say about judging people? In this video Pastor Nelson with Bible Munch explains what the Bible says about Judging others to answer the questions, is judging a sin, and what does the Bible mean that we are not to judge others?

Firstly, the statement “you are not to judge” is a judgement. What do I mean? Here are a few examples of this in conversation via Frank Beckwith and Greg Koukl:

You Shouldn’t Force Your Morality On Me!

FIRST PERSON: “You shouldn’t force your morality on me.”

SECOND PERSON: “Why not?”

FIRST PERSON: “Because I don’t believe in forcing morality.”

SECOND PERSON: “If you don’t believe in it, then by all means, don’t do it. Especially don’t force that moral view of yours on me.”

FIRST PERSON: “You shouldn’t push your morality on me.”

SECOND PERSON: “I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that statement. Do you mean I have no right to an opinion?”

FIRST PERSON: “You have a right to you’re opinion, but you have no right to force it on anyone.”

SECOND PERSON: “Is that your opinion?”

FIRST PERSON: “Yes.”

SECOND PERSON: “Then why are you forcing it on me?”

FIRST PERSON: “But your saying your view is right.”

SECOND PERSON: “Am I wrong?”

FIRST PERSON: “Yes.”

SECOND PERSON: “Then your saying only your view is right, which is the very thing you objected to me saying.”

FIRST PERSON: “You shouldn’t push your morality on me.”

SECOND PERSON: “Correct me if I’m misunderstanding you here, but it sounds to me like your telling me I’m wrong.”

FIRST PERSON: “You are.”

SECOND PERSON: “Well, you seem to be saying my personal moral view shouldn’t apply to other people, but that sounds suspiciously like you are applying your moral view to me.  Why are you forcing your morality on me?”[1]

SELF-DEFEATING

“Most of the problems with our culture can be summed up in one phrase: ‘Who are you to say?’” – Dennis Prager.  So let’s unpack this phrase and see how it is self-refuting, or as Tom Morris[2] put it, self-deleting.

  • When someone says, “Who are you to say?” answer with, “Who are you to say ‘Who are you to say’?”[3]

This person is challenging your right to correct another, yet she is correcting you.  Your response to her amounts to “Who are you to correct my correction, if correcting in itself is wrong?” or “If I don’t have the right to challenge your view, then why do you have the right to challenge mine?”  Her objection is self-refuting; you’re just pointing it out.

The “Who are you to say?” challenge fails on another account.  Taken at face value, the question challenges one’s authority to judge another’s conduct.  It says, in effect, “What authorizes you to make a rule for others?  Are you in charge?”  This challenge miscasts my position.  I don’t expect others to obey me simply because I say so.  I’m appealing to reason, not asserting my authority.  It’s one thing to force beliefs; it’s quite another to state those beliefs and make an appeal for them.

The “Who are you to say?” complaint is a cheap shot.  At best it’s self-defeating.  It’s an attempt to challenge the legitimacy of your moral judgments, but the statement itself implies a moral judgment.  At worst, it legitimizes anarchy!

[1] Francis Beckwith & Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Planted in Mid-Air (Baker Books; 1998), p. 144-146.

[2] Tom Morris, Philosophy for Dummies (IDG Books; 1999), p. 46

[3] Francis Beckwith & Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Planted in Mid-Air (Baker Books; 1998), p. 144-146.

Frank Turek talks about the assertion that Christians shouldn’t judge.

So, aside from Matthew 7:1-3 ripped from it’s context, if we let it stand as is, it is self deleting. But the CONTEXT is not that you should merely “not judge… gays, murderers, pro-choice arguments, and the like.” APOLOGETICS PRESS has a great article from which I will except a bit from the meddle of it:

… In Matthew 6:1-4, Jesus instructed us not to do charitable deeds…“as the hypocrites do” (to be seen of men). In 6:5-8, Jesus told us not to pray…“like the hypocrites” (to be heard of men). In 6:16-18, Jesus taught us not to fast…“like the hypocrites” (to be seen of men). Likewise, in Matthew 7:1-5, Jesus was teaching us that judging another is wrong… when that judgment is hypocritical.

But, what if we are doing charitable deeds to be seen of God? Then by all means, “do good to all men” (Galatians 6:10)! What if our prayers are led from a pure heart and with righteous intentions? Should we pray? Most certainly (cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:17). Can we fast today, if the purpose of our fasting is to be seen of God and not men? Yes. But what about passing judgment? In Matthew 7:1-5, did Jesus condemn all judging, or, similar to the above examples, did He condemn only a certain kind of judging? Matthew 7:5 provides the answer. After condemning unrighteous judgments (7:1-4), Jesus instructed a person to “first remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” He was saying, in essence, “Get your life right first. Then, in love, address your brother’s problem.” This is consistent with what Paul wrote to the church at Philippi: “Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others” (2:4). God never intended for Christians to be recluses who never interacted with those around them. Rather, He gave us the responsibility of helping others by lovingly correcting them when they sin. In Matthew 7, Jesus was not suggesting that a person can never judge. He was saying, when you judge, judge righteously (as when we pray, fast, and do good deeds—do it without hypocrisy—John 7:24). Incidentally, Jesus already had judged the Pharisees. Thus, He obviously was not teaching that we should never judge anyone.

Further proof that Jesus did not condemn all judging can be found throughout the rest of chapter 7. In fact, in the very next verse after His statements about judging, Jesus implicitly commanded that His followers make a judgment. He said: “Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces” (7:6). Disciples of Christ must judge as to who are “dogs” and who are “hogs.” Otherwise, how can we know when not to give that which is holy to “dogs”? Or how can we know when not to cast our pearls before “swine”? Jesus said we must judge between those who are “worthy,” and those who are like dogs and pigs (cf. Matthew 10:12-15; Acts 13:42-46). A few verses later, Jesus again implied that His disciples must make a judgment.

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them (Matthew 7:15-20).

Question: How can we “watch out” for false prophets if we cannot make judgments as to who the false prophets are? According to Jesus, determining the identity of false teachers involves inspecting “their fruits” and making judgments—righteous judgments.

What does the rest of Scripture have to say to those who regard all judging as being wrong?

  • In his letter to the churches of Galatia, Paul commanded those “who are spiritual” to restore those who have been “overtaken in any trespass…in a spirit of gentleness, considering yourself lest you also be tempted” (6:1). Certainly, determining who is spiritual and who has sinned involves making judgments.
  • While addressing an issue in the church at Corinth where a man had “his father’s wife” (1 Corinthians 5:1), Paul wrote through inspiration:

    In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus…. I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person…. Therefore, put away from yourselves the evil person (1 Corinthians 5:4-5,11,13b).

    Paul commanded the church at Corinth to purge a fornicator from its midst. This man’s sin was even to be addressed in a public manner. To follow Paul’s command, the church had to make a judgment. Paul also commanded the congregation to “put away” others who were living in a state of sin. When we make such judgments today, they are to be righteous judgments that are based on facts and carried out in love. Such judging should be performed in a merciful spirit (Luke 6:36-37), and for the purpose of saving souls (“that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus”—1 Corinthians 5:5). Judgments are to be made from good (righteous) intentions. But judgments nevertheless must be made.

  • Paul instructed the church at Ephesus to “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them” (5:11). And to the Christians in Rome he wrote: “Now I urge you, brethren, note those who cause divisions and offenses, contrary to the doctrine which you learned, and avoid them” (16:17). Were churches going to have to make important judgments to comply with Paul’s commands? Yes.
  • Similarly, the apostle John indicated that “whoever transgresses and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God. He who abides in the doctrine of Christ has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this doctrine, do not receive him into your house nor greet him; for he who greets him shares in his evil deeds” (2 John 9-11, emp. added). To determine whether or not we are going to allow someone into our homes, necessitates a judgment on our part.
  • Finally, if all judgments concerning spiritual matters are wrong, then why would Jesus have commanded His disciples to go and teach the lost (Matthew 28:19-20; cf. Acts 8:4)? Before one ever teaches the Gospel to someone who is not a Christian, a judgment must be made. Is this person lost in sin, or saved “in Christ”? If we are to teach the lost today, then it is necessary to determine who is lost and who is not.

If we never can “judge people” in any sense, as many today suggest (through the misuse of Matthew 7:1), then the above commands never could be obeyed. But, they must be obeyed! Thus, (righteous) judgments must be made. ….

Alan Shlemon of Stand to Reason answers the question: “Aren’t Christians commanded not to judge and therefore we shouldn’t judge homosexuals for their behavior?”

CARM end their article with this:

… Since the Bible does not contradict itself, what’s going on? It would seem that Jesus is talking about rash unwarranted judgments, not those judgments that are of sound consideration. This makes sense when we see what judgments Jesus made on people.

  • Matt. 7:5, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”
  • Matt. 23:33, “You serpents, you brood of vipers, how shall you escape the sentence of hell?”
  • Luke 11:40, “You foolish ones, did not He who made the outside make the inside also?”
  • John 8:44, “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father . . . “
  • John 8:55, “and you have not come to know Him, but I know Him; and if I say that I do not know Him, I shall be a liar like you, but I do know Him, and keep His word.”

So, Jesus would not be contradicting Himself. He made spiritual judgments as did Paul the Apostle. But when we make judgments, they need to be according to Scripture and not arbitrary judgments. Here are some commentaries on Matt. 7:1.

  • “The context makes it clear that the thing here condemned is that disposition to look unfavorably on the character and actions of others, which leads invariably to the pronouncing of rash, unjust, and unlovely judgments upon them.”
  • “1–5 warn against criticizing other people without considering how open to criticism we ourselves may be; be judged may well refer to God’s judgment, as well as that of other people. But v 6 indicates that there is also a right kind of judgment which the disciple is called on to exercise (cf. also vs 15–20).”
  • “Jesus did not prohibit judging of any sort, as verse 6 makes clear. Rather, He warned against judging others in way that we would not want applied to ourselves. To judge another person in a harsh spirit is to take on a role reserved only for God. Only the Lord can see beyond the outward appearance to underlying motives and causes in a person’s heart.”

Bill Maher Abortion Statements | Michael Knowles – Tim Pool

Published by Papa Giorgio

Republicans don’t hate women….

Republicans just view it as murder….

It basically *is* murder….

— Bill Maher

Here is another by Faye Wattleton, former president of U.S. Planned Parenthood:

  • “I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.”

So, Bill Maher is all for murder based on the lie of overpopulation.

