Previously, I blogged about the historical criteria that historians use to evaluate documents. One of the criteria is “multiple independent sources”. If a story is reported in multiple indendent sources, then historians are more likely to evaluate it as historically accurate. But how about the four gospels? Are they independent sources? The answer might not be what you expect.

Here’s how the question was put to Dr. Craig:

The latest video, “Did Jesus Rise From the Dead,” is especially compelling, but I had a question about it. In the part one video, you cite as evidence, the Gospels plus Acts and First Corinthians and you refer to them as “independent” and “unconnected” sources. But this isn’t exactly true, is it? After all, two of these books were written by the same author, Luke, and so Luke and Acts are connected by authorship. Furthermore, isn’t it true that much information relayed in Matthew and Luke were taken from Mark? This two facts would make it untrue to call the Gospels “independent” and “unconnected” would they not?

Here’s the video he’s talking about:

Dr. Craig answers the question in his latest question of the week. I think this answer is important for those who aren’t aware of how the gospels are organized.

He writes:

The objection is based on a simple misunderstanding. It assumes that the sources I’m referring to are the books of the New Testament.  But that’s not what I’m talking about.

New Testament critics have identified a number of sources behind the New Testament, sources on which the New Testament authors drew. For example, Matthew and Luke drew not only upon Mark as a source but also upon a source which scholars designate “Q,” which appears to have been a source containing Jesus’ sayings or teachings. Thus, if you could show that a saying in Matthew or Luke appears in both Mark and Q, that would count as multiple, independent attestation.

What does this mean? It means that although there is overlap between Matthew and Luke, called “Q”, there are actually three independent sources there: Matthew’s source, called M. Luke’s source, called L. And the material common to Matthew and Luke, which therefore PRE-DATES Matthew and Luke, called Q.

Dr. Craig lists out several independent sources in his full reply:

1. the pre-Markan Passion story used by Mark
2. the rest of the gospel of Mark has a source
3. Matthew’s source (M)
4. Luke’s source (L)
5. John’s gospel which is very different from Mark, Luke and Matthew
6. the sermons in Acts have a source
7. the early creed found in Paul’s 1 Corinthians 15

So if you are trying to lay out something from the New Testament, and you can find it in two of these sources, and at least one of them is very early, you’re in pretty good shape.

You can watch more of Dr. Craig’s videos in his playlist, here. These are especially useful for people who want to get the overall scope of the battlefield before deciding where to focus in study. Everybody should know about all of these arguments regardless of where you choose to specialize.

So, on Wednesday, I found a story on Daily Wire that made me really concerned. In the story, famous feminist Meghan Markle said that people should not reject women for marriage just because those women have had many past sexual partners. And she said that women can “make up” for their sexual pasts by excelling in their careers. I thought I should say something about this.

So first, here is the article from Daily Wire.

Markle, a far-left previously divorced radical feminist who only has work experience as an actress, says this:

Meghan Markle said she doesn’t understand why women are “vilified” for exploring their sexuality while she said it appeared that men are instead “celebrated” for doing the same.

The former actress talked about what she called the double standard when it comes to men and women “exploring” their “sensuality”… “One of the things that I think as all women, we face, as you’re getting older, you’re exploring and starting to understand your sensuality, your feminine divine,” the Duchess of Sussex shared. “Your sexuality, oftentimes, it can be very much used against you.”

“A man, if he is a player, out having fun or whatever he’s doing, it’s often celebrated, even heralded,” she added. “But for a woman, I don’t care if she is perhaps the most successful woman in finance in her mid-50s, I promise you, someone will still go, ‘But she was such a slut in college.’ It will stick with her.”

“And I don’t understand what it is about the stigma surrounding women and their sexuality, the exploration of their sexuality that is so much more vilified than for a man…,”Markle continued.

So, the reason I have to say something about this is because Markle is a radical feminist, and her views are being accepted by many young, unmarried women. And the church is not opposing this, believing that not judging feminism is a form of “chivalry”. Christian men are terrified of telling women no, even when it’s best for women to be told no. So let’s take a look at the mistakes Markle makes.

A fixation on promiscuous men

First, notice how she is concerned with emulating men who are promiscuous. Thanks to feminism, young women reject traditional male roles such as moral and spiritual leader. Men who talk about truth and morality are seen as inferior to the men who are attractive and promiscuous.  Unfortunately, 80% of the women are all chasing after the 5% of men who have a pleasing physical appearance and displayed wealth. And since these men have options, they feel no pressure to commit to any woman. In fact, these men treat women terribly. Which is why women should ignore them, and focus on men who are displaying marriage-ability and marriage-intentions. But Meghan Markle is telling women that these promiscuous men are great, and that women need to emulate them. She just doesn’t want women to be judged for acting like these scummy promiscuous men.

What does the data say?

So why do men quietly avoid women who are promiscuous? The short answer is because promiscuous women are risky to marry.

Many feminists think that men choose women based on emotions, but this is a mistaken way of understanding men. Men do not make decisions based on feelings. Men calculate risks and costs. Men’s top concern with marriage is avoiding financial ruin from the divorce courts. Men read social science studies to understand what kinds of behaviors make a woman initiate divorce. And what those men find in the studies is that a woman’s promiscuity is a major risk factor for her initiating divorce. The more sexual partners a woman has, the higher the risk of marital instability, and the greater the likelihood of financial ruin for the man.

Compatibility or restraint? The effects of sexual timing on marriage relationships

We found that the longer a dating couple waits to have sex, the better their relationship is after marriage. In fact, couples who wait until marriage to have sex report higher relationship satisfaction (20% higher), better communication patterns (12% better), less consideration of divorce (22% lower), and better sexual quality (15% better) than those who started having sex early in their dating. For couples in between—those that became sexually involved later in their dating, but prior to marriage—the benefits were about half as strong.

Counterintuitive Trends in the Link Between Premarital Sex and Marital Stability

Consistent with prior research, those with fewer sex partners were less likely to divorce. [W]omen who married as virgins had the lowest divorce rates by far… 6 percent. […]Premarital sex with one partner substantially increases the odds of divorce (21%).

[…]The highest five-year divorce rates of all are associated with… having ten or more premarital sex partners: 33 percent.

Feminists don’t like to think that men are guiding their decisions from these studies. But men are. Feminists look at these studies, and they think “who cares about scientific studies?” and “who cares about the risks to men?” Markle is focused on women being shamed for her promiscuity, but she has no concerns about the financial ruin that men experience in divorce courts. And that’s why she finds men avoiding promiscuous women so objectionable.

A man would have to be a fool to undertake an enterprise where he has all of the risks, all of the responsibilities, all of the exposure to legal tyranny, but none of the authority to lead the relationship. And that’s why the marriage rate is in a free-fall, because men are declining the offer of unstable marriage, which is being produced by promiscuous feminists. Markle is mad because women are feeling bad about being shamed. But men feel much worse, when they lose their house, car, money, children, and are put in debtor’s prison.

Remember, feminist thought leaders approve of the hook-up culture, believing that it is critical to making sure that women can have fun with the no-commitment bad boys that they are attracted to, but without letting their flings derail their educations and careers. The goal is to prevent pregnancies with abortion, and delay marriage for as long as possible while climbing the corporate ladder.  But hook-up culture is terrible for men who desire early marriage and children. These are the exact men who are passed over by women like Markle, who despise male headship. The problem is not that promiscuous women are being shamed. The problem is that promiscuous men are NOT being shamed. Markle needs to start shaming the hot bad boys who are spending all of their future wife’s  money on casual sex with no-commitment feminists. We need more shaming of promiscuity, not less. For both sexes.

And of course, these studies work the other way, too. Women should also avoid promiscuous men, in order to avoid marriage instability. So, it is actually even more awful that Meghan Markle doesn’t tell women to avoid these promiscuous men. Her support for promiscuity is exposing women to poor treatment by unstable, manipulative, narcissistic predators.  A cynical man might think that Markle was working for socialists, who want women to make themselves unstable for marriage. That way, they would never marry, and just keep working and paying taxes for the bureaucrats to spend on buying votes from the reckless people who need government handouts in order to survive.

No fix is in the pipeline

It’s important to understand that there is no fix for Markle’s embrace of promiscuity in the pipeline. No one is thinking about the risks men face from divorce courts. (See Dr. Stephen J. Baskerville’s “Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family”)

Feminists and their Christian allies agree that women should be encouraged to embrace feminism, and men must simply “man up” and marry them anyway, regardless of the financial risks of divorce. 68% of unmarried women voted for abortion, transgenderism, same-sex marriage, and cracking down on Christians who oppose these things in the 2022 mid-terms. But that is no problem for these feminists and their Christian allies. Just bully the men into marrying these promiscuous Democrat women anyway. Who cares? Men are expendable, like slaves. Whip them harder, and force them to serve.

Marriage is voluntary. If all the focus is on women’s needs not to be “shamed” for promiscuity, and no one cares about what marriage-minded men need, then marriages will not happen.  That is how the world works in reality. Right now, a good man would have to be literally insane to marry a promiscuous feminist. Men have to assume that any woman who does not have a record of demonstrated opposition to feminism and promiscuity has taken part in the hook-up culture, and is therefore a high risk of divorce.

The video of the debate was posted by ReasonableFaith.org – Dr. Craig’s organization. This debate occurred in March 2017 at the University of Dublin, in Ireland.

The video: (91 minutes)

My non-snarky summary is below.

Dr. Craig’s opening speech

Two claims:

1. There are good reasons to think that theism is true.
2. There are not comparably good reasons to think that atheism is true.

Five reasons for God’s existence:

1. The beginning of the universe
– actual infinite past is mathematically impossible
– BGV theorem: any universe that is on balance expanding in its history (like ours) cannot be past eternal

2. Fine-tuning of cosmic quantities and constants
– slight changes to quantities and constants prevent a universe from supporting complex embodied life
– the multiverse response of atheists conflicts with observations, e.g. the Boltzmann Brains problem

3. Objective moral values
– God’s existence is required to ground objective moral values and duties

4. Minimal facts case for the resurrection of Jesus
– there are good reasons to accept the most widely accepted facts about the historical Jesus (empty tomb, appearances, early widespread belief in the resurrection)
– the best explanation of these minimal facts is that God raised Jesus from the dead

5. Experience God directly
– in the absence of any defeaters to belief in God, a person can experience God directly

Dr. Daniel Came’s opening speech

1. The hiddenness of God
– if God wants a personal relationship with us, and a relationship with God would be the greatest good for us
– God ought to reveal himself to us, but he does not  reveal himself to many people, the “non-resistant non-believers”

2. The inductive problem of evil
– many evil events occur that are pointless – there is no morally sufficient reason why God would allow them to occur
– examples: animal suffering, children born with disease, tsunamis
– the theistic response to this is that humans are not in a position to know whether there are morally sufficient reasons, due to our limitations of knowing the consequences
– but this ripple effect defense has 4 possible outcomes, 3 of which don’t do the job of justifying

Dr. Craig’s first rebuttal

1. The hiddenness of God
– God’s goal is not to make his existence known, but to draw them into a love relationship
– it’s speculative that overt displays of God’s existence would draw people to him in a love relationship, they might resent his bullying
– atheist would have to prove that God could draw more people into a love relationship with him by revealing himself more overtly

2. The inductive problem of evil
– as humans, we are not in a position to know for certain that any apparently pointless evil really is pointless
– William Alston article: 6 limitations of human knowing make it impossible to judge that an evil is actually “pointless”
– Dr. Came says that there are 4 possibilities for the ripple effects, and since 3 are bad, it’s likely that there are not morally sufficient reasons for a apparently pointless evil
– it is logically fallacious to assert probability conclusions without knowing the probabilities of those 4 options
– there is actually an argument from evil: since the problem of evil requires an objective standard of good and evil by which to measure, and God is the only possible ground of objective morality, then pressing the problem of evil actually requires the atheist to assume God, in order to ground this objective moral standard

Dr. Came’s first rebuttal

3. Objective moral values
– there are naturalistic theories of moral realism where objective moral duties and objective moral values exist in a naturalistic universe
– I’m not saying that any of them are correct, but there are many theories about object morality in a naturalistic universe

There are naturalistic theories for all of the 5 arguments that Dr. Craig presented. It is Dr. Craig’s responsibility to present those naturalistic theories and prove that they are not as good as his explanations. I’m not going to defend (or even name!) a single naturalistic theory for any of these 5 arguments by Dr. Craig.

