The Secular Frontier

“He was deceived by a lie. We all were. It appears that the Chancellor is behind everything, including the war. Palpatine is the Sith Lord we’ve been looking for. After the death of Count Dooku, Anakin became his new apprentice.” Darth Harley, Bark Lord Of The Sith, also known as Don Harley, the Dogfather is officially middle-aged today. He is secretly behind everything happening at Secular Web Kids! His gift is currently boiling: ... Read Article

This is the first of three videos in which Kipp examines Richard Carrier's handling and understanding of early Jewish literature in his book, "On the Historicity of Jesus," which he uses to ground his "Minimal Jesus Myth" theory. In this video Kipp shows how Carrier clearly misreads the Babylonian Talmud. This first video looks at chapter 4-5 of Carrier’s On The Historicity Of Jesus to see if carrier gets the background context for Christian origins right.  Is Carrier's presentation a good source for information about early Judaism? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG6jY3yP96c&t=3s Carrier has posted a response to Davis here: Here is a selection from the response by Carrier: This is reflective of Carrier's responses to critics generally, and so we have a heightened example of this with Carrier responding to historian Tim O'Neil which is displayed on the landing page of Tim's site: McGrath posted on this issue a few years ago after numerous exchanges with Carrier: What Happ ... Read Article

Friend of Internet Infidels Dr. Robyn Walsh has a new interview out today on Bart Ehrman's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMsvMKsDt4s She highlights the gospel writer is not a literary voice for a community, and at time 36:05 "we have to keep on a bit of skepticism when we approach these texts if there is a particular detail that echoes something we've heard before maybe the author is trying to inject these things into a literary trajectory." In my approach I try to show the death of Jesus as emulating the wrongfully killed just man of the death of Socrates and the impaled just man of Plato's Republic. ... Read Article

(1) Elon Musk purchased Twitter for 44 billion dollars recently with the intention of rebranding it as "X." But a potential snag came out today: Meta already appears to hold the rights to 'X.' It could make Twitter's rebrand complicated. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, announced that the platform will now be called "X," but Mark Zuckerberg's Meta has already registered an "X" logo in connection to "online social networking services" and "social networking services in the fields of entertainment, gaming, and application development. Twitter's new logo, which was rolled out Monday, also resembles a generic Unicode character known as "mathematical double-struck capital X" that was added to the Unicode in March 2001. SEE Here (2) Also, a critique is coming soon of Carrier's mythicism from Kipp Davis, who has a PhD in Religions and Theology (Manchester, 2009). Here's the teaser: "Richard Carrier's poor treatment of early Jewish literature makes abundantly clear the ser ... Read Article

Jesus called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them,"If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselvesand take up their cross and follow me." ... "those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it." (Mark 8:34-5). So, we are to follow Jesus so that we give up our lives willingly to the religious and political authorities of our day, who will then put us to death by execution. Not literally of course, but to turn the other cheek and bless our persecutors as more important than ourselves so they might be transfigured as the forgiveness of Jesus transfigures the soldier at the cross in Luke. Let's consider this: I took my mom to see Barbie (2023) today and really enjoyed it. The director said she intended it, in part, to be a commentary on the creation story in Genesis, but I'd like to point out another biblical theme. At one point, the characters who are mesmerized in a patriarchal society ... Read Article

THE OMNIPOTENCE ARGUMENT There are many good reasons to believe that Jesus is NOT God. One such good reason is that Jesus was NOT eternally omnipotent (all-powerful): 1. Something is God ONLY IF it is eternally omnipotent. 2. Jesus was NOT eternally omnipotent. THEREFORE: 3. Jesus was NOT God. PREMISE (1) IS TRUE Premise (1) is based on a definition of "God" that would be acceptable to most Christian philosophers and theologians: X is God IF AND ONLY IF: X is the creator of the universe, and X is a bodiless person, and X is eternally omnipotent, and X is eternally omniscient, and X is eternally perfectly good. There is a powerful motivation for Christian philosophers and theologians to insist that God is eternally omnipotent (eternally all-powerful). If God was less than eternally omnipotent, then God would not be able to guarantee eternal life to Christian believers. Something could happen in the future that threatens the existence of some or al ... Read Article

EDITED 8/3/2023 4:29pm Atlantic Canada Time by John MacDonald Previously: (Part 1) The Philosophy of History: Professor Bart Ehrman’s New Course Comparing and Contrasting The Apostle Paul With The Historical Jesus (Part 2) The Philosophy of History: Professor Bart Ehrman’s New Course Comparing and Contrasting The Apostle Paul With The Historical Jesus (Part 3) The Philosophy of History: Professor Bart Ehrman’s New Course Comparing and Contrasting The Apostle Paul With The Historical Jesus (Part 4) The Philosophy of History: Professor Bart Ehrman’s New Course Comparing and Contrasting The Apostle Paul With The Historical Jesus (Part 5) The Philosophy of History: Professor Bart Ehrman’s New Course Comparing and Contrasting The Apostle Paul With The Historical Jesus (Part 6) The Philosophy of History: Professor Bart Ehrman’s New Course Comparing and Contrasting The Apostle Paul With The Historical Jesus (Part 7) The Philosophy of History: Professor Bart Ehrman’s New Course ... Read Article