Timcast

Bill Maher Says ABORTION IS MURDER But That He Is OK WITH IT In Shocking Statement

A flashback to some better known atheists than Maher discussing being Pro-Life! More at my post as well:

If You Say Hamas Kills Gays, You Are Homophobic | Wait! What?

Published by Papa Giorgio

HOT AIR astutely notes this about the following:

As I have argued many times in the past, ordinary people and Leftist activists don’t speak the same language or even use language for the same purposes. 

Ordinary people use language to communicate with others, and hence, we work hard to ensure that what we say creates a correspondence between what we are thinking and what our interlocutors understand.  People lie, of course, but generally speaking words mean the same thing to us as they do to whom we are speaking. It’s an essential part of language. 

Leftists don’t use language that way. Postmodernism, critical theory, or whatever label you want to use for the ideology, holds that words are always expressions of power relationships. Speaking is as much a means of seizing power as bonking somebody over the head, and it is the most effective means of seizing power when you haven’t enough power to destroy your enemies. 

It is in this context that you must understand the claims being made by “Queer” activists, and in particular the “Queers for Palestine” crowd. ….

According to Maya Mikdashi via the DAILY MAIL, Amnesty International is homophobic!

A Rutgers University professor told a seminar discussing the Israel-Hamas conflict that it is ‘violent’ and ‘homophobic’ to raise the issue of how LGBT people are treated in Gaza.

[….]

The event, entitled ‘Palestine is a Feminist and Queer Anti-Imperialist Abolition Struggle’, took place on March 20 and was co-hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Nadine Naber.

[….]

Queers for Palestine’ events and marches, which have proliferated across the US since the start of the war, have been criticized as a misguided show of support for a regime that does not support gay rights.

The Islamic Middle Eastern state follows sharia law, and as noted by Amnesty International, it is not safe for the queer community….

Even Hamas “Royalty” are killed when rumored to be gay!

Gay Palestinians and Gazan see refuge in Israel!

Prager Makes A Common Mistake In Regards To Jesus’ Divinity

Published by Papa Giorgio

Originally posted July 2014 ~ small facelift today

Listening to the Dennis Prager Show the other day, Dennis said two things that caught my attention. They are:

a) he likened Jesus to other Messianic figures;
b) he said the Gospel of John was the only place Jesus called himself “Divine,” God.

I combine the Dennis Prager audio, a similar statement by Bart Ehrman, and then Josh McDowell’s rebuttal. To be clear of what is below.

  1. First, that Jesus refers to himself as Deity (GOD) in the Gospel of Mark;
  2. Second, how did ancient rabbi’s view Isaiah 53;
  3. Then I show Jesus referenced himself as Diety in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

While I deal with two points, the third (Psalm 110) deals both with Jesus being different than past Jewish Messiah’s, as well as showing Prager’s statement about the Gospel of John to be wrong.

So lets deal with this two fold then. I will deal with “B” first, as it is a short response, needing only one example to show Prager’s assumption to be wrong (and remember, he loves truth for truths sake). He seemingly accepts the typical attribution to the age of the books by modern Biblical critics because he accepts their premise that John is the only book Jesus claims divinity. Then, using the attributed idea that Mark is the oldest book and is itself from “Q” material, any claims of Divinity in it should be THAT MUCH MORE powerful (early).

Verses Josh Goes Over: Mark 2:1-12 & Mark 14:60-64

So, that short, succinct, recapping of a challenge I the university class room by a professor is just one example to show a clear claim to Divinity by Jesus in another Gospel other than John.

Now to the larger response, “A.” Jesus is not, was, not, like any other Jewsish pseudo Messiah, He, yes He, is much different. Why? Because he alone has fulfilled the Messianic prophecies in Scripture.

Isaiah 53

The first thing that came to mind about this comment from Prager is how Jewish people/culture have changed the book of Isaiah over time to mean something different than the earlier Rabbis believed. Here, we get into some reading, I will of course put some video to it as well… but a serious subject requires a bit of reading, and I was impacted by Chuck Smith’s and Mark Eastman’s work on the subject, “The Search for Messiah,” of which the following is from…. again, it is long (13-pages to be exact).

This post is meant for the serious student, or Dennis Prager:

In the book of Isaiah there are a group of passages called “The Suffering Servant Songs.” These four vignettes are found in Isaiah 42:1-7; Isaiah 49:1-6; Isaiah 50:4-9; Isaiah 52:13-53:12. We will focus on the fourth suffering servant song since it is the most disputed portion of Isaiah.[1]

“Behold, My Servant shall deal prudently, He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high. Just as many were astonished at you, so His visage was marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men; So shall He sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at Him; for what had not been told them they shall see, and what they had not heard they shall consider. Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem him. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; he was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who will declare his generation? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of My people he was stricken. And they made his grave with the wicked; but with the rich at his death, because he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he has put him to grief. When You make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand. He shall see the travail of his soul, and be satisfied. By his knowledge My righteous servant shall justify many, for lie shall bear their iniquities. Therefore, I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul unto death, and he was numbered with the transgressors, and lie bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”

From the time of the development of the written Talmud (200-500 C.E.) this portion of scripture was believed to be Messianic. In fact, it was not until the eleventh century C.E. that it was seriously proposed otherwise. At that time Rabbi Rashi began to interpret the suffering servant in these passages as reference to the nation of Israel.[2]

One of the oldest translations of the Hebrew scriptures is known as the Targums. These are Aramaic translations of very ancient Hebrew manuscripts that also, included commentary on the scriptures. They were translated in the first or second century B.C.E. In the Targum of Isaiah, we read this incredible quote regarding the suffering servant in Isaiah 53:

“Behold, My servant the Messiah shall prosper; he shall be exalted and great and very powerful. The Righteous One shall grow up before him, lo, like sprouting plants; and like a tree that sends its roots by the water-courses, so shall the exploits of the holy one multiply in the land which was desperate for him. His appearance shall not be a profane appearance, nor shall the awe of an ignorant person, but his countenance shall radiate with holiness, so that all who see him shall become wise through him. All of us were scattered like sheep… but it is the will of God to pardon the sins of all of us on his account…Then I will apportion unto him the spoil of great nations… because he was ready to suffer martyrdom that the rebellious he might subjugate to the Torah. And he might seek pardon for the sins of many.”[3]

According to this commentary, the Messiah would suffer martyrdom, he would be, “The Righteous One” and would provide a way for God to forgive our sins. This forgiveness would be accomplished, not because of our goodness, but on account of the righteousness of Messiah. As we shall see, this is the very message of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament!

A reading from a Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah prayer book contains this passage:

“Our righteous anointed is departed from us: horror has seized us, and we have none to justify us. He has borne the yoke of our iniquities, and our transgression, and is wounded because of our transgression. He bears our sins on his shoulders, that we may find pardon for our iniquities. We shall be healed by his wound, at the time that the eternal will create the Messiah as a new creature. 0 bring him up from the circle of the earth. Raise him up from Seir, to assemble us the second time on mount Lebanon, by the hand of Yinon.”[4][5]

In this beautiful prayer, a commentary on Isaiah 53, we discover several of the ancient beliefs on the mission of God’s righteous Messiah:

1) He would apparently depart after an initial appearance: “Our righteous anointed is departed.”

2) The Messiah would be the one who justifies the people:[6] “Horror has seized us, and we have none to justify us.”

3) The Messiah would be wounded because of our transgressions and would take upon himself the yoke or punishment of our iniquities.[7] 

“He has borne the yoke of our iniquities, and our transgression, and is wounded because of our transgression.”

4) By his wound we would be healed when he reappears as a “new creature.”

“We shall be healed by his wound, at the time that the eternal will create the Messiah as a new creature.”

In the Babylonian Talmud there are a number of commentaries on the suffering servant in Isaiah 53. In a discussion of the suffering inflicted upon this servant we find the following statement:

“This teaches us that God will burden the Messiah with commandments and sufferings as with millstones.”[8]

In another chapter of Sanhedrin we find a discussion on the name of the Messiah. In this remarkable portion of the Talmud we read:

“There is a whole discussion in the Talmud about Messiah’s name. The several discussants suggested various names and cited scriptural references in support of these names. The disciples of the school of Rabbi Yehuda Ha’ Nasi said ‘The sick one is his name,’ for it is written, ‘Surely he has borne our sicknesses and carried our sorrows and pains, yet we considered him stricken, smitten, and afflicted of God.'”[9]

In the Midrash we again find reference to the “Suffering Servant” of Isaiah 53. In characteristic fashion we read one rabbi quoting another in a discussion of the Messiah’s suffering:

“Rabbi Huna in the name of Rabbi Acha says: ‘The sufferings are divided into three parts: one for David and the fathers, one for our own generation, and one for the King Messiah, and this is what is written, `He was wounded for our transgressions.”‘[10]

In a portion of the Midrash, called the Haggadah (a portion which expounds on the non-legal parts of Scripture) in the tractate Pesiqta Rabbati[11] we read an interesting discussion of the suffering of the Messiah:

“And the Holy One made an agreement with the Messiah and said to him, ‘The sins of those which are forgiven for your sake will cause you to be put under an iron yoke, and they will make you like this calf whose eyes are dim, and they will choke your spirit under the yoke, and on account of their sins your tongue shall cleave to your mouth. Are you willing to do this?’ Said Messiah before the Holy One: ‘Perhaps this agony will last many years?’ And the Holy One said to him: ‘By your life and by the life of my head, one week only have I decreed for you; but if your soul is grieved I shall destroy them even now.’ But the Messiah said to him: ‘Sovereign of the world, with the gladness of my soul and the joy of my heart I take it upon me, on condition that not one of Israel shall perish, and not only those alone should be saved who are in my days, but also those who are hid in the dust; and not only should the dead of my own time be saved, but all the dead from the first man until now; also, the unborn and those whom thou bast intended to create. Thus I agree, and on this condition I will take it upon myself.'” (Pesiqta Rabbati. chapter 36)

Another section of chapter 37, Pesiqta Rabbati, says the following:

“The Patriarchs will one day rise again in the month of Nisan and will say to the Messiah: ‘Ephraim, our righteous Messiah, although we are your ancestors, you are nevertheless greater than we, for you have borne the sins of our children, as it is written: `Surely he has borne our diseases and carried our sorrows; yet we regarded him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our sins, bruised for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that makes us well, and through his wounds we are healed.’[12] Heavy oppressions have been imposed upon you, as it is written: ‘As a result of oppression and judgment he was taken away[13]; but in his day, who considered that he was torn from the land of the living because of the transgressions of my people?’ You have been a laughing stock and a derision among the peoples of the world, and because of you they jeered at Israel, as it is written, You have dwelt in darkness and in gloominess, and your eyes have not seen light, your skin was cleaving to your bones, and your body withered like wood. Your eyes became hollow from fasting, and your strength was dried-up like a potsherd, as it is written.[14] All this happened because of the sins of our children, as it is written: ‘And Jehovah laid on him the iniquities of us all.’ ” (Isaiah 53:6)

In these fascinating portions of the Midrash we see language which closely parallels Psalm 22.[15] he writer specifically ties together the sufferings of the pierced servant in Psalm 22 (tongue shall cleave to your mouth… dried up like a potsherd) with the servant in Isaiah 53, whose sufferings provide a way for the children of Israel to be saved. The fact that the writer of this portion of the Midrash would tie the sufferings of the servant in Psalm 22 (the pierced one) and Isaiah 53, the despised and rejected one, is nothing less than astonishing. Clearly at least some of the rabbis of the ancient Midrashim believed that the Messiah would suffer and that the sufferings found in Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 belong to the same person.