Dr. Craig’s explanations for the 5 evidences he gave can’t be admitted, because we have to know how God did something in naturalistic terms before we can know that God did it supernaturally. Explanations are only valid if they are naturalistic.

1. The beginning of the universe
– naturalism explains how the universe expands after it came into being, so that explains how it came into being
– the God explanation, that God created the universe out of nothing, is not admissible, because it is not naturalistic
– how does God, as an unembodied mind interact with the physical world?
– the only agency that we know about is human agents, and we have bodies, so how could God perform actions without having a body?

The theistic hypothesis does not make any predictions, but naturalism makes lots of testable predictions. God could do anything, so he is not constrained and is therefore untestable. We can’t infer God as an explanation in principle because we can’t predict what is more probable if God exists than if he does not.

2. Fine-tuning of cosmic quantities and constants
– the university was not set up to make embodied intelligence plausible, because the vast majority of the universe is hostile to life
– there are models of the multiverse that escape the Boltzmann Brains problem that Dr. Craig raised

Dr. Craig’s second rebuttal

Some of Dr. Craig’s arguments are deductive (e.g. – the beginning of the universe, objective moral values), so that the conclusion follows from the premises if the premises are true. The resurrection passes the standard tests for historical explanations.

1. The beginning of the universe
– the whole point of the argument is that there is no naturalistic explanation for an ultimate beginning of the universe

2. Fine-tuning of cosmic quantities and constants
– the whole point of the argument is that there is no naturalistic explanation for a design of the universe to support life
– he has to prove that intelligences has to be attached to bodies
– human beings are non-physical minds united to physical bodies
– naturalistic attempts to explain mental operations fail
– the arguments prove that unembodied minds exist
– the vast expanse of the universe is required in order to form the galaxies, stars and heavy elements needed for complex life
– why expect that the entire universe should be small, or that life would be everywhere?
– a non-fine-tuned world is more likely in the multiverse, and in a multiverse, we are more likely to have a Boltzmann brain world than a world with complex, embodied life
– Dr. Came has not advanced any naturalistic explanation for the fine-tuning

3. Objective moral values
– non-theistic ethical theories cannot account for the ontological foundations of objective moral values and duties
– atheistic theories of moral realism simply assume objective moral values out of thin air
– it is especially hard to find any basis for objective moral duties in the absence of God

Dr. Came’s second rebuttal

5. Religious experience
– Dr. Craig should not bring up religious experience in a debate where arguments and evidence are central
– people who have dreams, hallucinations and psychotic delusions could appeal to religious experience
– religious experience is by no means universal, and it is possible to doubt it

3. Objective moral values
– there are lots of atheists who hold to objective moral values
– Dr. Craig has to explain how God grounds objective moral values and duties
– Dr. Craig has to explain why atheist moral realist theories don’t work to ground objective moral values and duties

1. The beginning of the universe
– Dr. Craig claims that something can’t come from nothing, that’s not an argument
– there are numerous models that don’t require an absolute beginning of the universe
– Dr. Craig cites the BGV theorem, but Guth (one of the authors) says that only the inflation has a beginning, not the whole universe

Dr. Craig’s conclusion

1. The beginning of the universe
– on theism, there is an efficient cause, but no material cause, for the origin of the universe
– on atheism, there is neither an efficient cause nor a material cause, for the origin of the universe: that’s worse!
– if he thinks that there are models of the universe that don’t require a beginning, then let him name a viable eternal model of the universe
– he never refuted the mathematical argues against an infinite past

2. Fine-tuning of cosmic quantities and constants
– nothing to refute

3. Objective moral values
– God is a better ground for morality than humans, because he is ultimate, and not contingent and arbitrary
– God is a being who is worthy of worship, and therefore command his creatures with moral duties

4. Minimal facts case for the resurrection of Jesus
– nothing to refute

5. Religious experience
– only justified because there are no defeaters to it

1. The hiddenness of God
– atheist has to show that if God’s existence were more obvious, that it would result in more people being drawn to him

2. The inductive problem of evil
– Dr. Came’s argument was logically fallacious, and makes errors in probability theory

Dr. Came’s conclusion

Sometimes, people can’t prove something, but lack of evidence is a justification for doubting it, e.g. – werewolves.

If none of Craig’s arguments work, then it follows that it is not rational to believe that God exists, and it is rational to believe that God does not exist.

Atheists shouldn’t have a burden of proof for what they know, only theists have a burden of proof for what they know.

My thoughts

One quick point. If life were common everywhere then atheists would infer that God wasn’t involved in it. Period. “Life is everywhere, so it’s common, why do we need a designer?” they’d say. I agree with Dr. Came about denouncing religious experience in a formal debate. I don’t like when Dr. Craig brings this up, but I see why he does it – he’s an evangelist, and that’s a good thing, too. I just worry about how it looks to atheists, although it’s good for sincere seekers. I’m not the one on the stage, though, Dr. Craig is.

I think the point about more overt revealing by God would annoy people and make them turn away. Think of how gay people respond to the suggestion that there is anything wrong with them, with rage, vandalism, threats, coercion, attempts to get you to lose your job and business, and using government as a weapon to fine and imprison you. It’s really obvious to me that more God does not mean more love of God. For those who don’t want God, the hiddenness is respect for their choice to put pleasure above the search for truth. (I mean the gay activists – I have great sympathy for people who struggle with same-sex unwanted attractions because they were impacted by a failed bond with their parent of the same sex as they are).

Whenever I meet people like Dr. Came, I always urge them to keep investigating and pursuing truth, because they will find it if they are sincerely seeking after God. Some atheists do sincerely seek God, but I don’t know any who haven’t found him. I’m not sure if that’s because those atheists who claim to be non-resistant and rational are in fact resistant and non-rational, or what the real reason is. If you believe the Bible, all unbelief is non-rational and resistant (see Romans 1). Regarding the werewolves, we don’t have any good arguments for werewolves, we do have good arguments for God. Dr. Came didn’t refute the arguments that Craig raised, nor did his own arguments for atheism work. And there are many, many more arguments (origin of life, Cambrian explosion, habitability-discoverability, molecular machines) that Craig did not raise, too.

A while back, I finished a book called “Beyond The Call: The True Story of One World War II Pilot’s Covert Mission to Rescue POWs on the Eastern Front”. It’s about a World War 2 heavy bomber pilot who completes 35 missions, and then goes into the Soviet Union (our allies, at the time) to rescue American POWs who were starving or being kidnapped or murdered by the Soviet secret police.

I found a very good article about it from Stripes, to just quickly introduce the story:

Later, after making contact with POWs roaming the Polish countryside, [Capt. Robert Trimble] fully embraced his mission. He saw the desperate plight of those who had been liberated from Third Reich prison camps. Many were sick, emaciated, often clothed in rags and left to fend for themselves during a brutally harsh winter.

Trimble risked his life numerous times over six weeks, helping to rescue hundreds of POWs. He came to the aid of others, too. In one daring rescue, nearly foiled by Russian agents who had become suspicious of his activities, Trimble helped 400 French women make it out of Poland and back to France.

Although he was being constantly trailed by Russian spies and informers, he would evade them, and bring food and money to the POWs, then put them on a train to Odessa, Ukraine, where they could get onto a ship going home.

Why I read military history

It is hard to develop virtues just by wishing and hoping. Something has to go into your mind that causes you to think differently, and feel differently. Everything that you watch on TV, hear on the radio, or see in the movie theater, is made by secular leftists. They aren’t trying to build your moral character. They’re goal is to break down your resistance to their unBiblical worldview and moral values. Instead of giving people who hate Jesus your money, just so you can be entertained, why not try to put something in front of your eyes that will make you better?

Look at this famous passage from the Bible.

Romans 12:1-2:

1Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. 

2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

And also this from Philippians, my favorite book of the Bible.

Philippians 4:8:

8 Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.

So you can see that when I am reading, my goal is to work on my character. I want to have feelings about things that are appropriate for a Christian man.

So why military history? Here are three reasons why I read these military history books.

Humility

First, humility. Humility used to be one of my biggest challenges. So I thought to myself “instead of seeing yourself as some heroic figure, why don’t you read about some real heroes… people who willingly gave their lives for their friends, like the Bible urges, and like Jesus did by example”.

Remember this from John 15:13?

13 Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.

Military history is filled with stories of courage, bravery, self-sacrifice, endurance, unselfishness, and many other virtues. When you read about people who are better than you, doing more important things than what you’re doing, it really helps you to be humble.

The best thing for humility is reading Medal of Honor citations. You can find a bunch of them online here. And if you want a book to read, try these books about Medal of Honor recipients:

• Heroes of World War II
• Korean War Heroes
• Vietnam Medal of Honor Heroes

Endurance

Second, endurance. I sometimes feel badly about not having found someone to marry and not having lots of children. I wanted a good marriage to be a model for others, and also to have an influence in the next generation through my children. However, whenever I read military history, I see a lot of young men dying in battle. And I think, they too won’t know what sex is like. And, they too won’t know what marriage is like. And, they too won’t know what having children is like. But it’s not just the ones who die, it’s the hardships they have to go through, as well. Cold, hunger, imprisonment, pain, loss of their friends, etc.

I remember reading about one of my favorite battles – probably the most famous battle of the Korean War, which is our most moral war. It’s about Fox Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Regiment, 1st Marine Division. They had to hold a hill beside a vital road against overwhelming numbers of Chinese soldiers during the freezing cold North Korean winter. I remember reading about how one soldier got up to go to the bathroom, and was nearly shot by a sniper. He fell over on his own poop, which had already frozen by the time it hit the ground. For months after, I would always think about this whenever I went into a bathroom. We have pre-warmed water in our bathrooms at work, along with soap, lysol spray, febreeze, contact lense cleaner, hand sanitizer, and other things. Just understanding what other people have to go through in war helps me to be more patient with the little tiny setbacks that I experience. I used to get very anxious when anything went wrong, because of I was raised by strict immigrant parents. That anxiety seemed to last a long time, but since I started to read military history, I’ve been much more patient. I know that things could be worse.

Thankfulness

The third thing that I’ve experienced is thankfulness. Not just for all the things that I have because of what our armed forces have done, e.g. – basic human rights, prosperity, liberty, security, etc. But also specifically about those who gave their lives so that I could live free in a free country, and practice my Christian faith without fear.

