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Physical and Spiritual Health

I see Christians ask fairly often for specialized help in their spiritual walk, ranging from special counseling to help with questions about their faith or advice about parenting. These requests are usually sincere, but often they seem unnecessary. Let me explain via a comparison.  When dealing with a health issue, people could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars and countless hours seeing doctors and specialists, trainers and dieticians, and doing who knows what. Often these are necessary, but these experts will first check on the patient's habits.  Are they struggling with weight but eat a gallon of ice cream every night after a full three meals? Do they binge whole bottles of alcohol every weekend? Have they not left their bed for months save for going to the bathroom?  These are the first things that any good specialist will advise changing. Drop some of the sugar and alcohol, increase the vegetables, or at least start taking vitamins, and start exercising, even if...
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Non-Christian scholars on the History of Jesus

The below is something I cobbled together as a pre-made Facebook comment when dealing with Jesus mythicists, though it works pretty well against most New Atheists in general. I’ve decided to post it as a blog post and will hopefully update it over time with more relevant quotes and better citation quality (page numbers, for example). Let's consider what a variety of non-Christian or anti-Christian scholars have to say about the existence of Jesus on the points of the crucifixion, burial, and later appearances of Jesus. The below list includes Gerd Ludemann, Bart Ehrman, Jodi Magness, Geza Vermes, Reginald H. Fuller, John Dominic Crossan, Michael Grant, Richard Burridge, Graham Gould, and E. P. Sanders, along with summary by amateur scholars Tim O'Neill and The Dutch Maverick. General opinion of the records: “As we will see in a moment, the oldest and best sources we have for knowing about the life of Jesus—despite what Leigh Teabing intimates—are the four Gospels of the New Tes...
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Women in Apologetics: An Antidote to Sexism

Religious Command I'm not an expert on all of the world's religions. But out of all the studying I've done so far, Christianity is the only religion with the intellect baked into its central commands. What do I mean by that? Jesus told us to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, our mind, our soul, and our strength. Did you catch that? All of our mind! God didn’t call us to love Him with only our hearts, feelings, and actions. God also calls us to think deeply about Him, drink from His word deeply, study it, reflect on it, and learn how to understand it. Apologetics This is one of the things I love about apologetics: that's the essence of the field! We want to learn more about God. We want to learn whether our beliefs are correct and, if they're right, how they're right, why they're right. We don't like or encourage or foster blind belief. We want to have good reasons to believe what we believe, and if we don't have good reasons for them, we w...
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A response to Tripp Crosby

  This article responds to Tripp Crosby’s TikTok, found here , seen on 7FEB22. Note to Tripp Crosby: if you want to take these issues seriously, I would love to talk with you. Email, Zoom, recorded YouTube discussion; whatever works best for you. We can discuss the history of the events, different scholars, various texts. I’d be glad to field your questions and answer them as best I can. Since Tripp effectively presented this TikTok as a series of points, my response will be in kind. I created a complete transcript and will address each point line by line. However, before I begin there, I want to make a few points of my own: I will not approach this assuming Christianity is true, Jesus rose the dead, my “denomination” is correct, the Bible is the Word of God, etc.  There are different ways to categorize how something is wrong; I will be using the following two for this article: Directly: something that is just outright wrong. For example, claiming that 2+2=5. Indirectly: somet...
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