In the eleventh century C.E. the rabbinical interpretation of Isaiah 52-53 began to change. Rabbi Rashi, a well-respected member of the Midrashim, began to interpret this portion of scripture as a reference to the sufferings of the nation of Israel. However, even after this interpretation took root, there remained many dissenters who still held onto its original, Messianic view.

In the fourteenth century Rabbi Moshe Cohen Crispin, a strong adherent to the ancient opinion, stated that applying the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 to the nation of Israel:

“distort[s] the verses of their natural meaning…As then it seemed to me that the doors of the literal interpretation [of Isaiah 53] were shut in their face, and that ‘they wearied themselves to find the entrance’, having forsaken the knowledge of our Teachers, and inclined after the ‘stubbornness of their own hearts’ and of their own opinion, I am pleased to interpret it, in accordance with the teaching of our Rabbis, of the King Messiah, and will be careful, so far as I am able, to adhere to the literal sense: thus possibly, I shall be free from the forced and farfetched interpretations of which others have been guilty. This prophecy was delivered by Isaiah at the divine command for the purpose of making known to us something about the nature of the future Messiah, who is to come and to deliver Israel,”[16]

Rabbi Isaac Abrabanel (143 7-1508), a member of the Midrashim, made the following remarkable declaration regarding the suffering servant of Isaiah 53:

“The first question is to ascertain to whom this prophecy refers, for the learned among the Nazarenes expound it of the man who was crucified in Jerusalem at the end of the Second Temple, and, who according to them, was the Son of God and took flesh in the virgin’s womb, as is stated in their writings. Jonathan ben Uzziel interprets it in the Targum of the future Messiah; and this is also the opinion of our learned men in the majority of their Midrashim.”[17]

Two centuries later we find the comments of another member of the Midrashim, Rabbi Elijah De Vidas, a Cabalistic scholar in sixteenth century. In his comments of Isaiah 53 we read:

“The meaning of ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities,’ is, that since the Messiah bears our iniquities, which produce the effect of his being bruised, it follows that who so will not admit that the Messiah thus suffers for our iniquities must endure and suffer them for himself.”[18]

We have also the writings of the sixteenth century Rabbi Moshe el Sheikh, who declares in his work “Commentaries of the Earlier Prophets,” regarding the suffering servant in Isaiah 53:

“Our rabbis with one voice accept and affirm the opinion that the prophet is speaking of the King Messiah, and we shall ourselves also adhere to the same view.”[19]

These remarkable references from the ancient rabbis leave no doubt that the suffering servant in Isaiah 52:13­53:12 was indeed believed to be the Messiah. Even more remarkable is the fact that the suffering servant of Isaiah is connected with the suffering servant of Psalm 22. Finally, we find the ancient rabbis claiming that the suffering and death of the Messiah would have the effect of freeing us from our sins. This is in complete agreement with the Christian concept of the Messiah!

Even without these ancient references, there are several other reasons why the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 could not be the nation of Israel.

First, the suffering servant is an innocent person without sin:

“And they made his grave with the wicked; but with the rich at his death, because he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.” Isaiah 53:9

Israel has an admittedly sinful past; the Hebrew scriptures even admit this fact. Psalm 14:2-3 says:

“There is none that does good, no not one.”

I Kings 8:46 says:

“…for there is no one who does not sin.”

Ecclesiastes 7:20 says:

“For there is not a just man on earth who does good and does not sin.”

Secondly, the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 suffers on account of the sins of others.

“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4)

Thirdly, the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 is willing to suffer.

“He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; he was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.” (Isaiah 53:7)

In the entire history of their nation, the Jews have never suffered willingly.

Finally, the suffering servant’s end was death.

“Therefore I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul unto death, and he was numbered with the transgressors, and lie bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” (Isaiah 53:12)

The nation of Israel has suffered much, but she has never died. In fact, the nation of Israel was re-gathered back into the land after nearly 1900 years of world-wide dispersion, an event unprecedented in world history.

“Let Israel now say; Many a time they have afflicted me from my youth; Yet they have not prevailed against me.” (Psalm 129:1)

Finally, listen to the words of nineteenth century Jewish scholar Herz Homberg;

“This prophecy is disconnected with what precedes it. According to the opinion of Rashi and lbn Ezra, it relates to Israel at the end of their captivity; the term `servant’ and the use of the singular number referring to the individual members of the nation. But if so, what can be the meaning of the passage, ‘He was wounded for our transgressions?’, etc.? Who was `wounded?’ Who are the ‘transgressors’ Who `carried’ the sickness and ‘bare’ the pains? And where are the sick? Are they not the same as those who are ‘smitten’ and who ‘bear?’ And if ‘each turned to his own way’, upon whom did ‘the Lord lay the iniquity of them all?’ The Ga’on, Rabbi Sa’adyah, explains the whole Parashah of Jeremiah: and there are indeed numerous parts of Scripture in which we can trace a great resemblance to what befell Jeremiah while persecuted by the false prophets. But the commencement of the prophecy, ‘He shall be high and exalted and lofty exceedingly’, and similarly the words ‘with the mighty he shall divide the spoil’, will not admit of being applied to him. The fact is that it refers to the King Messiah, who will come in the latter days, when it will be the Lord’s good pleasure to redeem Israel from among the different nations of the earth…and even the Israelites themselves will only regard him as `one of the vain fellows’, believing none of the announcements which will be made by him in God’s name, but being contumacious against him, and averring that all the reproaches and persecutions which fall to his lot are sent from heaven, for that he is ‘smitten of God’ for his own sin. For they will not at first perceive that whatever he underwent was in consequence of their own transgression, the Lord having chosen him to be a trespass-offering, like the scapegoat which bore all the iniquities of the house of Israel. Being, however, himself aware that through his pains and revilings the promised redemption will eventually come at the appointed time, he will endure with a willing soul, neither complaining nor opening his mouth in the siege and distress wherewith the enemies of Israel will oppress him (as is pointed out from the passage here in the Haggadah).”[20]

Here we have in the clearest term possible the belief that the prophet was speaking of King Messiah. Furthermore, Homberg states that the Messiah, when he comes, will be rejected “as one of the vain fellows, believing none of the announcements which will be made by him in God’s name.” Finally, he sees the rejection and death of the Messiah accomplishing the role of the trespass-offering for the sins of the people. The Messiah suffers not because of the sins of himself, but on account of the sins of the people. Through Messiah’s suffering and death “the promised redemption will eventually come!”

As we will see, in his understanding of Isaiah 53, Herzog has pointed out the very heart of the Christian message!

FOOTNOTES

[1] Messianically applied in Targum of Jonathan, written between first and second century C.E.

[2] See The Messianic Hope, Arthur Kac.

[3] See comments on Isaiah 53 in Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Appendix IX.

[4] Yinon is one of the ancient rabbinical names of the Messiah.

[5] See The Messianic Hope, Arthur Kac, The Chapter of the Suffering Servant.

[6] To justify is to make one acceptable and righteous in the sight of God.

[7] i.e. Our individual sins.

[8] Talmud, Sanhedrin 93b .

[9] Talmud, Sanhedrin 98b.

[10] The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Alfred Edersheim, Appendix IX.

[11] Compiled in the ninth century, but based on writings from Talmudic times from 200 B.C.E.- 400 C.E.

[12] A reference to Isaiah 53.

[13] A reference to the death of the Messiah.

[14] A reference to Psalm 22:15-16.

[15] In fact, there is no other portion of scripture that parallels the language in Pesiqta Rabbati chapter 37 as closely as does Psalm 22.

[16] A Commentary of Rabbi Mosheh Kohen Ibn Crispin of Cordova. For a detailed discussion of this reference see The Fifty Third Chapter of Isaiah According to Jewish Interpreters, preface pg. x, S.R. Driver, A.D. Neubauer, KTAV Publishing House, Inc., New York, 1969.

[17] “The Messianic Hope“, by Arthur Kac, pg. 75.

[18] ibid, pg. 76.

[19] ibid, pg. 76.

[20] From the exposition of the entire Old Testament, called Korem, by Herz Homberg (Wein, 1818). 

Mark Eastman and Chuck Smith, The Search for Messiah ([Co-Published] Fountain Valley, CA: Joy Publishing, 1996; Costa Mesa, CA: Word for Today, 1996), 16-28.

Dr. Erez Soref – The Messiah Is The Purpose Of The Torah

Psalm 110:1-7 ~David’s Son and David’s Lord

THE PRIESTLY KING

A psalm of David.

1 This is the declaration of the Lord to my Lord:

“Sit at my right hand

until I make your enemies your footstool.”

2 The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion.

rule over your surrounding enemies.

3 Your people will volunteer

on your day of battle.

In holy splendor, from the womb of the dawn,

the dew of your youth belongs to you.

4 The Lord has sworn an oath and will not take it back:

“You are a priest forever

according to the pattern of Melchizedek.”

5 The Lord is at your right hand;

he will crush kings on the day of his anger.

6 He will judge the nations, heaping up corpses;

he will crush leaders over the entire world.

7 He will drink from the brook by the road;

therefore, he will lift up his head.