Here are two of my favorite Medal of Honor stories from World War 2, in the Battle of Pearl Harbor:

Congressional Medal of Honor
Awarded Posthumously
PETER TOMICH

Rank and organization: Chief Watertender, U.S. Navy.
Place and date: Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941.
Born: 3 June 1893, Prolog, Austria.

Although realizing that the ship was capsizing as a result of enemy bombing and torpedoing, Tomich remained at his post in the engineering plant of the U.S.S. Utah, until he saw that all boilers were secured and all fireroom personnel had left their stations, and by so doing lost his own life.

And:

Congressional Medal of Honor
Awarded Posthumously
JAMES RICHARD WARD

Rank and organization: Seaman First Class, U.S. Navy.
Place and date: Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941.
Born: 10 September 1921, Springfield, Ohio.

When it was seen that the U.S.S. Oklahoma was going to capsize and the order was given to abandon ship, Ward remained in a turret holding a flashlight so the remainder of the turret crew could see to escape, thereby sacrificing his own life.

I do think that it’s important for Christians to read these kinds of stories in order to feed their own awareness of what it must have been like for Jesus to give his life voluntarily for us.

There is no shortcut to gratitude. You have to constantly reflect on the sacrifices made by others for you, if you are to have any concrete reason for feeling grateful. The more you read about examples of people giving their lives for others, the more you’ll appreciate what Jesus did for you. It will make you grateful.

There is a very annoying idea out there in the culture that says that people just do whatever is easy and fun for themselves, and since everyone else is always doing what makes them feel good, then there is no need to be thankful for anything. It’s comforting for people to delude themselves with that belief, but it’s false.

My reading list

You can check out the “What I am Reading” section of the blog to see which military history books I’ve been reading.

I am re-posting this post because recently a well-known Christian apologist changed his worldview from Protestant to Catholic, and I thought I would explain why I have not done so.

In this post, I explain why I’m not Roman Catholic. And I also explain how Protestant Christians arrive at their beliefs. We’ll start with J. Warner Wallace on Purgatory, then I’ll go second.

Purgatory

Here’s the first article from Cold Case Christianity, by the Master of the Evidence J. Warner Wallace. He writes about the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory, and his experience with studying and then rejecting it.

Here is his introduction:

The notion of purgatory assumes many of us die with unforgiven sins that need to be purged from our account; some of us are not good enough to go to heaven, but not bad enough to go to hell. Purgatory, therefore, is a temporary, intermediate place (or state of being) where good deeds and works can be performed in order to purge our impurity prior to our final destiny with God. Although millions of Catholics believe purgatory to be a reality, the idea needs to be tested in light of the Scripture. Is purgatory something we, as Bible believing Christians, should accept as true?

He’s got a stack of Bible verses to make two points against Purgatory: first, that Jesus’ death on the cross is sufficient to atone for all our rebellion against God, and we don’t need to endure any suffering or punishment to supplement it. And second, the teaching about the afterlife in the Bible says that believers are immediately ushered into the presence of God after they die (without resurrection bodies, yet), while unbelievers are separated away from God.

Here’s what he says about the first point:

Our Salvation Isn’t Based On Our Good Works
According to the Biblical doctrine of Salvation, forgiveness is not based on the good works of the believer. For this reason, deeds or works performed for those in purgatory are both unnecessary and ineffectual:

Romans 3:21-24, 27-28
But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus… Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.

Romans 8:1
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering.

Our Salvation Is Based On Jesus’ Work on the Cross
According to the Biblical doctrine of Salvation, Jesus’ work on the cross (His blood) purifies us from allsin. For this reason, there isn’t a lingering sin problem requiring the existence of a place like purgatory:

Titus 2:13-14
…we wait for the blessed hope—the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.

1John 1:7b
…the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.

1John 1:9b
…he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

1John 2:2
He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.

Hebrews 10:14
…because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.

Our Salvation Has, Therefore, Already Been Guaranteed
According to the Biblical doctrine of Salvation, Jesus has already purified and purged believers of sin based on our faith in Him. For this reason, there is no need for a place like Purgatory where additional purging must be performed…

[…]The Biblical doctrine of Salvation clearly eliminates the need for purgatory.

I was never able to find anything in the Bible to support purgatory. It’s a very very late doctrine that was unknown to the early church until the late 2nd / early 3rd century, where it is spoken about by a handful of people. But lots of weird doctrines were creeping up on the fringe around that time, so we shouldn’t be surprised… the point is that they have no support from the Bible, and not in the community of believers for the first 150 years after the death of Jesus.

The bodily assumption of Mary

Anyway, my turn now. The Roman Catholic church teaches that Mary was “bodily assumed” into Heaven after her death, i.e. – she didn’t just stay in her grave. Let’s see if that is in the Bible or in the early church.

Here’s what I found:

1. To be a Roman Catholic, you need to believe in Papal infallibility in matters of dogma.
2. In 1950, the Pope pronounced the assumption of Mary to be infallible dogma.
3. This pronouncement was solicited by a petition featuring over 8 million signatures.
4. There is no historical record of this doctrine in the Bible.
5. No early church father mentions the assumption until 590 AD.
6. Documents dated 377 AD state that no one knows how Mary died.
7. The assumption appears for the first time in an apocryphal gospel dated about 495 AD.

Data

I only cite Roman Catholic sources for my facts.

6. “But if some think us mistaken, let them search the Scriptures. They will not find Mary’s death; they will not find whether she died or did not die; they will not find whether she was buried or was not buried … Scripture is absolutely silent [on the end of Mary] … For my own part, I do not dare to speak, but I keep my own thoughts and I practice silence … The fact is, Scripture has outstripped the human mind and left [this matter] uncertain … Did she die, we do not know … Either the holy Virgin died and was buried … Or she was killed … Or she remained alive, since nothing is impossible with God and He can do whatever He desires; for her end no-one knows.” (Epiphanius, Panarion, Haer. 78.10-11, 23. Cited by Juniper Carol, O.F.M. ed.,Mariology, Vol. II (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1957), pp. 139-40).

7. “The idea of the bodily assumption of Mary is first expressed in certain transitus–narratives of the fifth and sixth centuries. Even though these are apocryphal they bear witness to the faith of the generation in which they were written despite their legendary clothing. The first Church author to speak of the bodily ascension of Mary, in association with an apocryphal transitus B.M.V., is St. Gregory of Tours.” (Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma(Rockford: Tan, 1974), pp. 209–210).

It should be noted that the apocryphal gospel in which the doctrine of the assumption of Mary first appeared was condemned as heretical by two Popes in the 5th and 6th centuries. However, I was not able to find a CATHOLIC source for this fact, so I deliberately chose not to use it in my case.

Conclusion

The first thing I want to say is that the Bible is not the only place you look to decide these issues. You also look in church history, and you are looking for a clear chain of custody of the doctrine as far back as it can go. Purgatory and the perpetual virginity of Mary have some track record, but the bodily assumption of Mary is just nowhere – not in the Bible, not in the Early Church fathers. So that’s the silver bullet against Roman Catholicism, since they made it “infallible”.

This post is more directed to non-Christians to sort of show you how we do our homework. I am the first Protestant in my family. We have half the family who is Muslim, and the other half mostly Hindu, with some Catholic. I had to debate all these people growing up, and I wiped the floor with them. It was not even close. I simply settled on the beliefs that allowed me to win every argument, every time. That’s how you do religion. If you have to go against your whole family in order to be right, you do it. It’s not good to be wrong about things just because that’s what your family believes. These things were not pushed hard on me by my parents, I studied them on my own in order to win arguments. After a while of winning, I found myself acting consistently with what I was arguing for. Although that might sound really weird to you, that’s probably the right way to do this. Don’t listen to parents and church, find your own way forward by winning arguments, and believing only what the evidence supports.

Although most people think that if I had kids, I’d bully them into my beliefs, I actually would not. Because that’s not what worked on me. What really works is fighting about evidence, welcoming questions, and allowing differences of opinion. Being free to pursue truth is more important in the long run than coercing your kids to act nicely.

I remember that president Joe Biden blamed conservative Christians who support natural marriage for the anti-LGBT attack that occurred in Colorado Springs. He said that anyone who disagrees with his LGBT views is motivated by “hate” and that those hateful people cause violence like the Colorado Springs shooting. The corporate news media agreed with him. But is it true?

Here’s the latest from The Post Millennial:

Attorneys for Anderson Lee Aldrich, the individual charged with 5 counts of murder and 5 hate crimes, have said that Aldrich is “non-binary” and uses “they/them” pronouns.

Aldrich is accused of engaging in a mass shooting at Colorado Springs nightclub Club Q, killing 5 and wounding more than 17. Aldrich is being represented by public defenders.

In documents obtained by The New York Times, attorneys list Aldrich as “Mx. Anderson Aldrich.”

[…]Aldrich, 22, was arrested in 2021 on suspicion of making bomb threats.

Is that the impression you got about the shooter from President Imbecile and his stooges in the corporate news media?

Well, what about the the violence in New York City? I listened carefully to the Democrats and the corporate news media, and I believed them when they said that conservative Christian parents were “domestic terrorists” and were the cause of this violence.

But then I saw this article from the New York Post:

A suspect was busted Tuesday in the string of attacks on a Hell’s Kitchen gay bar — and allegedly told cops he was just “exacting revenge” on behalf of a gal pal feuding with the club, police said.

Sean Kuilan, 34, was charged with reckless endangerment and criminal mischief in the brick-hurling attacks on VERS bar, including a caught-on-video incident Saturday night, NYPD Chief of Detectives James Essig said.

“Basically, what he says [is] he knows a girl who had a problem with one of the guys in the bar and he was ‘exacting revenge,’” Essig said. “As of right now we don’t have any reason to believe it is [a hate crime].”

[…]“I’m gay myself,” Kuilan said as he was led out of a police vehicle and escorted into court in handcuffs on Tuesday evening.

In fact, one of the most famous crimes that was used by the secular left to drum up support for same-sex marriage also turned out to be misrepresented by the Democrats and the corporate news media.

Consider this article from the pro-gay The Advocate, which explains that Matthew Shepard was a meth user and he was killed by another meth user named Aaron McKinney – who he had gay sex with on prior occasions.

Excerpt:

What if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard’s murder was wrong?

[…]By several accounts, McKinney had been on a meth bender for five days prior to the murder, and spent much of October 6 trying to find more drugs. By the evening he was so wound up that he attacked three other men in addition to Shepard. Even Cal Rerucha, the prosecutor who had pushed for the death sentence for McKinney and Henderson, would later concede on ABC’s 20/20 that “it was a murder that was driven by drugs.”

[…]Shepard was also a routine drug user, and — according to some of his friends — an experienced dealer.

[…] A former lover of Shepard’s confirms that Shepard and McKinney had sex while doing drugs in the back of a limo owned by a shady Laramie figure, Doc O’Connor. Another subject, Elaine Baker [reports] that Shepard and McKinney were friends who had been in sexual threesome with O’Connor. A manager of a gay bar in Denver recalls seeing photos of McKinney and Henderson in the papers and recognizing them as patrons of his bar. He recounts his shock at realizing “these guys who killed that kid came from inside our own community.”

The other murderer Henderson was also a patron of the same gay bar in Denver.

The article concludes:

In different ways, the Shepard story we’ve come to embrace was just as necessary for shaping the history of gay rights as Lawrence v. Texas; it galvanized a generation of LGBT youth and stung lawmakers into action. President Obama, who signed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, named for Shepard and James Byrd Jr., into law on October 28, 2009, credited Judy Shepard for making him “passionate” about LGBT equality.