WHERE WE ARE In Chapter 8 of the Handbook of Christian Apologetics (hereafter: HCA) Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli attempt to prove that God raised Jesus from the dead. A key premise in their case for the resurrection is their claim to have refuted the Swoon Theory. However, Kreeft and Tacelli have FAILED to refute the Swoon Theory, so their case for the resurrection of Jesus also FAILS. Through a series of blog posts here at The Secular Frontier, I will carefully evaluate each of their nine objections against the Swoon Theory to show that they have FAILED to refute the Swoon Theory and thus FAILED to prove that God raised Jesus from the dead. (For clarification about what the Swoon Theory implies, see my post "Careful Argument Analysis of Objections to the Swoon Theory". ) In Part 2 of this series, I presented a clarified version of Objection #2 by Kreeft and Tacelli. In this post, I will begin to evaluate that objection against the Swoon Theory. THE CORE ARGUMENT OF OBJECTION #2 Here is ... Read Article

Belief in all five spiritual entities has fallen between 3-5 points since 2016, the last time that Gallup polled Americans on the topic. Since the pollster first began collecting survey data on the subject more than two decades ago, belief in God and heaven has dropped 16 points, while belief in hell has fallen 12 points and belief in the devil and angels has decreased by 10 points. See Julia Shapero's analysis HERE ... Read Article

WHERE WE ARE For a brief summary of what has been covered in Part 3 through Part 15 of this series, see the “WHERE WE ARE” section at the beginning of Part 16 of this series. For a brief summary of what has been covered in Part 16, Part 17, and Part 18, see the “WHERE WE ARE” section at the beginning of Part 19 of this series. In their second point against Jesus being a lunatic, Kreeft and Tacelli offer two similar arguments. I call the first argument the Feeling-Superior argument: 21. When a mentally healthy person meets an insane person (a lunatic), they feel uncomfortable, and they feel that way because they feel superior to the insane person. 24. When mentally healthy persons met Jesus, they felt uncomfortable and this was NOT because they felt superior to Jesus. THEREFORE: 5B. Jesus was not a lunatic. My current focus is on evaluating premise (24) of this argument by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli. In Part 19 of this series, I reviewed thirteen examples o ... Read Article

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1SsHwjihbY&t This is an interesting video that came out yesterday. If you're Canadian presenter Prof Barrie Wilson will be of interest from his How Jesus Became Christian, which was a bestseller. I have chatted with Barrie many times (though not recently), and he's a super nice guy! ... Read Article

Half the problem seems to be there is nothing to do there but praise Jesus all day long ... ... Read Article

In Chapter 8 of the Handbook of Christian Apologetics (hereafter: HCA) Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli attempt to prove that God raised Jesus from the dead. They claim that there are only four skeptical theories that are alternatives to the Christian view: The Swoon Theory The Conspiracy Theory The Hallucination Theory The Myth Theory Based on that assumption they attempt to refute each of these skeptical theories in order to try to prove the resurrection of Jesus. They claim to have refuted all four of these skeptical theories in Chapter 8, and they conclude that this proves that the one remaining theory (the Christian view that God raised Jesus from the dead) is true. However, Kreeft and Tacelli have FAILED to refute the Swoon Theory, so their case for the resurrection of Jesus also FAILS. Through a series of blog posts here at The Secular Frontier, I will carefully evaluate each of their nine objections against the Swoon Theory to show that they have FAILED to refute the Swoon Theor ... Read Article

This video was shared to us by our Treasurer Ray on the Documentary Hypothesis, the idea that the first 5 books of the bible were not written by Moses but represent a compilation of a number of different sources. Note the visual nature of the presentation, which is important from an educational point of view as we are mostly visual learners and there is a great deal of interconnectivity between the various sensory areas of the brain (which makes metaphor possible, for instance). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi1vuwGnKxI ... Read Article

I have previously analyzed and evaluated the case against the Swoon Theory presented by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli in Chapter 8 of their Handbook of Christian Apologetics (hereafter: HCA): https://secularfrontier.infidels.org/2020/02/defending-the-swoon-theory-index/ My conclusion was that all nine of their objections against the Swoon Theory FAIL, and that their attempt to refute the Swoon Theory FAILED. If I have already analyzed and evaluated their objections against the Swoon Theory, then why go back to evaluate their nine objections all over again? I am planning to publish a book defending the Swoon Theory against these objections, so I have been working to revise and improve my argument analysis of these objections (each objection constitutes an argument against the Swoon Theory). Now that I have revised and improved my analysis of their nine objections, I want to work my way through the objections again, to make sure that my previous responses to these objections still make sens ... Read Article