In Matthew 22:41-46 (Mark 12:35-37; Luke 20:41-44), citing Psalm 110, Jesus said, “How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’ [Messiah]?” Jesus stumped his skeptical Jewish questioners by presenting then with a dilemma that blew their own neat calculations about the Messiah “Lord”(as he did in Ps. 110), when the Scriptures also say the Messiah would be the “Son of David” (which they do in 2 Samuel 7:12.)? The only answer is that the Messiah must be both a man (David’s son or offspring) AND God (David’s Lord). Jesus is claiming to be both God and human, at the same time!

Here is the Matthew 22 verses:

41While the Pharisees were together, Jesus questioned them, 42 “What do you think about the Messiah? Whose Son is He?” “David’s,” they told Him. He asked them, “How is it then that David, inspired by the Spirit, calls Him ‘Lord’:

The Lord declared to my Lord,
‘Sit at My right hand
until I put Your enemies under Your feet’?

“If David calls Him ‘Lord,’ how then can the Messiah be his Son?” No one was able to answer Him at all, and from that day no one dared to question Him anymore.

It is bullet pointed thus:

  • Double-question by Jesus (42a)
  • Answer by Pharisees (42b)
  • Second double-question by Jesus (43–45)
  • Silence (46)

Richard B. Gardner, Matthew, Believers Church Bible Commentary (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1991), 329.

MATTHEW HENRY notes the importance of this verse as a call to reflect on WHO Jesus is:

22:41-46 When Christ baffled his enemies, he asked what thoughts they had of the promised Messiah? How he could be the Son of David and yet his Lord? He quotes Ps 110:1. If the Christ was to be a mere man, who would not exist till many ages after David’s death, how could his forefather call him Lord? The Pharisees could not answer it. Nor can any solve the difficulty except he allows the Messiah to be the Son of God, and David’s Lord equally with the Father. He took upon him human nature, and so became God manifested in the flesh; in this sense he is the Son of man and the Son of David. It behoves us above all things seriously to inquire, What think we of Christ? Is he altogether glorious in our eyes, and precious to our hearts? May Christ be our joy, our confidence, our all. May we daily be made more like to him, and more devoted to his service.

Walter A. Elwell also notes that “Only a person who recognizes Jesus as both God and man could understand and answer the question of verse 45.”

Jesus is truly the son of David (1:1–17), but not merely so. For he is preeminently the Son of God (16:16) and thus David’s Lord. As Jesus now reveals, the Old Testament itself (Ps. 110) witnesses to Messiah’s deity, to both the distinction of person and the identity of being between God the Father (“the Lord”) and God the Son (“my Lord”). The Pharisees do not acknowledge Jesus’ messiahship, much less his deity. Only a person who recognizes Jesus as both God and man could understand and answer the question of verse 45.

Walter A. Elwell, Evangelical Commentary on the Bible, vol. 3, Baker Reference Library (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1995), Mt 22:41.

See also Hebrew University professor Israel Knohl’s supposed discrepancy with this idea and Jesus’ genealogy, HERE. Also, a great excoriation of this Psalm comes via The Rosh Pina Project, and, while it is a longer article, his opening is worth the posting here:

This is the most quoted Psalm in the New Testament (about one-third of quotes from the Tanach come from this Psalm.) For example Psalm 110:4 in Hebrews 5:6, 10; 6:20; 7:3, 11, 15, 17, 21, 24, 28). Words about sitting at God’s right hand are echoed in Mark 14:62, Acts 2:34ƒ and Hebrews 10:12ƒ.

Psalm 110 is also a very disputed psalm. There was a time when few did not consider this a Messianic Psalm, today the few are those that continue to affirm the Messianic nature of this Psalm.

Modern Liberal scholars who presume that foretelling prophecy does not exist approach this text with a bias. They say it must all speak of a contemporary situation from the time of the writer. There is some truth to the fact that this must have meant something at its time of writing. But, there is implicit in this a failure to accept the essential futuristic foretelling aspect that defines prophetic writing as prophecy.

The fact that the Psalm starts with נְאֻ֤ם יְהוָ֨ה “ne’um Adonai“, a classic prophetic phrase, firmly fixes the prophetic nature of this Psalm.

Since the Rosh Pina Project is down, see JESUS PLUS NOTHING’s post

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee Wants To Live On the Sun

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is as good as the “M-Word” or that Guam will tip over if too many military personnel are on one side. (Yes, that is HERE.) So here is the most recent example of stupidity in Congress.

LOLZ!

Here is the NATIONAL PULSE’s story on this:

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) has “clarified” that she was actually asking whether or not she could live on the sun, not the moon. Her comments came after she was widely lampooned for discussing whether or not human beings could live on the moon, which, she claimed, “is made up mostly of gases.”

Speaking at Booker T. Washington High School in Houston, the Texas Congressman told her audience, “sometimes you need to take the opportunity just to come out and see a full moon is a complete rounded circle, which is made up mostly of gases,” adding: “could we as humans live on the moon? Are the gases such that we could do that?”

Jackson Lee received significant mockery for the speech, as it is common knowledge the moon is not “made up mostly of gases” and is uninhabitable. Now, however, she insists she “[o]bviously misspoke and meant to say the sun, but as usual, Republicans are focused on stupid things instead of stuff that really matters.”

“What can I say though, foolish thinkers lust for stupidity!” she added.

The sun, however, is still more uninhabitable than the moon, being a ball of gas and plasma with no solid surface, burning at around 10,000 Fahrenheit (5,600 Celsius) on its surface and 27,000,000 Fahrenheit (15,000,000 Celsius) at its center.

Any human attempting to approach the sun would be killed by its intense heat and radiation millions of miles before reaching it……

OMG!

Here s Megyn Kelly and Vitor Davis Hanson discussing it:

BUT WAIT, THE VIEW SAYS HOLD MY BEER:

Click pic to view the video.

The Elite [Democrats] Are More Likely To Cheat During Elections

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dennis Prager read from a couple articles showing how “the elite” that are willing to cheat in elections are in fact Democrats. Zuckerbucks is a “for instance”:

  • Zuckerbucks 101: How A Media Mogul Took Over The 2020 Election And Why GOP Leaders Must Never Let It Happen Again (THE FEDERALIST)

And these elites all joining forces:

  • The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election (TIME)

SOME ARTICLES:

  • Poll: Most of the Elite Are Okay With Cheating to Win Elections (HOT AIR:)
  • ‘Most Terrifying Poll Result I’ve Ever Seen’: Scott Rasmussen Surveys America’s Elite 1% (DAILY SIGNAL)
  • The Elite 1 Percent Behind the Cultural Civil War (REAL CLEAR POLICY)
  • RASMUSSEN STUDY: Them vs. Us (PDF)

‘The Most Terrifying Poll Result I’ve Ever Seen’ (ISSUES & INSIGHTS)

….Given this, it’s not surprising that the elite 1 percent have great faith in government. Some 70 percent trust government to do the right thing most of the time.

Rasmussen said that this project has revealed the scariest single polling number he has seen in nearly 35 years of studying popular opinion. According to his data, 35 percent of the elite 1 percent (and 69 percent of the politically obsessed elite 1 percent) said they would rather cheat than lose a close election. Among average Americans, 93 percent reject cheating and accept defeat in an honest election. Only 7 percent reported they would cheat.

While only 6 percent of most voters have a very favorable opinion of members of Congress, 69 percent of the elite 1 percent have a very favorable view (this is almost unimaginable). While 10 percent of all voters have a favorable view of journalists, the elite 1 percent really like them (71 percent favorable). While 17 percent of all voters have a favorable view of college professors, the elite 1 percent just love them (76 percent). This tracks, because many of the elite 1 percent may be college professors.

To illustrate the scale of the gap between the elite 1 percent and the rest of the country, consider the elite 1 percent’s views on climate issues (and understand that these ideas are opposed by 63 percent to 83 percent of most Americans).

  • 77 percent of the elite 1 percent would like to impose strict restrictions and rationing on the private use of gas, meat, and electricity.
  • 72 percent of the elite 1 percent favor banning gas powered vehicles.
  • 69 percent of the elite 1 percent favor banning gas stoves.
  • 58 percent of the elite 1 percent favor of banning sport utility vehicles.
  • 55 percent of the elite 1 percent favor banning non-essential air travel.
  • 53 percent of the elite 1 percent favor banning private air conditioning.

As Rasmussen noted, the degree to which the elite 1 percent think their views represent those of the average American is astonishing.

According to Rasmussen, the most radical of the elite 1 percent were educated at what he calls the “dirty dozen:” Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, John’s Hopkins, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Cornell, MIT, and the University of Chicago.

The elite 1 percent who graduated from these schools deeply believe in government. Fifty-five percent believe there is too much individual freedom in America and that Americans should obey government and follow government leadership.

Rasmussen’s identification of the elite 1 percent begins to explain the depth of the tension between most Americans and the tiny group of elitists who control what Vladimir Lenin called “the commanding heights,” the elements of power which control the rest.

It is the elite 1 percent who dominate the universities, news media, judiciary, intelligence agencies, giant foundations, and most major corporations. Although they are relatively few, they marry each other, their children go to the same schools, and they hire and promote each other.

Charles Murray in his classic work, “Coming Apart,” analyzed zip codes and proved that graduates from “dirty dozen” universities that Rasmussen described live, work and play in the same zip codes. They are an isolated set and create a “power aristocracy” that has no knowledge of the rest of us – and contempt for most of us. This perfectly explains Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” line.

Scott Rasmussen has done pioneering work. Every American should read “The Elite 1% and the Battle for America’s Soul” to understand what we are fighting to change.

There’s Nothing New Under the Sun – Abortion

Published by Papa Giorgio

There’s Nothing New Under the Sun: Child Sacrifice Never Stopped

Infants were sacrificed to Molech for prosperity, wealth. No different than today… babies are sacrificed for careers, schooling, or just convenience. See my “Forcing Morality” post for more.

Here is a good post detailing the history of abortion.

….As Carthaginians succumbed deeper into this form of worship their self-abasement grew, along with the population, and thus, babies were plentiful. One could surmise that the gods rewarded their worship. This worship, however, gradually turned to child sacrificing, especially when times were tough, in order to appease the gods Molech and Ashteroth, the darker and more sinister gods – who demanded human sacrifice in order to grant the community “health and well being.” It started with sacrificing the firstborn, but it appears that the gods grew greedier and greedier. Eventually, and as times got tougher, i.e. during famines and disasters, they practiced massive annual sacrifices of thousands of babies and children, in order to invoke greater blessings and prosperity. It is believed that this civilization became quite sophisticated, under the caste system, and the noble class sometimes practiced substitution for their firstborns through the “ladies of the sanctuary,” or temple prostitution in order to fulfill their mandatory quotas of children for the gods.