Yes. These stories are routinely lied about by people like Joe Biden, other Democrats, Big Tech, and the corporate news media. They lie, because they want people to support legislation that cracks down on those evil conservative Christians. You know, those evil married couples with children, who support the traditional definition of marriage. Those hateful scum who think – based on scientific evidence of parenting outcomes – that the best place to raise a child is in a home near his biological parents.

Recently, the Senate voted on a bill that normalized depriving children of their biological mother, their biological father, or both.

Several moderate Republican senators voted for this bill:

• Roy Blunt of Missouri
• Richard Burr of North Carolina
• Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia
• Susan Collins of Maine
• Joni Ernst of Iowa
• Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming
• Lisa Murkowski of Alaska
• Rob Portman of Ohio
• Mitt Romney of Utah
• Dan Sullivan of Alaska
• Thom Tillis of North Carolina
• Todd Young of Indiana

Why? Because they believed that there was a surge in anti-LGBT “hate” all over the country from those church-attending pro-marriage Christians. They supported the legislation, because they thought that support for the traditional definition of marriage is causing an epidemic of violence against marriage-redefiners, like in the three cases I mentioned above. They thought that the only way to stop this violence was to persecute anyone who disagrees with their re-definition of marriage. Even if it means trampling on their religious liberty.

So, understand this. People who are involved in marriage and church attendance do not commit crimes like this. They are not dealing or using drugs. They are not having promiscuous sex with strangers. They are not confused about their gender identity. They are not experiencing mental illness. They are not going to night clubs. They are not getting into violent disputes with other people. They are getting married, having children, and they are raising those children to be followers of Jesus, including accepting Jesus’ definition of marriage as male-female. Those Christian parents just want to be left alone.

So be skeptical of reports from the secular left that blame church-attending Christian conservatives for violence that comes from within their own secular left communities.

Before the 2020 election happened, the New York Post broke a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop that cast President Joe Biden in an extremely negative light. Biden supporters like Jen Psaki claimed that the laptop was Russian disinformation. Dozens of former intel officials agreed. And Twitter and Facebook both shut the story down, claiming that the laptop could not possible be authentic.

Well, guess what? CBS News is now reporting that Hunter Biden’s laptop WAS authentic… 5 minutes after the mid-term elections. I guess the Democrat elites really don’t want Joe Biden running against Ron DeSantis in 2024.

New York Post reports:

It only took them 769 days.

CBS News said Monday that it confirmed the authenticity of data from Hunter Biden’s former laptop — more than two years after The Post first revealed its contents ahead of the 2020 presidential election — as the first son’s lawyer complained that he didn’t “consent” to the release.

The laptop links President Biden to his son and brother James Biden’s overseas influence-peddling, but high-ranking former US intelligence officials initially claimed it was likely Russian disinformation and the story was censored by Twitter and Facebook before the election.

And what about the 10% of Hunter’s business deals for his father? FACT:

Herridge did not specifically say which documents from the laptop were determined to be authenticated, including an infamous May 2017 email that described a 10% cut for the “big guy” as part of her reporting — but said that two sources confirmed to her that Joe Biden was the person identified as the “big guy.”

Ukraine:

The first document reported by The Post from Hunter Biden’s laptop described Joe Biden’s attendance at a 2015 dinner at DC’s Cafe Milano to which his son invited an array of associates — including a representative of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, which paid Hunter Biden up to $1 million pear year while his father led the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.

Russia:

Documents on the laptop show Hunter Biden also invited to that dinner a trio of Kazakhstani businessmen and Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, ex-Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov.

Baturina allegedly paid $3.5 million in 2014 to a firm associated with Hunter Biden and remains one of just a handful of Russian billionaires not to face US sanctions in response to this year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine.

China:

Online business records also indicate Hunter still holds a 10% stake in BHR Partners, a Chinese state-backed private equity firm that manages $2.1 billion in assets and takes a prominent role in acquiring overseas assets.

Hunter Biden co-founded BHR Partners in 2013 within weeks of joining then-Vice President Joe Biden aboard Air Force Two on an official trip to Beijing, according to the Wall Street Journal. Hunter introduced his dad to incoming BHR CEO Jonathan Li in a hotel lobby and Joe Biden later wrote college recommendation letters for Li’s children.

In the separate Chinese venture that made mention of the “big guy” getting a cut, Hunter and James Biden earned $4.8 million from CEFC China Energy — an arm of Beijing’s foreign-influence “Belt and Road” initiative — in 2017 and 2018, according to the Washington Post.

I remember watching 60 Minutes “journalist” Lesley Stahl telling her viewers that the Hunter Biden laptop “can’t be verified”. I wish more people would understand that if you are relying on the corporate news media to report the news accurately, then you’re going to be disappointed. They work for the Democrats. Especially right before a big election.

So, I’m trying out a new church that has held apologetics conferences in back to back years, featuring real old-Earth evidential Christian apologists! Yesterday was my first time going to the service. I was impressed. Not only did the pastor have slides about current events, but he actually quoted from books by non-Christians: Andrew Doyle and Douglas Murray.

I took a picture of the slide and then found the story in The Federalist.

Here’s what it says:

Candace Cameron Bure, the Hallmark Channel queen who rose to fame as D.J. Tanner on “Full House,” just wants to make Christmas movies that spread the joy and wholesomeness of Christmas and of her Christian faith. To that end, she recently moved from Hallmark to Great American Family, a new, smaller channel “that is positioning itself as the God-and-country alternative for holiday entertainment.”

For the crime of wanting to make a product that aligns better with her Christian faith, Bure is getting slammed as a bigot. But instead of apologizing for her convictions, Bure’s words and actions indicate she’s more interested in spreading the love of Christ than appeasing her Hollywood haters.

This is the part my new pastor mentioned:

Prompted by a question about whether same-sex relationships will be central features of her films, Bure said in her interview with the Journal, “I think that Great American Family will keep traditional marriage at the core.”

For that line, Bure was chastised by former Hallmark colleagues and other fellow stars from JoJo Siwa to Maren Morris, Chrishell Stause, and even Bure’s former “Full House” costar Jodie Sweetin, who commented her support for Siwa’s post slamming Bure.

I thought this was interesting, because Rose and I just did an episode of Knight and Rose Show to help Christians get better at defending traditional marriage, and it’s already one of our most popular episodes.

(If you like audio podcasts better than YouTube, you can find everything here)

In our episode, we covered a whole bunch of research showing why a male-female household is better for raising children. And we answered a bunch of objections against traditional marriage. Instead of arguing from any religious premises, we argued from natural law and peer-reviewed research. If you missed the episode, download it and have a listen. It was only 40 minutes long.

Church

As everyone knows, I’m very picky about churches. I refuse to attend churches that aren’t doing anything to oppose feminism, socialism and secularism. Many people in my life pick on me for not going to church, but when I tell them why, they don’t listen. Instead of trying to find me a church that has demonstrated ability in the areas where Christianity is under attack, they just say “go to church”. One woman even admitted to me that the reason I have to go to church is so that I’ll get married, because I am supposedly depriving some woman by not handing her the results of my education, career and finances.

What I want to say to the “go to church” people is that it’s not up to me to go to churches that aren’t doing anything other than pressuring men to marry women. The churches have to be doing something about the things that men care about. Then the men will show up to the churches. It’s supple-side economics. Innovation comes from the supplier, not the consumer. Every time people say “go to church” without solving the problem, it just makes me go to church less.

What actually worked was when my  practical, ex-military pro-life advocate friend Nathan sent me a screenshot of the apologetics conference, with the heads of two of my favorite Christian apologists in it. I know that one of those speakers is publicly conservative, and the other is secretly conservative. And both of them are evidentialists. I decided to give this church a try, because they hosted two apologetics conferences. I also found out from the pastor that they refused to mask up or lock down during COVID. The pastor is clearly opposed to “social justice”. He must have mentioned that phrase a dozen times in the sermon. I told a few of the guys in my office about the speakers at the apologetics conference, and they wanted to try church too.

Sadly, the church has very loud music. But they do have free ear plugs! So, I just used ear plugs to keep the music out. I was even able to sing one of the hymns, because it was classical. I love classical hymns. Everything new sucks! Still, it’s the sermons that matter to me, so I’m going to keep going. So far, so good. I’m not picky about music, I just care that the pastor fights where the secular left is pushing against Christianity.

Probably the biggest misconception that I encounter when defending the faith is the mistaken notion of what faith is. Today we are going to get to the bottom of what the Bible says faith is, once and for all. This post will be useful to Christians and atheists, alike.

What is faith according to the Bible?

I am going to reference this article from apologist Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason in my explanation.

Koukl cites three Biblical examples to support the idea that faith is not blind leap-of-faith wishing, but is based on evidence.

1. Moses went out into the wilderness and he had that first encounter with the burning bush, and God gave him the directive to go back to Egypt and let his people go. Moses said, Yeah, right. What’s going to happen when they say, why should we believe you, Moses?God said, See that staff? Throw it down.Moses threw it down and it turned into a serpent.God said, See that serpent? Pick it up.And he picked it up and it turned back into a staff.God said, Now you take that and do that before the Jewish people and you do that before Pharaoh. And you do this number with the hail, and the frogs, and turning the Nile River into blood. You put the sun out. You do a bunch of other tricks to get their attention.And then comes this phrase: “So that they might know that there is a God in Israel.”
2. [I]n Mark 2 you see Jesus preaching in a house, and you know the story where they take the roof off and let the paralytic down through the roof. Jesus said, “Your sins are forgiven.” And people get bugged because how can anyone forgive sins but God alone?Jesus understood what they were thinking and He said this: What’s harder to say, your sins are forgiven, or to rise, take up your pallet and go home?Now, I’ll tell you what would be harder for me to say : Arise, take up your pallet and go home. I can walk into any Bible study and say your sins are forgiven and nobody is going to know if I know what I am talking about or not. But if I lay hands on somebody in a wheelchair and I say, Take up your wheelchair and go home, and they sit there, I look pretty dumb because everyone knows nothing happened.But Jesus adds this. He says, “In order that you may know that the Son of Man has the power and authority to forgive sins, I say to you, arise, take up your pallet and go home.” And he got up and he got out. Notice the phrase “In order that you may know”. Same message, right?
3. Move over to the Book of Acts. First sermon after Pentecost. Peter was up in front of this massive crowd. He was talking about the resurrection to which he was an eyewitness. He talked about fulfilled prophecy. He talked about the miraculous tongues and the miraculous manifestation of being able to speak in a language you don’t know. Do you think this is physical evidence to those people? I think so. Pretty powerful.Peter tells them, These men are not drunk as it seems, but rather this is a fulfillment of prophecy. David spoke of this. Jesus got out of the grave, and we saw him, and we proclaim this to you.Do you know how he ends his sermon? It’s really great. Acts 2:36. I’ve been a Christian 20 years and I didn’t see this until about a year ago. This is for all of those who think that if you can know it for sure, you can’t exercise faith in it. Here is what Peter said. Acts 2:36, “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” There it is again. “Know for certain.”

What is faith according to Bible-based theologians?

I am going to reference this article from theologian C. Michael Patton of Parchment and Pen in my explanation.

Patton explains that according to Reformation (conservative, Bible-based) theologians, faith has 3 parts:

1. notitia – This is the basic informational foundation of our faith. It is best expressed by the word content. Faith, according to the Reformers must have content. You cannot have faith in nothing. There must be some referential propositional truth to which the faith points. The proposition “Christ rose from the grave,” for example, is a necessary information base that Christians must have.
2. assensus – This is the assent or confidence that we have that the notitia is correct… This involves evidence which leads to the conviction of the truthfulness of the proposition… This involves intellectual assent and persuasion based upon critical thought… assensus… says, “I am persuaded to believe that Christ rose from the grave.”
3. fiducia – This is the “resting” in the information based upon a conviction of its truthfulness. Fiducia is best expressed by the English word “trust.”… Fiducia is the personal subjective act of the will to take the final step. It is important to note that while fiducia goes beyond or transcends the intellect, it is built upon its foundation.

So, Biblical faith is really trust. Trust(3) can only occur after intellectual assent(2), based on evidence and thought. Intellectual assent(2) can only occur after the propositional information(1) is known.

The church today accepts 1 and 3, but denies 2. I call this “fideism” or “blind faith”. Ironically, activist atheists, (the New Atheists), also believe that faith is blind. The postmodern “emergent church” denies 1 and 2. A person could accept 1 and 2 but deny 3 by not re-prioritizing their life based on what they know to be true.

How do beliefs form, according to Christian philosophers?

I am going to reference a portion of chapter 3 of J.P. Moreland’s “Love Your God With All Your Mind” (i.e. – LYGWYM).

J.P. Moreland explains how beliefs form and how you can change them.

1. Today, people are inclined to think that the sincerity and fervency of one’s beliefs are more important than the content… Nothing could be further from the truth… As far as reality is concerned, what matters is not whether I like a belief or how sincere I am in believing it but whether or not the belief is true. I am responsible for what I believe and, I might add, for what I refuse to believe because the content of what I do or do not believe makes a tremendous difference to what I become and how I act.
2. A belief’s strength is the degree to which you are convinced the belief is true. As you gain ,evidence and support for a belief, its strength grows for you… The more certain you are of a belief… the more you rely on it as a basis for action.

But the most important point of the article is that your beliefs are not under the control of your will.

…Scripture holds us responsible for our beliefs since it commands us to embrace certain beliefs and warns us of the consequences of accepting other beliefs. On the other hand, experience teaches us that we cannot choose or change our beliefs by direct effort.

For example, if someone offered you $10,000 to believe right now that a pink elephant was sitting next to you, you could not really choose to believe this… If I want to change my beliefs about something, I can embark on a course of study in which I choose to think regularly about certain things, read certain pieces of evidence and argument, and try to find problems with evidence raised against the belief in question.

…by choosing to undertake a course of study… I can put myself in a position to undergo a change in… my beliefs… And… my character and behavior… will be transformed by these belief changes.

I think definition of faith is important, because atheists seemed to want to substitute their own definition of faith as blind belief for this Biblical definition, but there is no evidence for their view that faith is belief without evidence. I think this might be another case of projection by atheists. Blind faith is how they arrive at their views, so they are trying to push it onto us. But the Bible is clearly opposed to it.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

• The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory
• The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities
• The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life
• The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information
• The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion
• Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation
• Angus Menuge’s ontological argument from reason
• Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason
• William Lane Craig’s moral argument
• The unexpected applicability of mathematics to nature
• Arguments and scientific evidence for non-physical minds
• William Lane Craig’s case for the resurrection of Jesus

A MUST-SEE lecture based on Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s book “Signature in the Cell“. One of my favorite 6 arguments for a Creator and Designer is the origin of the simplest replicating living system. When you look into the cell, what you’ll find is carefully sequenced components that for complex structures, like proteins. In this lecture, you’ll learn all about this “biological information”.

I highly recommend watching the lecture, and looking at the slides. The quality of the video and the content is first class. There is some Q&A (9 minutes) at the end of the lecture.

Topics:

• intelligent design is concerned with measuring the information-creating capabilities of natural forces like mutation and selection
• Darwinists think that random mutations and natural selection can explain the origin and diversification of living systems
• Darwinian mechanisms are capable of explaining small-scale adaptive changes within types of organisms
• but there is skepticism, even among naturalists, that Darwinian mechanisms can explain the origin of animal designs
• even if you concede that Darwinism can account for all of the basic animal body plans, there is still the problem of life’s origin
• can Darwinian mechanisms explain the origin of the first life? Is there a good naturalistic hypothesis to explain it?
• there are at least two places in the history of life where new information is needed: origin of life, and Cambrian explosion
• overview of the structure of DNA and protein synthesis (he has helpful pictures and he uses the snap lock blocks, too)
• the DNA molecule is composed of a sequence of bases that code for proteins, and the sequence is carefully selected to have biological function
• meaningful sequences of things like computer code, English sentences, etc. require an adequate cause
• it is very hard to arrive at a meaningful sequence of a non-trivial length by randomly picking symbols/letters
• although any random sequence of letters is improbable, the vast majority of sequences are gibberish/non-compiling code
• similarly, most random sequences of amino acids are lab-proven (Doug Axe’s work) to be non-functional gibberish
• the research showing this was conducted at Cambridge University and published in the Journal of Molecular Biology
• so, random mutation cannot explain the origin of the first living cell
• however, even natural selection coupled with random mutation cannot explain the first living cell
• there must already be replication in order for mutation and selection to work, so they can’t explain the first replicator
• but the origin of life is the origin of the first replicator – there is no replication prior to the first replicator
• the information in the first replicator cannot be explained by law, such as by chemical bonding affinities
• the amino acids are attached like magnetic letters on a refrigerator
• the magnetic force sticks the letters ON the fridge, but they don’t determine the specific sequence of the letters
• if laws did determine the sequence of letters, then the sequences would be repetitive
• the three materialist explanations – chance alone, chance and law, law alone – are not adequate to explain the effect
• the best explanation is that an intelligent cause is responsible for the biological explanation in the first replicator
• we know that intelligent causes can produce functional sequences of information, e.g. – English, Java code
• the structure and design of DNA matches up nicely with the design patterns used by software engineers (like WK!)

There are some very good tips in this lecture so that you will be able to explain intelligent design to others in simple ways, using everyday household items and children’s toys to symbolize the amino acids, proteins, sugar phosphate backbones, etc.

Proteins are constructed from a sequence of amino acids:

Proteins sticking onto the double helix structure of DNA:

I highly, highly recommend this lecture. You will be delighted and you will learn something.

Here is an article that gives a general overview of how intelligent design challenges. If you want to read something more detailed about the material that he is covering in the lecture above related to the origin of life, there is a pretty good article here.

There is a good breakdown of some of the slides with helpful flow charts here on Uncommon Descent.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

• The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory
• The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities
• The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life
• The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information
• The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion
• Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation
• Angus Menuge’s ontological argument from reason
• Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason
• William Lane Craig’s moral argument
• The unexpected applicability of mathematics to nature

Brian Auten has a book review posted up at Apologetics 315.

The book is “If There’s A God, Why Are There Atheists?”, by theologian R.C. Sproul. R.C. Sproul is one of my favorite theologians. The book in question has a very, very special place in my heart, because I think that it is one of the major reasons why I was able to resist pernicious ideas like religious pluralism and postmodernism for so long. Once you put on the glasses of Romans 1 and see for the first time what man is really doing with respect to God, you can never see things the same again. I’ll say more about this at the end, but let’s see what Brian wrote first.

The review

So often, you hear atheists complaining about religion is nothing but wish-fulfillment or some sort of crutch for people who are frightened by a variety of things. They think that God is invented to solve several problems. 1) how does the world work?, 2) is there meaning to suffering and evil?, 3) why should I be moral?, and 4) what will happen to me and my loved ones when I die?. On the atheistic view, God is just a crutch that people cling to out of weakness and ignorance. But is this really the case?

Sproul starts the book by investigating three atheists who sought to explain religious belief as a result of psychological factors.

Brian writes:

Before tackling the psychology of atheism, Sproul spends a chapter on the psychology of theism, from the perspective of Freud’s question “If there is no God, why is there religion?” What follows is an overview of various psychological explanations of theistic belief: Feuerbach’s “religion is a dream of the human mind.” Marx’s belief that religion is “due to the devious imagination of particular segment of mankind.” And Nietzche’s idea that “religion endures because weak men need it.” The author properly reiterates: “We must be careful to note that the above arguments can never be used as proof for the nonexistence of God. They can be useful for atheists who hear theists state that the only possible explanation for religion is the existence of God.” That being said, Sproul also reveals what these arguments presume:

Their arguments already presupposed the nonexistence of God. They were not dealing with the question, Is there a God? They were dealing with the question, Since there is no God, why is there religion?16

Sproul points out the weaknesses of each of these approaches and says “there are just as many arguments showing that unbelief has its roots in the psychological needs of man.”

Wow, could that really be true? What are the real reasons why people reject God? Does the Bible have anything to say about what those reasons are?

Brian cites Sproul’s contention:

The New Testament maintains that unbelief is generated not so much by intellectual causes as by moral and psychological ones. The problem is not that there is insufficient evidence to convince rational beings that there is a God, but that rational beings have a natural hostility to the being of God.

[…]Man’s desire is not that the omnipotent, personal Judeo-Christian God exist, but that He not exist.

In Romans 1:18-23, the apostle Paul explains what is really going on:

¹⁸The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,

¹⁹since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

²⁰For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

²¹For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

²²Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools

²³and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

On this blog, I regularly present many, many arguments for theism in general, and Christian theism in particular:

• The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory
• The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities
• The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life
• The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information
• The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion
• Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation
• Angus Menuge’s ontological argument from reason
• Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason
• William Lane Craig’s moral argument
• The unexpected applicability of mathematics to nature
• Six reasons why you should believe in non-physical minds
• William Lane Craig’s case for the resurrection of Jesus

Sproul explains why atheists cannot allow themselves to live according to the evidence that is presented to them:

The cumulative effect of this knowledge that is clearly seen is to leave men ‘without excuse.’ Herein lies the basis of the universal guilt of man. No one can claim ignorance of the knowledge of God. No one can cite insufficient evidence for not believing in God. Though people are not persuaded by the evidence, this does not indicate an insufficiency in the evidence, but rather an insufficiency in man.

[…]The basic stages of man’s reaction to God can be formulated by means of the categories of trauma, repression, and substitution.

[…]If God exists, man cannot be a law unto himself. If God exists, man’s will-to-power is destined to run head-on into the will of God.

And this is the force that is animating atheists today. They don’t want to be accountable to God in a relationship, no matter what the evidence is. They have to deny it, so that they can be free to get the benefits of a universe designed for them, without having to give any recognition or acknowledgement back. If they have to lie to themselves to deny the evidence, they will do it. Anything to insulate themselves from the Creator and Designer who reveals himself in Jesus Christ.

The rest of the book review, and the book, deals with explaining in detail how atheists respond to an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing Creator/Designer. I encourage you to click through and read the whole book review. You can read the review, and the book, and then investigate for yourself whether atheists really are like that.

Recently, an article published in the Wall Street Journal reported on a research survey done by a far-left Democrat psychotherapist based in far-left New York City. Surprisingly, her book caused an uproar among the author’s left-wing allies. How come?

Excerpt:

Motherhood used to be as American as apple pie. Nowadays it can be as antagonistic as American politics. Ask Erica Komisar.