When a mother, willingly or not, released her infant onto the down-stretched arms of Moloch’s bronze statue, the baby consequently rolled off the arms and fell headlong onto a fire-y brazier pit. Burial monuments found in Carthage and other places were inscribed with the Tanit symbol, in honor of the Phoenician goddess.

The Carthaginians were hated, and perhaps envied by other contemporary cultures for their practice of child sacrifice, and respectively their riches. Chief among their enemy was the Romans. Ironically, Rome conquered Carthage, yet the Romans later practiced infanticide themselves as well as other tortures for sport, like killing Christians. Is there some kind of progression here for doomed civilizations?

The gods Asherah, Baal, Molech and Ashteroth had also been a stumbling block for the Israelites, when they possessed the “promise land” east of the Jordan River, or Canaan. Ironically, they purged the Canaanites out, who practiced child sacrifice, and yet they too in time did the same thing. Disobeying God’s commands to purge out the idols and religious practices of the Canaanites and the Ammonites, they eventually came to commit these same spiritually adulterous and idolatrous practices. They set up the “grove,” a group of trees with graven images carved into them near the altar of Jehovah. The prophets soundly condemned the grove, and practicing the heathen religions and warned of coming judgment. Judgment did fall in Jerusalem, when the temple and the whole city was completely destroyed by the Babylonians and the kingdom of Israel was taken into captivity in 587 BC…..

Also, from Joseph M. Holden and Norman Geisler in their The Popular Handbook of Archaeology and The Bible

In 1928, a farmer (Brahim) in northern Syria accidently discovered a vault in his field. Later this area would be known as Ras Shamra due to the expedi­tion and excavation led by F.A. Schaeffer and George Chenet. Then in 1929, archaeologists unearthed a scribal school and library adjoining a temple. The fifteenth-century BC tablets found at the location contained a script previ­ously unknown to scholars, but it soon would be understood to be Canaan­ite, a language similar to Hebrew. The tablets describe the dark religious practices of the Canaanite peoples indigenous to the land prior to Joshua’s conquest. These wicked practices offer confirmation of the deities, practices, laws, and religious beliefs and customs of the heathen described in the Old Testament, which include 1) the burying alive of children, 2) child sacrifice of other kinds, 3) male and female religious prostitution, 4) the malice and jealousy among the gods, 5) absence of morality among the gods, and 6) idol worship among others.

Moreover, these tablets have provided an answer to the critical argument that denied the possibility of Moses writing a sophisticated religious law code as early as 1440 to 1400 BC. In addition, the Ras Shamra tablets have contributed to our understanding of the development of the Hebrew script from about 1500 BC to the modern day. This discovery has also dealt a blow to negative higher critics who asserted that Aramaic words included in Moses’ writings did not develop until after the exile to Babylon (sixth century BC). Several Aramaisms were found in the Ugaritic texts, which are contemporary with Moses, which refutes this notion.

(Pages 84-85)

Cultural Christianity: One | Secularism: Zero (New Atheism Fails)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Okay, let’s get this party started… right? I had seen a blip of Dawkins admitting — and it really is an admission of sorts — that what Christ wrought [as a worldview] is CULTURALLY what he [Dawkins] prefers to live under. He says he prefers this over Islam, but note, he didn’t mention he would rather live under some atheistic program.

Why?

Because when dialectical materialism comes about as a worldview embedded into government, what do we get? (PDF version of the below)

A recent comprehensive compilation of the history of human warfare, Encyclopedia of Wars by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod documents 1763 wars, of which 123 have been classified to involve a religious conflict. So, what atheists have considered to be ‘most’ really amounts to less than 7% of all wars. It is interesting to note that 66 of these wars (more than 50%) involved Islam, which did not even exist as a religion for the first 3,000 years of recorded human warfare. Even the Seven Years’ War, widely recognized to be “religious” in motivation, noting that the warring factions were not necessarily split along confessional lines as much as along secular interests.

CHRISTIANITY (Crusades)

  • 9 Total Crusades from 1095-1272 A.D;
  • The crusades lasted about 177 years;
  • bout 1-million deaths – this includes: disease, the selling into slavery, and died en-route to the Holy land;
  • About 5,650 deaths a year.

(More visual info HERE)

ATHEISM (Stalin)

  • His rise to power in 1927 lasted until his death in 1953;
  • Stalin’s reign was 26-years;
  • Middle road estimates of deaths are from 20-million to a high of 60-milion;
  • That clocks in at about 1,923,076 deaths a year.

(Some put the death toll per-week by Stalin at 40,000 every week — even during “peacetime” [IBT])

ATHEISM (Mao)

  • His rise to power was in 1949 until his death in 1976;
  • Mao’s reign was 27-years;
  • HOWEVER, the “Great Leap Forward” was 4-years (1958 to 1962);
  • While Mao killed about 78-million people, in just 4-years he killed 45-million people
  • That is almost 31,000 a day — killed — for four years.

ISLAM (killing just Hindus)

  • From 1000 (conquest of Afghanistan) to 1525 (end of Delhi Sultanate);
  • 80-million killed;
  • 160,000 a year.

[BTW, over 270 million people have been killed by Islam, over a hundred millions blacks on the Continent of Africa — for the #woke crowd’s knowledge Muhammad was racist to the bone.]

… a minimum of 28 million African were enslaved in the Muslim Middle East.  Since, at least, 80 percent of those captured by Muslim slave traders were calculated to have died before reaching the slave market, it is believed that the death toll from 1400 years of Arab and Muslim slave raids into Africa could have been as high as 112 Million.  When added to the number of those sold in the slave markets, the total number of African victims of the trans-Saharan and East African slave trade could be significantly higher than 140 million people. – John Allembillah Azumah, author of The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue

As an aside… about 5.714 [yes, point] people were killed a year by the Spanish Inquisition [if you take the highest number] over its 350-year long stretch if you use the leading historian on the topic.

Another aside: the Crusades were largely an operation to free people, whereas Islamic caliphates [jihad] were to convert and enslave people.

Some Resources Used

  • Alan Axelrod & Charles Phillips, Encyclopedia of Wars, 3 volumes (New York, NY: Facts on File, 2005);
  • John Entick, The General History of the Late War (Volume 3); Containing It’s Rise, Progress, and Event, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America (Reprinted by Hard Press; date of publication was from about 1765-1766);
  • William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009);
  • Gordon Martel, The Encyclopedia of War, 5 Volumes (New Jersey, NJ: Wiley, 2012);
  • Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (London, England: Yale University Press, 1997);
  • (8-authors) The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999);
  • J. Rummel, Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (New York, NY: Routledge Publishers, 1997);
  • Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 2005);
  • M. Davis, House of War: Islam’s Jihad Against the World (Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2015);
  • Islamic Jihad: A Legacy of Forced Conversion, Imperialism, and Slavery (Bloomington, IN: iUniversity, 2009).

MORE via my site, RELIGIO-POLITICAL TALK

AGAIN, to be clear via STAND TO REASON:

  • Not only were students able to demonstrate the paucity of evidence for this claim, but we helped them discover that the facts of history show the opposite: religion is the cause of a very small minority of wars. Phillips and Axelrod’s three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars lays out the simple facts. In 5 millennia worth of wars—1,763 total—only 123 (or about 7%) were religious in nature (according to author Vox Day in the book The Irrational Atheist). If you remove the 66 wars waged in the name of Islam, it cuts the number down to a little more than 3%. A second [5-volume] scholarly source, The Encyclopedia of War edited by Gordon Martel, confirms this data, concluding that only 6% of the wars listed in its pages can be labelled religious wars. Thirdly, William Cavanaugh’s book, The Myth of Religious Violence, exposes the “wars of religion” claim. And finally, a recent report (2014) from the Institute for Economics and Peace further debunks this myth.

In other words, the culturally Christian West seems to diminish the propensity to “war.”

WHICH may be part of the issue, as well as culturally where we are headed with “gender,” “climate legislation/regulation,” “free-speech,” and the like that are bringing a consensus of sorts on the idea of the positive attributes of the Judeo-Christian worldview. Which leads me to my next example… a recent ATLANTIC article. Mr. Thompson starts the article thus:

  • As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.

Here, ARMSTRONG & GETTY discuss the article, as two non-believers/cultural Christians themselves:

As they were discussing the issue, I was thinking of this well worn quote from G.K. Chesterton: “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.” You should read the entire ATLANTIC article.

Bill Maher recently noted the following:

  • For all the progressives and academics who refer to Israel as an outpost of Western civilization, like it’s a bad thing, please note: Western civilization is what gave the world pretty much every [expletive] liberal precept that liberals are supposed to adore. Individual liberty, scientific inquiry, rule of law, religious freedom, women’s rights, human rights, democracy, trial by jury, freedom of speech. Please, somebody, stop us before we enlighten again. 

Western civ is basically the Greco-Roman/Judaica-Christianity stream of influence. The CHRISTIAN POST, after quoting Maher, finishes their story:

  • Which, in fact, brings up just what Bill Maher left out in his otherwise thoughtful and compelling monologue. As you might expect from the guy behind the faith-despising faux-documentary Religulous, he’s not quite ready to admit the role of religion in cultivating liberty and human rights. Because Voltaire and Rousseau were anti-religious, they are safe to mention. Locke and King are often praised almost in spite of their deep faith, which Maher never mentioned. 

For more on the video to the right, see my post:

And it is this failure for community, freedom, and following the science (gender) that is chasing people away from secularism… into Western Foundations.

Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” talks to Frank Turek author of “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist” about the collapse of the New Atheist movement; Richard Dawkins admitting that religion may be necessary for a flourishing society; the failure of atheism in providing a sense of purpose and meaning; what prominent atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris overlooked; how only religions like Christianity and Judaism can protect a society from the worst elements of radical Islam; the spreading of social justice and woke culture in America’s churches; the case for intelligent design as a part of the story of evolution; how morality always ends up being legislated; Jordan Peterson’s utilitarian view of religion; and much more.

CROSS EXAMINED NOTED: Yes, we know that Dave Rubin is an openly gay man. CrossExamined.org does not always agree with and affirm all the held beliefs of our guests. Dave did not agree with everything Frank said when he was on The Rubin Report last month either. However, it is good to have dialogue and ask questions of non-Christian guests to see if they are open to Christ, as you will hear Frank do with Dave. We also welcome guests who can add value to specific topics on which we do agree. Despite our noted disagreements, Dave gets a lot right.