Ms. Komisar, 53, is a Jewish psychoanalyst who lives and practices on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. If that biographical thumbnail leads you to stereotype her as a political liberal, you’re right. But she tells me she has become “a bit of a pariah” on the left because of the book she published this year, “Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters.”

[…]The premise of Ms. Komisar’s book—backed by research in psychology, neuroscience and epigenetics—is that “mothers are biologically necessary for babies,” and not only for the obvious reasons of pregnancy and birth. “Babies are much more neurologically fragile than we’ve ever understood,” Ms. Komisar says. She cites the view of one neuroscientist, Nim Tottenham of Columbia University, “that babies are born without a central nervous system” and “mothers are the central nervous system to babies,” especially for the first nine months after birth.

What does that mean? “Every time a mother comforts a baby in distress, she’s actually regulating that baby’s emotions from the outside in. After three years, the baby internalizes that ability to regulate their emotions, but not until then.” For that reason, mothers “need to be there as much as possible, both physically and emotionally, for children in the first 1,000 days.”

What’s interesting about this is how the left responds to the science. They don’t want to see anything that challenges their desires to focus on fun in the short-term, but have marriage and successful children in the long-term.

More:

Christian radio stations “interviewed me and loved me,” she says. She went on “Fox & Friends,” and “the host was like, your book is the best thing since the invention of the refrigerator.” But “I couldn’t get on NPR,” and “I was rejected wholesale—particularly in New York—by the liberal press.” She did appear on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” but seconds before the camera went live, she says, the interviewer told her: “I don’t believe in the premise of your book at all. I don’t like your book.”

[…]Ms. Komisar tells of hosting a charity gathering for millennials at her apartment. One young woman “asked me what my book was about. I told her, and she got so angry. She almost had fire coming out of her eyes, she was so angry at my message. She said, ‘You are going to set women back 50 years.’ I said, ‘Gosh, I wouldn’t want to do that.’ ”

[…]The needs of children get lost in all this—and Ms. Komisar hears repeatedly that the hostility to her message is born of guilt. When she was shopping for a literary agent, she tells me, “a number of the agents said, ‘No, we couldn’t touch that. That would make women feel guilty.’ ” Another time she was rejected for a speaking gig at a health conference. She quotes the head of the host institution as telling her: “You are going to make women feel badly. How dare you?”

[…]“The thing I dislike the most is day care,” she says. “It’s really not appropriate for children under the age of 3,” because it is “overstimulating” given their neurological undevelopment. She cites the “Strange Situation experiments,” devised in 1969 by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth, a pioneer of attachment theory: “A mother and the baby are on the floor playing. The mother gets up and leaves the baby in the room alone. The baby has a separation-anxiety response. A stranger walks in; the baby has a stressed reaction to the stranger.”

[…]Researchers sample the infant’s saliva and test it for cortisol, a hormone associated with stress (and inversely correlated with oxytocin). In a series of such experiments in which Ms. Komisar herself participated, “the levels were so high in the babies that the anticipation was that it would . . . in the end, cause disorders and problems.” In a more recent variant of the experiment, scientists use functional magnetic resonance imaging to look directly at the brain of an infant reacting to photos of the mother and of a stranger.

You’d think that people would be happy to find out how the world works, and adjust their decisions to match. But they’re not. The only good evidence is evidence that confirms their desires and ideology.

Let’s look at one of the studies, to see some evidence.

The UK Telegraph reported on a recent study that measured the brain development of 3-year-old children.

Excerpt:

Take a careful look at the image of two brains on this page. The picture is of the brains of two three-year-old children. It’s obvious that the brain on the left is much bigger than the one on the right. The image on the left also has fewer spots, and far fewer dark “fuzzy” areas.

To neurologists who study the brain, and who have worked out how to interpret the images, the difference between these two brains is both remarkable and shocking. The brain on the right lacks some of the most fundamental areas present in the image on the left. Those deficits make it impossible for that child to develop capacities that the child on the left will have: the child on the right will grow into an adult who is less intelligent, less able to empathise with others, more likely to become addicted to drugs and involved in violent crime than the child on the left. The child on the right is much more likely to be unemployed and to be dependent on welfare, and to develop mental and other serious health problems.

[…]The primary cause of the extraordinary difference between the brains of these two three-year-old children is the way they were treated by their mothers. The child with the much more fully developed brain was cherished by its mother, who was constantly and fully responsive to her baby.

The child with the shrivelled brain was neglected and abused. That difference in treatment explains why one child’s brain develops fully, and the other’s does not.

[…]Professor Allan Schore, of UCLA, who has surveyed the scientific literature and has made significant contributions to it, stresses that the growth of brain cells is a “consequence of an infant’s interaction with the main caregiver [usually the mother]”.

The growth of the baby’s brain “literally requires positive interaction between mother and infant. The development of cerebral circuits depends on it.”

I like bringing science to bear on moral issues. The more you read about the science, the less wiggle-room there is for feelings. Doing the right thing (e.g. – saving money for a stay-at-home mom) is hard because it feels bad. But when you inform yourself with science, it makes it easier to override your bad feelings, because you know you’re doing the right thing to achieve a result.

Democrats maintained control of the Senate in the 2022 mid-term elections, and as a result, they are holding a vote on a bill that will deprive children of relationships with their biological mother and/or biological father. Katy Faust, who we cited in our episode defending natural marriage, writes about it for the Daily Signal.

Here is the political news from her article:

Control of the U.S. Senate has been decided and now we hear that Democrats have scheduled a vote Wednesday on the misnamed Respect for Marriage Act, in hopes of legislatively cementing the mother- and father-loss that the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling endorsed seven years ago.

What’s the “Respect for Marriage Act”?

When it comes to issues like this, I trust the Alliance Defending Freedom to explain it, since they are the ones who go to the Supreme Court for these cases.

They say:

The so-called Respect for Marriage Act is a misnamed bill that expands not only what marriage means, but also who can be sued for disagreeing with the new meaning of marriage.

While proponents of the bill claim that it simply codifies the 2015 Obergefell decision, in reality it is an intentional attack on the religious freedom of millions of Americans with sincerely held beliefs about marriage.

The Respect for Marriage Act threatens religious freedom and the institution of marriage in multiple ways:

• It further embeds a false definition of marriage in the American legal fabric.
• It opens the door to federal recognition of polygamous relationships.
• It jeopardizes the tax-exempt status of nonprofits that exercise their belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.
• It endangers faith-based social-service organizations by threatening litigation and liability risk if they follow their views on marriage when working with the government.

The truth is the Respect for Marriage Act does nothing to change the status of same-sex marriage or the benefits afforded to same-sex couples following Obergefell. It does much, however, to endanger religious freedom.

This is serious. If you are reading this, you should definitely contact your senators in Washington to make sure they vote against this legislation.

OK, so the first problem is religious liberty trouble, but this law is bad for children, too.

Let’s go back to Katy, writing for Daily Signal:

With Obergefell, the Supreme Court made gay marriage the law of the land and mandated that government institutions and processes could make no legal distinctions between adult romantic relationships.

Two married men cannot be treated any differently than a married man and woman. Indeed, from the perspective of adult emotional fulfillment, there may be no distinction.

But from the child’s perspective, these two couplings are polar opposites.

A child who is the product of a married man and woman receives the complementary developmental benefits of a male and female parent, the two adults who are (statistically) the safest, most connected to, and most invested in them, and are granted 100% of their biological identity.

A child raised by married men is deprived of the emotional and developmental benefit conferred exclusively by mothers, are being raised by at least one adult who statistically increases their risk of abuse and neglect, and are deprived at least 50% of their heritage and kinship network. In short, same-sex marriage requires child loss.

Many of us warned that making husbands and wives optional in marriage would result in mothers and fathers becoming optional in parenthood. The past seven years have validated those concerns.

In the name of nondiscrimination, the Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that two married women may be listed as parents on a child’s birth certificate, legally erasing the child’s father on the day of birth.

The old definition of marriage required opposite sexes work together to provide an environment for raising children. Not every couple has to have children, but every child born in a marriage has two biological parents nearby who have a biological interest in the child’s development.

Now that we have got rid of that male-female dynamic, people are just manufacturing kids with IVF and surrogacy, and those children DON’T have either their mom or dad nearby.

“Infertility” has been redefined so that same-sex couples can have their child “trappings” of marriage covered by insurance. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., proposed legislation that would use tax dollars to subsidize creation of intentionally motherless or fatherless children. Surrogacy tourism is on the rise, and entire industries are devoted to procuring custom-ordered motherless babies.

Her article also talks about how studies attempting to show that same-sex parenting is benign are problematic:

In 2016, after examining every single same-sex parenting study, researcher Walter Schumm concluded: “[S]tudies that show ‘no difference’ often used poor methodology (non-random samples, parental (self-) reporting vs. actual child outcomes, short duration, etc.) to reach their conclusions.”

Unsurprisingly when you employ the gold standard of the scientific method, “no difference” actually meant “significant difference.”

One such study found that compared to children with opposite-sex parents, children of same-sex parents:

• Experienced “definite” or “severe” emotional problems at a rate of 14.9% versus 5.5%.
• Were diagnosed with ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder] at a rate of 15.5% versus 7.1%.
• Struggled with learning disabilities at a rate of 14.1% versus 8%.
• Received special education and mental health services at a rate of 17.8% versus 10.4%.

Perhaps the disparity is a result of the same-sex couple’s inability to marry, you argue. There’s data on that as well.

A review of outcomes for children raised by unmarried and married same-sex couples found that “above average child depressive symptoms rises from 50% to 88%; daily fearfulness or crying rises from 5% to 32%; grade point average declines from 3.6% to 3.4%; and child sex abuse by parent rises from zero to 38%.”

Turns out you can’t legislate away the benefit that children receive from being raised by their own mom or dad, even if you call it marriage.

I think that people have a vague feeling that there is something wrong with redefining marriage, but they don’t know what it is. It’s right there in plain sight. When you take away a mom from a child, the child loses something. When you take away a dad from a child, the child loses something. When the child cannot see a man and a woman working together to provide a stable, calm environment for the child, the child loses something. Children’s needs are more important than adult desires.

Were the authors of the gospels of Mark and Luke connected to eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus? Well, it turns out that there are good reasons to think that Mark was linked to the eyewitness Peter, and Luke was linked to Paul, who had a post-mortem appearance of Jesus in 1 Cor 15:8, and who met with Peter and James in Galatians 1 and again in Galatians 2.

There is a list of evidence for Peter’s influence on Mark on the Cold Case Christianity blog.

Here’s my favorite one from the list:

Peter’s Embarrassments Have Been Omitted

There are many details in the Gospel of Mark consistent with Peter’s special input and influence,including omissions related to events involving Peter. How can Mark be a memoir of Peter if, in fact, the book contains so many omissions of events involving Peter specifically? It’s important to evaluate the entire catalogue of omissions pertaining to Peter to understand the answer here. The vast majority of these omissions involve incidents in which Peter did or said something rash or embarrassing. It’s not surprising these details were omitted by the author who wanted to protect Peter’s standing in the Christian community. Mark was quite discreet in his retelling of the narrative (other Gospel writers who were present at the time do, however, provide details of Peters ‘indiscretions’ in their own accounts. See Cold-Case Christianity for a more detailed explanation).

It makes me laugh to imagine Peter looking over Mark’s shoulder and saying “no, don’t put that in it” and “no, don’t tell them I did that”. Funny! But also very good evidence. The rest of Wallace’s list makes it even more clear.

And what about the gospel of Luke? Well, did you know that the author of Luke’s gospel knew Paul? If you read it carefully, you’ll see that Luke switches from describing history from an “I” perspective to describing things from a “we” perspective in the book of Acts (which he also wrote). Who is the “we” he is talking about?

Here’s famous Christian scholar William Lane Craig to explain:

Now who was this author we call Luke? He was clearly not an eyewitness to Jesus’s life. But we discover an important fact about him from the book of Acts. Beginning in the sixteenth chapter of Acts, when Paul reaches Troas in modern-day Turkey, the author suddenly starts using the first-person plural: “we set sail from Troas to Samothrace,” “we remained in Philippi some days,” “as we were going to the place of prayer,” etc. The most obvious explanation is that the author had joined Paul on his evangelistic tour of the Mediterranean cities. In chapter 21 he accompanies Paul back to Palestine and finally to Jerusalem. What this means is that the author of Luke-Acts was in fact in first hand contact with the eyewitnesses of Jesus’s life and ministry in Jerusalem.

[…]There is no avoiding the conclusion that Luke-Acts was written by a traveling companion of Paul who had the opportunity to interview eyewitnesses to Jesus’s life while in Jerusalem. Who were some of these eyewitnesses? Perhaps we can get some clue by subtracting from the Gospel of Luke everything found in the other gospels and seeing what is peculiar to Luke. What you discover is that many of Luke’s peculiar narratives are connected to women who followed Jesus: people like Joanna and Susanna, and significantly, Mary, Jesus’s mother.

Was the author reliable in getting the facts straight? The book of Acts enables us to answer that question decisively. The book of Acts overlaps significantly with secular history of the ancient world, and the historical accuracy of Acts is indisputable.

This has recently been demonstrated anew by Colin Hemer, a classical scholar who turned to New Testament studies, in his book The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History. [5] Hemer goes through the book of Acts with a fine-toothed comb, pulling out a wealth of historical knowledge, ranging from what would have been common knowledge down to details which only a local person would know. Again and again Luke’s accuracy is demonstrated: from the sailings of the Alexandrian corn fleet to the coastal terrain of the Mediterranean islands to the peculiar titles of local officials, Luke gets it right.

I know a lot of people (like my Dad) read the Bible devotionally, looking for feelings or trying to “get right with God” so they get blessings. But I think it’s helpful to look at things from an evidential point of view – how am I going to make a case for this? When you look at things from that perspective, the Bible gets a whole lot more interesting. And you can talk about it with non-Christians when you know about these interesting details.

I have been seeing interesting tweets about the sudden popularity of transgenderism among young people. One of them went something like this. First, they deny that sex-change surgeries are happening. Then, they say they are happening, but not many. Then, they say many are happening, but not to children. Sadly, this new study shows that many are happening to children.

Here’s the story from Daily Wire:

A new study of nationwide hospital databases found that at least 1,130 adolescents between 2016 and 2019 received “gender-affirming” chest surgeries in the U.S.

The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, saw a 389% increase in adolescents (ages 12-17) obtaining chest surgeries from 2016 to 2019. An overwhelming majority (1,114) of the adolescents seeking this surgery were female (98.6%), and just 16 were male (1.4%).

“To our knowledge, this study is the largest investigation to date of gender-affirming chest reconstruction in a pediatric population,” the paper’s authors wrote, who are each affiliated with Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “The results demonstrate substantial increases in gender-affirming chest reconstruction for adolescents.”

Here is the breakdown by age:

The ages of the pediatric patients ranged from 12 to 17, with 42 (5.5%) of the recipients between 12 and 14, 131 (16%) aged 15, 291 (34.5%) aged 16, and 365 (44%) aged 17.

It’s an interesting situation. I would expect parents to set boundaries on their children. First, to shelter them from public schools and social media. But second, at least keep them away from the people who are profiting from “gender-affirming care”.

Speaking of profiting, there was this:

The median total charges for chest reconstruction were $29,886 ($21,285–$45,147), a number that was adjusted for inflation, the authors note. Most of the chest surgeries (61.1%) were covered by private health insurance, 16.5% used public health insurance including Medicaid, 15.8% paid out of pocket, and 6.7% indicated “other.”

Remember what the lady from Vanderbilt said?

It was reported by Daily Wire:

“It’s a lot of money,” VUMC Clinic for Transgender Health’s Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said at one Medicine Grand Rounds lecture, video reveals. “These surgeries make a lot of money.”

Taylor noted that a “chest reconstruction” can bring in $40,000 per patient, and someone “just on routine hormone treatment, who I’m only seeing a few times a year, can bring in several thousand dollars … and actually makes money for the hospital.”

Citing the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery, Taylor said vaginoplasty surgeries can generate $20,000, gushing that it “has to be an underestimate,” since hospital stay, anesthesia, post-op visits, and other add-ons are not included in the total.

“And the female-to-male bottom surgeries, these are huge money makers,” the doctor continued, adding that such surgeries could bring in “up to $100,000” for the hospital.

Some clinics are “entirely” “supported” financially by such phalloplasty surgeries, Taylor boasted.

“These surgeries are labor intensive, there are a lot of follow-ups, they require a lot of our time, and they make money,” she emphasized. “They make money for the hospital.”

Sadly, for one reason or another, the adults have decided that it is more virtuous to go along with the agenda of the schools and social media, and inflict surgeries on their children. I could never understands why anyone would cut healthy organs off of a child with mental health issues. That would be like putting an anorexic person on a diet.

When it comes to debating social issues, I like to have studies close at hand. For same-sex marriage, I use studies showing different outcomes for children raised in same-sex homes. For abortion, I use science textbooks showing that the embryo is fully human. It is self-directed and has distinct DNA from either parent. And for transgenderism, I like to use studies like these, showing how health care providers are profiting from the social trends being pushed by the “don’t judge” compassion crowd in the public schools. The study showing that gender-affirming care does not lower the number of suicides (in the long term) is a good one, too.

One thing I wish that Christian parents and pastors emphasized more with young, unmarried Christian women is the need to choose a man who keeps his commitments. It turns out that passing on Christian values and worldview works a lot better when there is a man around to teach the children himself.

Here is some statistical evidence showing the difference that Christian fathers make, from Touchstone magazine.

Excerpt:

In 1994 the Swiss carried out an extra survey that the researchers for our masters in Europe (I write from England) were happy to record. The question was asked to determine whether a person’s religion carried through to the next generation, and if so, why, or if not, why not. The result is dynamite. There is one critical factor. It is overwhelming, and it is this: It is the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children.

If both father and mother attend regularly, 33 percent of their children will end up as regular churchgoers, and 41 percent will end up attending irregularly. Only a quarter of their children will end up not practicing at all. If the father is irregular and mother regular, only 3 percent of the children will subsequently become regulars themselves, while a further 59 percent will become irregulars. Thirty-eight percent will be lost.

If the father is non-practicing and mother regular, only 2 percent of children will become regular worshippers, and 37 percent will attend irregularly. Over 60 percent of their children will be lost completely to the church.

Let us look at the figures the other way round. What happens if the father is regular but the mother irregular or non-practicing? Extraordinarily, the percentage of children becoming regular goesupfrom 33 percent to 38 percent with the irregular mother and to 44 percent with the non-practicing, as if loyalty to father’s commitment grows in proportion to mother’s laxity, indifference, or hostility.

[…]In short, if a father does not go to church, no matter how faithful his wife’s devotions, only one child in 50 will become a regular worshipper. If a father does go regularly, regardless of the practice of the mother, between two-thirds and three-quarters of their children will become churchgoers (regular and irregular). If a father goes but irregularly to church, regardless of his wife’s devotion, between a half and two-thirds of their offspring will find themselves coming to church regularly or occasionally.

A non-practicing mother with a regular father will see a minimum of two-thirds of her children ending up at church. In contrast, a non-practicing father with a regular mother will see two-thirds of his children never darken the church door. If his wife is similarly negligent that figure rises to 80 percent!

The results are shocking, but they should not be surprising. They are about as politically incorrect as it is possible to be; but they simply confirm what psychologists, criminologists, educationalists, and traditional Christians know. You cannot buck the biology of the created order. Father’s influence, from the determination of a child’s sex by the implantation of his seed to the funerary rites surrounding his passing, is out of all proportion to his allotted, and severely diminished role, in Western liberal society.

Basically, a child who doesn’t have a benevolent, involved father is going to have an more difficult time believing that moral boundaries set by an authority are for the benefit of the person who is being bounded. The best way to make moral boundaries stick is to see that they apply to the person making the boundaries as well – and that these moral boundaries are rational, evidentially-grounded and not arbitrary. It is therefore very important to children to be shepherded by a man who studied moral issues (including evidence from outside the Bible) in order to know how to be persuasive to others.

If a woman wants her child to be religious and moral, then she has to pick a man who is religious and moral. And it can’t just be a faith commitment that he claims with words, because he can just lie about that. Women ought to check whether men are bound to what they believe by checking what they’ve read. A man usually acts consistently with what he believes, and beliefs only get formed when a man informs himself through things like reading. It would be good to see how he puts those beliefs into practice, too.

My advice to Christian women is this. When you are picking a man, be sure and choose one who is already invested in Christian things and producing results. It’s very unlikely that he’s going to be interested in developing that capacity from scratch if he’s not already doing it. If you want your kids to be taught Christianity by their father, then make spiritual leadership a priority when you’re choosing a husband.

Welcome to episode 29 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose strategies for finding a partner for life-long married love. This episode contains mature subject matter. Listener discretion is advised. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Podcast description:

Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.

Episode 29:

Episode  Summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss how to find a partner to marry. We talk about God’s design for marriage, and contrast that with society’s view of marriage. We talk about how to measure a person’s suitability for marriage. We contrast our strategies with a half-dozen rival strategies, using peer-reviewed research. We talk about compatibility and common areas of tension. And we recommend our favorite book about marriage.

Speaker biographies

Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.

Desert Rose did her undergraduate degree in public policy, and then worked for a conservative Washington lobbyist organization. She also has a graduate degree from a prestigious evangelical seminary. She is active in Christian apologetics as a speaker, author, and teacher.

Important note:

In the podcast, we kept saying that “Gary Chapman” wrote “The Sacred Search”. It’s actually Gary Thomas. Gary Chapman wrote “The Five Love Languages”, which is another of our favorites.

References:

• The Sacred Search by Gary Thomas
• Compatibility or restraint? The effects of sexual timing on marriage relationships (Institute for Family Studies)

• Counterintuitive Trends in the Link Between Premarital Sex and Marital Stability (Institute for Family Studies)

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Music attribution:

Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5744-strength-of-the-titans
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Because I’m still unmarried and have done well in my career and finances, and I sometimes approached by people who think that it is a good time for me to get serious about marriage. Although the previous generation of women was very good at marriage, the current generation of younger women is terrible at marriage. And you can see how terrible by looking at how they voted.

Here’s an article from Breitbart News to explain:

Sixty-eight percent of unmarried women favored Democrats in the U.S. House midterm elections compared to 31 percent who favored Republicans, according to exit poll data.

[…]A majority of women (67 percent) also said they were either angry or dissatisfied with Roe v. Wade being overturned, with 72 percent of women who supported Democrat candidates agreeing, compared to 27 percent who supported Republicans. On the other hand, 30 percent of women were either enthusiastic or satisfied with Roe being overturned, with a majority supporting Republicans (84 percent) compared to Democrats (15 percent).