I will end with this article I found to be an interesting and pleasant read… this is how it ends:

From Relativism to Wokism: A Path of Confusion, Fallacy and Self-Destruction

Society appears to have come a long way from initially professing relativism, which rejects any and all standards of truth including moral, to eventually embracing wokism – an utterly aggressive force of imposed “moralistic” judgment. Semantically different, these concepts are actually homogeneous. When objective truth is denied, its place does not remain empty; it is swiftly occupied by opinions and beliefs of the “self,” either formed by individuals themselves or, more commonly, enforced through educational, group and/or societal indoctrination. People who do not love truth or are precluded from seeking it will find themselves confused, easily manipulated and ultimately deceived.

The tree is always known by its fruit.

 

The Bible Summarized in 11-Minutes

Published by Papa Giorgio

See my post: Good News Means There is Bad News

The Bible can be a difficult book to understand, especially for people who have not read it. Within its pages lies a rich deposit of priceless and timeless truths. These incredible truths apply to people as much today as they did when the Bible was written over a period of 1,500+ years extending from approximately 3,500 to 2,000 years ago.

God’s Story

When we know God’s story, it changes everything: who we are, what we want, and how we live. View this 5 minute video to see how you fit in to God’s story.

God’s Story from JT on Vimeo.

Love Is Illusory (Wolpert | Sizer/Ammi | Provine | + Lennox)

Published by Papa Giorgio

UPDATED w/Dawkins & Greg Bahnsen at the end.

“‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York, NY: Schribner, 1995), 3.

In this short montage I start out with Lewis Wolpert on the “Unthinkable” program with Justin Brierley. According to evolution, love is reducible entirely to natural causes. I add a response I love from a cyber friend (Ken Ammi) via his debate in March 2010 with Michael Sizer (see my upload of just this part). And of course I add Provine for good measure.

  • …love better coheres within the Christian, mind-first, conception of reality—where love has role, meaning and place in a universe created by a God who is love. (THE GOSPEL COALITION)

Here is a short snippet from John Lennox’s book, “Determined to Believe? The Sovereignty of God, Freedom, Faith, and Human Responsibility“

Free will and love

Another capacity that would be impossible without free will is the capacity to love. The existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre captured this idea well:

The man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. He is not bent on becoming the object of passion which flows forth mechanically. He does not want to possess an automaton, and if we want to humiliate him, we need try to only persuade him that the beloved’s passion is the result of a psychological determinism. The lover will then feel that both his love and his being are cheapened… If the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone.7

The endowment of men and women with free will inevitably implies the possibility that they might use that free will to choose evil, and to reject love, even the love of God. Hence we must consider some necessary implications of human free will for the structure of nature. If the free will and free choice that God gave to human beings were intended to be genuine, that very fact necessitated that nature should possess a certain degree of autonomy.

C.S. Lewis puts it this way:

People often talk as if nothing were easier than for two naked minds to “meet” or to become aware of each other. But I see no possibility of their doing so except in a common medium which forms their “external world” or environment… What we need for human society is exactly what we have – a neutral something, neither you nor I, which we can both manipulate so as to make signs to each other. I can talk to you because we can both set up sound waves in the common air between us.8

Lewis then points out that this and other neutral fields – matter, in other words – must have a certain fixed nature, a certain autonomy as Lewis calls it. Suppose the contrary were the case. Imagine, for example, that the world was structured in such a way that a beam of wood remained hard and strong when used in the construction of a house, but it became as soft as grass when I hit my neighbour with it. Or if the air refused to carry lies and insults. Indeed, says Lewis:

If the principle were carried to its logical conclusion evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in our thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighbourhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations.9

The result would be, of course, that real freedom of human will and choice would be negated.

Nature, then, must have a certain autonomy, in order that there can be a society of beings with free will, able to make real moral decisions for good or evil, and to carry them out in practice. The potential of evil thought and act to produce evil effects cannot be annulled without simultaneously removing the necessary condition for free will to function. This is a moral universe.

So far, so good, but what lies behind all of this? How does this universe come to be a moral universe; and if we are to be free within it, what are the basic conditions for achieving that freedom?

7 J-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, New York, Pocket Books, 1984, p. 478.

8 C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, London, HarperCollins, 2002, p. 18.

9 Ibib., p. 21.

Naturalism is self-defeating Richard Dawkins vs. Greg Bahnsen

Are Those Who Have Not Heard the Gospel Damned? RPT Q&A +More

Published by Papa Giorgio

UPDATED WITH WRETCHED… originally posted August 2014

This evangelism encounter is POWERFUL. Watch an intelligent college student PRESS street-preacher Todd Friel on the requirements to enter Heaven, then receive a biblical explanation.

This post is a response to a question posed to me via my email by an atheist.

I see that you do some apologetics. Here are a few sincere questions that I’ve tried to get answered from Christians like Greg Koukl, but I never seem to get a response. I’m not baiting you by sending you these questions. If you have any thoughts on these issues, I’d appreciate getting to read your opinion.

1. The New Testament makes it clear that its only through faith in Jesus and his sacrifice that humans can enter heaven. Anyone who lived before Jesus started his ministry had no way of having faith in Jesus. Maybe the people of ancient Israel could piece together what they needed to believe to achieve salvation, but for the gentiles or even humans who lived in North America before the birth of Jesus, they would have no knowledge of the nation of Israel. And most certainly they would have no knowledge of a coming messiah or a future person named Jesus and his sacrifice. What I can conclude is that God allowed humans to be born that would have absolutely no chance of avoiding eternal torment in the fires of hell. I’ve been told that human morality proves that God must be a moral being. However, we have an enormous contradiction here. The God in this scenario is not worthy of respect or love because he is not moral. Hitler and Stalin would have to be quite envious of the amount of torment this God would have allowed.

I brought up the idea of Native-Americas (N-A) not hearing the Gospel with my dad. It seemed, to me, unfair that they should not be afforded at least some clarity in an opportunity to be judged before their maker. My dad shared his thoughts on the matter, and it started with a reading from Romans:

  • 18 For God’s wrath  is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth,  19 since what can be known  about God is evident among them,  because God has shown it to them. 20 For His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world,  being understood through what He has made.  As a result, people are without excuse. (The Holy Bible: Holman Christian Standard Version. [Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2009], Ro 1:18–20.)
  • But God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth. But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse. (Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language [Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2005], Ro 1:18–20.)

He explained that the tribes that were very “war-like,” like the Comanches, acted in rejection of what they knew to be God’s creation and how they should treat their fellow man and nature via the attributes they could clearly interpret via nature. The Sioux were at other times feared as well.

Peaceful tribes – not perfect mind you, but they had a deep understanding of their Creator and how to care for their own and other Native-American tribes they encountered — would interpret nature’s revelatory aspect of Whom they were to worship, and how. The Hopi tribe is one example.

To be clear, when theologians say that God is ultimately sovereign in his decisions over his creation, I am down with this. God — in classical understanding — IS the “Good” and would have a larger view of the panoply of history (since God would be outside of it and viewing it as a whole… the Eternal Now type stuff). So His judgement would necessarily be a Just one. I am not questioning this. I am saying that there are views within orthodoxy that struggle with the boundaries of those who have lived by law seeing that redemption of nature and themselves was somehow woven into nature and never hearing the Gospel (Hebrews 11:9-11). …continuing….

So using the Romans understanding of “The Book of Nature,” and the basis for “unsaved” people seeing – yes, even God’s attributes – something metaphysical and not just material, and looked forward to this hope. Also, these stories of creation and serving a God were handed down from the beginning of mankind. Some people across the earth held close these ancient stories although changed with time.

Combine this with the story of Abraham’s Bosom (Luke 16:19-31) and what Peter tells us about Jesus preaching to these lost souls (I Peter 3:18-20). I would posit — staying within the lane-lines of orthodoxy — that those in the world [pre and post Calvary] who have not been afforded a good explanation of the Gospel message may be afforded an opportunity to respond. This is not me arguing for universalism, but for justice being metered out in some form that was communicated to the Hebraic peoples that is hinted to in the New Testament.

Some Commentary On 1 Peter 3:18-19

This verse raises the two most difficult questions in the letter. When did Jesus preach to the spirits in prison, and who were they? Some take the verse to refer to the chronological sequel to Jesus’ death, when his spirit passed into the realms of the departed. Then, with Acts 2:31 and Eph. 4:9, this verse establishes the clause in the Creeds about Jesus’ descent to the dead. In that case he must have preached to all the dead in one of three ways: to offer them a second chance of salvation; to proclaim his victory over death and triumph over the power of evil and so confirm the sentence on unbelievers and announce deliverance for believers; to proclaim release from purgatory to those who had repented just before they perished in the flood (a popular interpretation among Roman Catholic writers).

Neither the first nor the last of these can be supported from Scripture, but the second has been held by many commentators as fitting in with the NT evidence above. E.G. Selwyn (The First Epistle of Peter [Macmillan, 1949]), and others see the spirits in prison as the fallen angels of Gn. 6:1–8 referred to in 2 Pet. 2:4–10 and Jude 6 as well as in the apocryphal 1 Enoch. Peter’s aim in this context is to demonstrate that God’s purpose is being worked out even in times of suffering. So it would seem best to understand the preaching as a declaration of Christ’s triumph, in order to assert (22) that all angels, authorities and powers [are] in submission to him. Grudem (TNTC) in an appendix summarizes the views and claims that the spirits were Noah’s contemporaries who rejected the preaching of the Spirit of Christ through Noah (see 2 Pet. 2:5) and are now in the prison of the abode of the dead. The interpretation of made alive by the Spirit (18) as a reference to the resurrection, and the spirits in prison as a reference to the fallen angels is cogently argued by R. T. France in New Testament Interpretation, ed. I. H. Marshall (Paternoster Press, 1979), pp. 264–281. He claims that NT and contemporary usage favour this understanding of the word spirits when used by itself, rather than applying it to men and women who had died before Jesus came to bring the gospel.

No view is free of problems, but the use of a verb implying steady and purposeful progression (went [19] and has gone [22] are both the same Gk. word poreutheis) suggests that Peter is recounting what Jesus accomplished between his death and exaltation.