Daily Wire adds:

Studies suggest single women vote Democrat more often than married women because they depend on a single income, have feminist attitudes towards social issues like abortion and pre-marital sexual behavior, and agree with ideologies that redefine gender roles and family responsibilities.

[…]Other notable figures from CNN’s exit poll data show that 72% of women between 18 and 29 voted Democrat.

Are women who vote Democrat a good match for a man who is interested in marriage? Let’s see.

1. Democrats support no-fault divorce laws, and that’s dangerous for men, because we get ruined by divorce courts. Divorce courts regularly disregard pre-nups, even if you have one. Ideally, a man would prefer a woman who hates divorce. Women who hate divorce think that it is their responsibility to evaluate a husband candidate, and then commit to him, no matter what happens. We just aren’t making women who want the responsibility of choosing a good man, and making a life-long commitment to him.

2. Democrats support abortion, and that’s horrifying for marriage-minded men, because we value the needs of children above the needs of selfish adults (it’s our protective nature). Pro-abortion women think that they need to be free to “have fun” with attractive men who won’t commit to them before sex. And then if they happen to get pregnant, they can just stop their new baby from living. Unborn babies have their own DNA, distinct from the parents. Marriage-minded men don’t want women who are willing to kill other people in order to escape from responsibilities.

3. Democrat women typically value careers over children. They want to put their kids in daycare, and go back to work. But marriage-minded men want someone trustworthy to stay home with very young children for the first 5 years. Research indicates that children benefit from having mom in the home for at least the first 2 years. Marriage-minded men don’t want to get married to women who are going to throw the kids in daycare and go back to work.

4. Democrat women prefer higher taxes and more government spending. When husband earns money, they think that government knows how to spend it better. And they think that teachers, judges and bureaucrats (who are paid by husband) are better at leading the home than husband. Marriage-minded men aren’t interested in paying other people to run his home. He wants choices in everything – especially about who will educate the children.

5. Democrat women favor subsidizing single mothers who make fatherless babies. Instead of setting moral boundaries on single motherhood by choice, Democrat women want to tax husbands to pay for single moms. Marriage-minded men know they only have enough money to pay for their own household, and their own kids. They don’t have money to pay for other people’s kids.

6. Democrat women are in favor of same-sex marriage. That means that they think that marriage is an arrangement of 2 or more people based on feelings. “Love makes a family” And they think it’s fine to deprive a child of their relationships with a biological mother, or a biological father, or both. Marriage-minded men know the research on how all this affects children. And we aren’t going to marry any woman who puts the selfish desires of adults above the needs of the children for their mom and dad.

If women don’t understand the needs of husbands and children, then marriage-minded men will not marry them

In conclusion, I think it’s important for people who expect marriage-minded men to get married to understands that most of the young women who are available would not make good wives and mothers for us. Men want marriage because they want to lead a home, and to be respected as leaders in their home. If society produces a generation of women who believe in student loan forgiveness, infanticide, gay rights, high taxes, and government regulation of fathers, then they can’t expect to find husbands.

Husbands want to lead. We can’t lead if we don’t get to keep what we earn. We can’t lead if we are overruled by teachers, judges and bureaucrats. We can’t lead if we are dragged into divorce courts. Women will have to choose between voting Democrat, and having husbands.

Everyone is talking about how Ron DeSantis won Florida by 20 points, by using a combination of competent policy and social conservatism. But there are other good states with really good conservative legislatures, and legislators. And they are not scared about passing laws to protect vulnerable children from the selfishness and greed of adults.

Daily Wire has the story:

Tennessee Majority Leaders William Lamberth and Jack Johnson, both Republicans, introduced the Protecting Children from Gender Mutilation Act on Wednesday, November 9, which would effectively bar doctors from prescribing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and performing gender-related surgeries on minors for the purpose of medical transition. It would also allow patients and their families to sue for damages and let the courts impose an additional $25,000 penalty for each violation.

You might think that Republicans are scared to pass socially conservative legislation. That’s what a lot of people who don’t follow politics closely would say. “Both parties are the same” or maybe “Republicans never do anything about social issues”. But it’s not true in Tennessee. A recent report by the American Conservative Union found that Tennessee had the #1 most conservative legislature – more conservative than even Florida:

Back to the Daily Wire article. Here are some comments from the bill’s authors that show their motivation.

Read this:

“This bill is about protecting children,” said Johnson. “Under no circumstances should minors be allowed to undergo irreversible elective procedures to mutilate body parts and intentionally harm their reproductive systems. This practice comes with lifelong health complications that children are not capable of understanding.”

[…]“Interfering or destroying the healthy, normal reproductive organs of a child for the purpose of altering their appearance is profoundly unethical and morally wrong,” Lamberth said. “Tennesseans across our state have demanded an immediate call to action.”

“Through the passage of House Bill 1/Senate Bill 1, Tennessee will protect vulnerable children who cannot give informed consent for adult decisions they aren’t ready for,” Lamberth added.

They’re going to get sued by the pedophilia-supporting legal groups, but they don’t care. They got sued for banning men from women’s sports, too, but that didn’t stop them from passing the law. They got sued for passing  a ban on all abortions after 6 weeks. Tennessee doesn’t care about the secular left bullies. And as soon as Roe v. Wade was repealed, they banned all abortions. These are serious, serious conservative legislators.

Two key parts of the law. First, children who sustained injuries due to medical transition can sue for damages. And second, since this is a criminal law, the government can get involved when the law is violated:

The Protecting Children from Gender Mutilation Act would also create a private right of action, allowing a minor or the parent of a minor who sustained injuries due to medical transition to sue for damages. Additionally, it would enable a child to bring a civil cause of action against a parent if that parent helped to facilitate their child’s medical transition.

The bill would allow courts to impose a $25,000 penalty per violation and the state attorney general to bring an action against a healthcare provider for knowingly violating the law within 20 years of the offense. The proposed bill would require the state attorney general to establish a process for reporting violations of the law.

The secular leftists are evil, but even they understand money leaving their pockets. This is the way to stop them – take their money.

The Daily Caller adds:

The legislation comes after a bombshell report revealed that Vanderbilt University’s Dr. Shayne Taylor said in 2018 that providing sex change surgeries to minors was a “big money maker” and clarified that individuals who were against these surgeries due to religious beliefs would face “consequences”…

I’ll bet Dr. Shane Taylor is sorry now that she ever made that video! Instead of religious parents facing consequences, it’s the transgender profiteers who are going to face consequences.

My impression of Tennessee from watching their legislation is that they seem to get upset whenever blue states pass legislation they don’t like, and they pass legislation to go in the opposite direction of these blue states. Like, they point at New York and go “look, they are supporting infanticide! We should probably ban all abortions” or maybe “look California is banning guns! We should loosen restrictions on concealed carry permits!” And then they do it. They are not just trying to slow down secular leftists. They are on the offense, passing laws to make the state even more conservative. Why do you think the Daily Wire people chose to move to Nashville? Nashville is the new headquarters of the conservative movement.

If you missed it, Ben Shapiro recently interviewed the governor of Tennessee for his Sunday Special:

Tennessee now has 8 Republican congressmen out of 9 possible districts. If you’re looking for a conservative state, put Tennessee on your short list.

I’ve noticed that many Christians can tell me a lot about famous entertainers. It doesn’t matter if it’s singers, musicians, actors, athletes, etc., they seem to know details of their biographies, achievements, etc. And it doesn’t really matter if those people are Christians, or whether they have performed actions consistent with a Christian worldview in their private lives.

Anyway, speaking for myself, I mostly admire two kinds of people. The first kind is the kind I blog about here all the time: Christian scholars engage non-Christians intellectually using logic and evidence. The second kind, as you can tell from my reading list, is people who distinguish themselves in conflict with those who oppose the principles and policies that allow me to live out my Christian life. And I am especially interested when people who are fighting evil (imperialists, Nazis, socialists, communists, leftists, etc.) exhibit Christ-like character in risking their lives to save others, or in giving their lives to save others.

I have a war story to tell you that happened on November 10th, 1943.

Lieutenant (later Lieutenant Commander) Walter Lewis Chewning of Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, steps on the burning fuel tank of an F6F-3 Hellcat flown by Ensign (later Lieutenant) Byron Milton Johnson of Potter, Nebraska to effect a successful rescue of the pilot on November 10, 1943. Johnson had flown out to USS Enterprise from Barbers Point, Hawaii, enroute to Makin Atoll in the Gilberts to support the United States Army invasion, which occurred on November 20, 1943. The afternoon of November 10, Johnson took off in F6F Hellcat Number 30 for a routine training exercise. He immediately developed engine trouble and requested an emergency landing. He was waved off three times as he struggled to maintain control, but his tail hook caught the third arresting gear wire, and Johnson’s Hellcat was slammed into the deck, coming to rest in the port catwalk. The plane came to rest on its external belly fuel tank, which started to leak. As the engine vibrated horribly as the propeller bent itself on the deck, sparks ignited the fuel. The hard landing had jammed Johnson’s canopy closed, shearing the retaining pin; he could not exit the plane. Chewning, who had joined the ship October 2, 1943 as Enterprise new catapult officer, scrambled out of the catwalk and came through the smoke. Stepping on the burning belly tank, he forced open the canopy and pulled Johnson to safety.

He received the two highest non-combat medals available:

Chewning was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his actions.

He was a well-educated and accomplished person before joining the Navy:

Chewning played soccer and Lacrosse at Cornell while studying Mechanical Engineering, breaking his rib and left ankle in one game. He graduated in 1936 and studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the Navy in January 1941. He was the assistant to the Chief Engineer at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania before joining USS Enterprise. He served as Enterprise’s catapult officer until December 1944, when he transferred to Dutch Harbor Naval Air Station in Alaska as ordinance officer. Chewning served in the Navy until December 1949; he also was awarded the Bronze Star. After the war he assisted research and development for various aeronautical companies, the United States Air Force, and the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Motion picture film of the crash, taken from Enterprise’s bridge, was shown as part of the television program “Victory at Sea” on January 25, 1953. Chewning and Johnson gave interviews to several newspapers about the accident after the program aired.

You can see a video clip of the rescue here, from 5:35 to 6:00. I found a colorized version of the picture above here:

This image was colourized from the original by Paul Reynolds.

What I thought was interesting about Chewning was how he had everything going for him in terms of his education and career, but he chose to join the Navy anyway, in order to defend his country from Japanese imperialism. Those who understand how the Japanese treated prisoners and conquered peoples will know which side of that conflict was good, and which side was evil. Chewning wasn’t some sort of loser who took risks for fun and thrills. It had to be a risk where the prize was worth the risk. And he had the humility to consider others better than himself, so that their life was worth the risking of his own. Many people on the secular left who like to talk about how generous, compassionate and virtuous they are are unable to make moral judgments against evils like Japanese imperialism – much less take self-sacrificial action against them.

I just think that it’s important for young Christians to have the right kind of heroes. The heroes who are promoted to young Christians by the cultural elites are not usually the right role models. And there is a reason for that. The secular leftists don’t want young Christians to be emulating people who excel according to the standards of the Christian worldview. We are in a religion where self-sacrificial love is the centerpiece. Taking trouble on yourself for someone else. Doing your job, when it goes against your own self-interest. Let’s not allow a bunch of godless socialist celebrities to pick and choose who we hold in high regard.