D. A. Carson et al., eds., New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition, 4th ed. (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), 1380–1381.

I marry this understanding to a view via William Lane Craig, a name you may be familiar with is on the opposing side of Christian apologetics. He has a view on Molinism I enjoy a bit. [“Enjoy a bit” – I believe is still in the pale of orthodoxy] Here is what he says, and I will emphasize the important aspect I wish to highlight:

The doctrine of Molinism seeks to reconcile God’s sovereign predestination with man’s free will. Through His divine middle knowledge, God can know all possible outcomes of any world that is feasible for Him to create, including all the circumstances required for an individual to come to a saving knowledge of Him. But what if the saving of one individual means the loss of another? Does Molinism provide answers to such a dilemma? In this article, Dr. Craig answers questions on the how God would act if his choices were bound by damning either person A or person B arbitrarily.

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/molinism

I see the solution to your query in your first question in the above. [And the few videos immediately below.]

And it is the same question[s] I struggled with and struggle with. This does away with the contradiction you see. I do wish to note however, that you are taking a moral position in your premise, Saby. And without God, this cannot be the case. Jesus would HAVE to be intimately involved in all of the above scenarios… intimately. None of the above take away from this fact.

I do not know your worldview you operate from, but I can assume atheistic in its presuppositions. But truth (absolute ethical statements are included in this understanding of truth) is something of a fiction to the atheistic evolutionist. Here are some quotes and audio/videos to make my point:

Let’s consider a basic question: Why does the natural world make any sense to begin with? Albert Einstein once remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Why should we be able to grasp the beauty, elegance, and complexity of our universe?

Einstein understood a basic truth about science, namely, that it relies upon certain philosophical assumptions about the natural world. These assumptions include the existence of an external world that is orderly and rational, and the trustworthiness of our minds to grasp that world. Science cannot proceed apart from these assumptions, even though they cannot be independently proven. Oxford professor John C. Lennox asks a penetrating question, “At the heart of all science lies the conviction that the universe is orderly. Without this deep conviction science would not be possible. So we are entitled to ask: Where does the conviction come from?”” Why is the world orderly? And why do our minds comprehend this order?

Toward the end of The God Delusion, Dawkins admits that since we are the product of natural selection, our senses cannot be fully trusted. After all, according to Darwinian evolution, our senses have been formed to aid survival, not necessarily to deliver true belief. Since a human being has been cobbled together through the blind process of natural selection acting on random mutation, says Dawkins, it’s unlikely that our views of the world are completely true. Outspoken philosopher of neuro-science Patricia Churchland agrees:

The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it… enhances the organism’s chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, takes the hindmost.

Dawkins is on the right track to suggest that naturalism should lead people to be skeptical about trusting their senses. Dawkins just doesn’t take his skepticism far enough. In Miracles, C. S. Lewis points out that knowledge depends upon the reliability of our mental faculties. If human reasoning is not trustworthy, then no scientific conclusions can be considered true or false. In fact, we couldn’t have any knowledge about the world, period. Our senses must be reliable to acquire knowledge of the world, and our reasoning faculties must be reliable to process the acquired knowledge. But this raises a particularly thorny dilemma for atheism. If the mind has developed through the blind, irrational, and material process of Darwinian evolution, then why should we trust it at all? Why should we believe that the human brain—the outcome of an accidental process—actually puts us in touch with reality? Science cannot be used as an answer to this question, because science itself relies upon these very assumptions.

Even Charles Darwin was aware of this problem: “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” If Darwinian evolution is true, we should distrust the cognitive faculties that make science possible.

Sean McDowell and Jonathan Morrow, Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2010), 37-38.

….Darwin thought that, had the circumstances for reproductive fitness been different, then the deliverances of conscience might have been radically different. “If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill  their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering” (Darwin, Descent, 82). As it happens, we weren’t “reared” after the manner of hive bees, and so we have widespread and strong beliefs about the sanctity of human life and its implications for how we should treat our siblings and our offspring.

But this strongly suggests that we would have had whatever beliefs were ultimately fitness producing given the circumstances of survival. Given the background belief of naturalism, there appears to be no plausible Darwinian reason for thinking that the fitness-producing predispositions that set the parameters for moral reflection have anything whatsoever to do with the truth of the resulting moral beliefs. One might be able to make a case for thinking that having true beliefs about, say, the predatory behaviors of tigers would, when combined with the understandable desire not to be eaten, be fitness producing. But the account would be far from straightforward in the case of moral beliefs.” And so the Darwinian explanation undercuts whatever reason the naturalist might have had for thinking that any of our moral beliefs is true. The result is moral skepticism.

If our pretheoretical moral convictions are largely the product of natural selection, as Darwin’s theory implies, then the moral theories we find plausible are an indirect result of that same evolutionary process. How, after all, do we come to settle upon a proposed moral theory and its principles as being true? What methodology is available to us?

Paul Copan and William Lane Craig [Mark D. Linville], eds., Contending With Christianity’s Critics: Answering the New Atheists & Other Objections (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2009), 70.

What about human actions? They are of no more value or significance than the actions of any other material thing. Consider rocks rolling down a hill and coming to rest at the bottom. We don’t say that some particular arrangement of the rocks is right and another is wrong. Rocks don’t have a duty to roll in a particular way and land in a particular place. Their movement is just the product of the laws of physics. We don’t say that rocks “ought” to land in a certain pattern and that if they don’t then something needs to be done about it. We don’t strive for a better arrangement or motion of the rocks. In just the same way, there is no standard by which human actions can be judged. We are just another form of matter in motion, like the rocks rolling down the hill.

We tend to think that somewhere “out there” there are standards of behaviour that men ought to follow. But according to Dawkins there is only the “natural, physical world”. Nothing but particles and forces. These things cannot give rise to standards that men have a duty to follow. In fact they cannot even account for the concept of “ought”. There exist only particles of matter obeying the laws of physics. There is no sense in which anything ought to be like this or ought to be like that. There just is whatever there is, and there just happens whatever happens in accordance with the laws of physics.

Men’s actions are therefore merely the result of the laws of physics that govern the behaviour of the particles that make up the chemicals in the cells and fluids of their bodies and thus control how they behave. It is meaningless to say that the result of those physical reactions ought to be this or ought to be that. It is whatever it is. It is meaningless to say that people ought to act in a certain way. It is meaningless to say (to take a contemporary example) that the United States and its allies ought not to have invaded Iraq. The decision to invade was just the outworking of the laws of physics in the bodies of the people who governed those nations. And there is no sense in which the results of that invasion can be judged as good or bad because there are no standards to judge anything by. There are only particles reacting together; no standards, no morals, nothing but matter in motion.

Dawkins finds it very hard to be consistent to this system of belief. He thinks and acts as if there were somewhere, somehow standards that people ought to follow. For example in The God Delusion, referring particularly to the Christian doctrine of atonement, he says that there are “teachings in the New Testament that no good person should support”. And he claims that religion favours an in-group/out-group approach to morality that makes it “a significant force for evil in the world”.

According to Dawkins, then, there are such things as good and evil. We all know what good and evil mean. We know that if no good person should support the doctrine of atonement then we ought not to support that doctrine. We know that if religion is a force for evil then we are better off without religion and that, indeed, we ought to oppose religion. The concepts of good and evil are innate in us. The problem for Dawkins is that good and evil make no sense in his worldview. “There is nothing beyond the natural, physical world.” There are no standards out there that we ought to follow. There is only matter in motion reacting according to the laws of physics. Man is not of a different character to any other material thing. Men’s actions are not of a different type or level to that of rocks rolling down a hill. Rocks are not subject to laws that require them to do good and not evil; nor are men. Every time you hear Dawkins talking about good and evil as if the words actually meant something, it should strike you loud and clear as if he had announced to the world, “I am contradicting myself”.

Please note that I am not saying that Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in good and evil. On the contrary, my point is that he does believe in them but that his worldview renders such standards meaningless.

____________
The Dawkins Proof, chapter one.

Even Darwin had some misgivings about the reliability of human beliefs. He wrote, “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

Given unguided evolution, “Darwin’s Doubt” is a reasonable one. Even given unguided or blind evolution, it’s difficult to say how probable it is that creatures—even creatures like us—would ever develop true beliefs. In other words, given the blindness of evolution, and that its ultimate “goal” is merely the survival of the organism (or simply the propagation of its genetic code), a good case can be made that atheists find themselves in a situation very similar to Hume’s.

The Nobel Laureate and physicist Eugene Wigner echoed this sentiment: “Certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.” That is, atheists have a reason to doubt whether evolution would result in cognitive faculties that produce mostly true beliefs. And if so, then they have reason to withhold judgment on the reliability of their cognitive faculties. Like before, as in the case of Humean agnostics, this ignorance would, if atheists are consistent, spread to all of their other beliefs, including atheism and evolution. That is, because there’s no telling whether unguided evolution would fashion our cognitive faculties to produce mostly true beliefs, atheists who believe the standard evolutionary story must reserve judgment about whether any of their beliefs produced by these faculties are true. This includes the belief in the evolutionary story. Believing in unguided evolution comes built in with its very own reason not to believe it.

This will be an unwelcome surprise for atheists. To make things worse, this news comes after the heady intellectual satisfaction that Dawkins claims evolution provided for thoughtful unbelievers. The very story that promised to save atheists from Hume’s agnostic predicament has the same depressing ending.

It’s obviously difficult for us to imagine what the world would be like in such a case where we have the beliefs that we do and yet very few of them are true. This is, in part, because we strongly believe that our beliefs are true (presumably not all of them are, since to err is human—if we knew which of our beliefs were false, they would no longer be our beliefs).

Suppose you’re not convinced that we could survive without reliable belief-forming capabilities, without mostly true beliefs. Then, according to Plantinga, you have all the fixins for a nice argument in favor of God’s existence For perhaps you also think that—given evolution plus atheism—the probability is pretty low that we’d have faculties that produced mostly true beliefs. In other words, your view isn’t “who knows?” On the contrary, you think it’s unlikely that blind evolution has the skill set for manufacturing reliable cognitive mechanisms. And perhaps, like most of us, you think that we actually have reliable cognitive faculties and so actually have mostly true beliefs. If so, then you would be reasonable to conclude that atheism is pretty unlikely. Your argument, then, would go something like this: if atheism is true, then it’s unlikely that most of our beliefs are true; but most of our beliefs are true, therefore atheism is probably false.

Notice something else. The atheist naturally thinks that our belief in God is false. That’s just what atheists do. Nevertheless, most human beings have believed in a god of some sort, or at least in a supernatural realm. But suppose, for argument’s sake, that this widespread belief really is false, and that it merely provides survival benefits for humans, a coping mechanism of sorts. If so, then we would have additional evidence—on the atheist’s own terms—that evolution is more interested in useful beliefs than in true ones. Or, alternatively, if evolution really is concerned with true beliefs, then maybe the widespread belief in God would be a kind of “evolutionary” evidence for his existence.

You’ve got to wonder.

Mitch Stokes, A Shot of Faith: To the Head (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2012), 44-45.

AND THE BELOW is taken from another post of mine:

I wish to start out with an excerpt from a chapter in my book where I use two scholarly works that use Darwinian naturalism as a guide to their ethic:

  • Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 1997).
  • Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).

My incorporation of these works into my book (quote):

“Lest one think this line of thinking is insane, that is: sexual acts are something from our evolutionary past and advantageous; rape is said to not be a pathology but an evolutionary adaptation – a strategy for maximizing reproductive success….. The first concept that one must understand is that these authors do not view nature alone as imposing a moral “oughtness” into the situation of survival of the fittest. They view rape, for instance, in its historical evolutionary context as neither right nor wrong ethically. Rape, is neither moral nor immoral vis-à-vis evolutionary lines of thought, even if ingrained in us from our evolutionary paths of survival. Did you catch that? Even if a rape occurs today, it is neither moral nor immoral, it is merely currently taboo. The biological, amoral, justification of rape is made often times as a survival mechanism bringing up the net “survival status” of a species, usually fraught with examples of homosexual worms, lesbian seagulls, and the like.”

(pp. 7-9 of  Roman-Epicurean-ism-Natural-Law-and-Homosexuality)

Now, hear from other atheist and evolutionary apologists themselves in regard to the matter:

Richard Dawkins

(h/t: TrueFreeThinker) – A Statement Made by an atheist at the Atheist and Agnostic Society:

Some atheists do believe in ethical absolutes, some don’t. My answer is a bit more complicated — I don’t believe that there are any axiological claims which are absolutely true, except within the context of one person’s opinion.

That is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so are ethics. So, why is Adolf Hitler wrong? Because he murdered millions, and his only justification, even if it were valid, was based on things which he should have known were factually wrong. Why is it wrong to do that? Because I said so. Unless you actually disagree with me — unless you want to say that Adolf Hitler was right — I’m not sure I have more to say.

[side note] You may also be aware that Richard Dawkins stated,

…I asked an obvious question: “As we speak of this shifting zeitgeist, how are we to determine who’s right? If we do not acknowledge some sort of external [standard], what is to prevent us from saying that the Muslim [extremists] aren’t right?”

“Yes, absolutely fascinating.” His response was immediate. “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question. But whatever [defines morality], it’s not the Bible. If it was, we’d be stoning people for breaking the Sabbath.”

I was stupefied. He had readily conceded that his own philosophical position did not offer a rational basis for moral judgments. His intellectual honesty was refreshing, if somewhat disturbing on this point….

Stated during an interview with Larry Taunton, “Richard Dawkins: The Atheist Evangelist,” by Faith Magazine, Issue Number 18, December 2007 (copyright; 2007-2008)

Lewis Wolpert

From the video description:

Atheists Trying to Have Their Cake and Eat It Too on Morality. This video shows that when an atheist denies objective morality they also affirm moral good and evil without the thought of any contradiction or inconsistency on their part.

Dan Barker

This is from the video Description for the Dan Barker video below:

The atheist’s animal-level view of “morality” is completely skewed by dint of its lack of objectivity. In fact, the atheist makes up his own personal version of “morals” as he goes along, and this video provides an eye-opening example of this bizarre phenomenon of the atheist’s crippled psyche:

During this debate, the atheist stated that he believed rape was morally acceptable, then he actually stated that he would rape a little girl and then kill himself — you have just got to hear his psychotic words with your own ears to believe it!

He then stammered and stumbled through a series of ridiculously lame excuses for his shameful lack of any type of moral compass.

To the utter amazement of his opponent and all present in the audience, the gruesomely amoral atheist even goes so far as to actually crack a sick little joke on the subject of SERIAL CHILD-RAPE!

:::shudders:::

Meanwhile, the Christian in the video gracefully and heroically realizes the clearly objective moral values that unquestionably come to humanity by God’s grace, and yet are far beyond the lower animal’s and the atheist’s tenuous mental grasp. Be sure to keep watching until the very end so that you can hear the Christian’s final word — it’s a real knuckle-duster!

Atheist dogma™ not only fails to provide a stable platform for objective human morality for its adherent — it precludes him even the possibility. It’s this very intellectual inability to apprehend any objective moral values that leads such believers in atheist dogma™ as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Dahmer to commit their horrific atheistic atrocities.

Any believer in atheist dogma™, given sufficient power, would take the exact same course of action that Hitler did, without a moment’s hesitation.

Note as well that evolutionary naturalism has very dogmatic implication, IF — that is — the honest atheist/evolutionist follow the matter to their logical conclusions, via the ineffable Dr. Provine:

William Provine

Atheist and staunch evolutionist Dr. William Provine (who is often quoted by Richard Dawkins) admits what life has in stored if Darwinism is true. The quote comes from his debate here with Dr. Phillip E. Johnson at Stanford University, April 30, 1994.

Sam Harris denies completely free will: “In fact, the concept of free will is a non-starter, both philosophically and scientifically.” This is important — as Stephen Hawking points out in his lecture entitled Determinism: Is Man a Slave or the Master of His Fate — who admitted that if “we are the random products of chance, and hence, not free, or whether God had designed these laws within which we are free.”[1] In other words, do we have the ability to make choices, or do we simply follow a chemical reaction induced by millions of mutational collisions of free atoms? Michael Polyni mentions that this “reduction of the world to its atomic elements acting blindly in terms of equilibrations of forces,” a belief that has prevailed “since the birth of modern science, has made any sort of teleological view of the cosmos seem unscientific…. [to] the contemporary mind.”[2]

Which is why in Hawkings most recent book he says “This book is rooted in the concept of scientific determinism, which implies that the answer to [the question of miracles] is that there are no miracles, or exceptions to the laws of nature.”[3] And hence the spiral from scientism, to determinism, to reductionism: “…so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”[4] 

[1] Ravi Zacharias, The Real Face of Atheism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2004), 118, 119.

[2] Michael Polanti and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago, IL: Chicago university Press, 1977), 162.

[3] Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (London, England: Bantam Press, 2010), 34.

[4] Ibid., 32.

Ethics and propositions that include ethical choice is one that rejects naturalistic origins. Some more quotes to make the point:

What merit would attach to moral virtue if the acts that form such habitual tendencies and dispositions were not acts of free choice on the part of the individual who was in the process of acquiring moral virtue? Persons of vicious moral character would have their characters formed in a manner no different from the way in which the character of a morally virtuous person was formed—by acts entirely determined, and that could not have been otherwise by freedom of choice.

Mortimer J. Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1985), 154.

If what he says is true, he says it merely as the result of his heredity and environment, and nothing else. He does not hold his determinist views because they are true, but because he has such-and-such stimuli; that is, not because the structure of the structure of the universe is such-and-such but only because the configuration of only part of the universe, together with the structure of the determinist’s brain, is such as to produce that result…. They [determinists – I would posit any philosophical naturalist] want to be considered as rational agents arguing with other rational agents; they want their beliefs to be construed as beliefs, and subjected to rational assessment; and they want to secure the rational assent of those they argue with, not a brainwashed repetition of acquiescent pattern. Consistent determinists should regard it as all one whether they induce conformity to their doctrines by auditory stimuli or a suitable injection of hallucinogens: but in practice they show a welcome reluctance to get out their syringes, which does equal credit to their humanity and discredit to their views. Determinism, therefore, cannot be true, because if it was, we should not take the determinists’ arguments as being really arguments, but as being only conditioned reflexes. Their statements should not be regarded as really claiming to be true, but only as seeking to cause us to respond in some way desired by them.

J. R. Lucas, The Freedom of the Will (New York: NY: Oxford University Press, 1970), 114, 115.

He thus acknowledged the need for any theory to allow that humans have genuine freedom to recognize the truth. He (again, correctly) saw that if all thought, belief, feeling, and choice are determined (i.e., forced on humans by outside conditions) then so is the determinists’ acceptance of the theory of determinism forced on them by those same conditions. In that case they could never claim to know their theory is true since the theory making that claim would be self-referentially incoherent. In other words, the theory requires that no belief is ever a free judgment made on the basis of experience or reason, but is always a compulsion over which the believer has no control.

Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2005), 174.

Determinism is self-stultifying.  If my mental processes are totally determined, I am totally determined either to accept or to reject determinism.  But if the sole reason for my believing or not believing X is that I am causally determined to believe it I have no ground for holding that my judgment is true or false.

J. P. Moreland & William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003), 241; Quoting: H.P. Owen, Christian Theism (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1984), 118.

Frank Zindler (Editor of American Atheist Magazine and Director of American Atheists Press), denies the existence of free will. In an article he wrote for the American Atheist magazine, he writes this:

Although I risk inciting to disaffection many of the people who have expressed admiration for some of my previous articles, I must now focus my ‘Probing Mind’ upon the question, “Can will be free?” Let me answer the question straightaway with a firm “no,” and then attempt to support my conclusion.

The Center for Naturalism is strongly advocating for widespread rejection of free will:

We should doubt the little god of free will on the very same grounds that atheists doubt the big god of traditional religions: there’s no evidence for it.

(Reasons for God)

I hope this helped and challenged you to know the variability within faith (while remaining orthodox) as well as bringing you face-to-face with your own premises in your worldview. Remember, if you disagree with the above ethics portion, you are not arguing against me but arguing against fellow atheists (if you are an atheist… I would hope you are a soft-agnostic). I also hope you asked your questions in a manner that is in line with you truly seeking a solution to these sticky issues. I will respond to your other challenges (honest questions) at a later date,

Finally, it is objected that the ultimate loss of a single soul means the defeat of omnipotence. And so it does. In creating beings with free will, omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of such defeat. What you call defeat, I call miracle: for to make things which are not Itself, and thus to become, in a sense, capable of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats we attribute to the Deity. I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man “wishes” to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York, NY: Simon & Shuster, 1996), 113-114.

Papa Giorgio