Me and Matt Slick

I finally made time to give Matt Slick a call over at CARM. I listened to a discussion he had on a show called The Atheist Experience. He did an initial call in, then called in for a later show for a more extensive discussion with Matt Diluhanty. You can listen to that call here. I thought for the first call he was cut off a little too much by the hosts, so he seemed frustrated, and then for the second call I thought Matt Diluhanty didn't answer his challenges the way I would have, so I thought I ought to call in to CARM and see how I fared. Then I got sick with a sore throat and forgot about it until now. So it had been a while since I had thought about TAG, but I thought I'd call anyway.

You can go to the CARM podcast and listen to my call from 7/6 or you download the section that involves just me here. It was a lot of fun. Matt seems like a really good guy and he's absolutely right that he and I would have so much fun with these topics over a barbeque in his back yard.

I'm not as philosophically oriented, so things like TAG are not so much my area of expertise, but it's fun anyway. I thought the call went great and generally I'm satisfied with the way I presented my fundamental objection, but I have to admit that some of the things he said didn't really register with me while I was on the phone so I didn't respond to them exactly as I would have liked to. I might have more to say about this later, or I may just call him back.

He wanted to ask me about the Kalam Cosmological argument, but wanted to give another caller a chance to get through, so he suggested I call back and I did. So after one caller I was back on the air. Once again it's at his podcast, or you can just listen here. A more brief call, but interesting nontheless. Once again I was able to express my fundamental objection to the Kalam Cosmological argument and I was happy with that.

He suggested I call in the next day (Tuesday) to talk about the resurrection. So I did. The podcast isn't posted yet, but I recorded it myself, so you can get that here. It's a .wma file. I might replace it with an .mp3 after the podcast is posted. This call also was great as far as I was concerned. I expressed my fundamental objection to belief in the resurrection, ripping off Arif Ahmed's brilliant argument against Gary Habermas and Matt tried to respond. In my view it's absolutely devastating. Matt in response was getting away from my central argument, talking about the early dating of Acts, which is really rendered irrelevant by Ahmed's argument. If I was trying as hard as I could to win I'd have probably dismissed these points as irrelevant, but really I was more just having fun and I find the rabbit trails interesting, so I went with it a little. The reality though is that even if we posited that Acts was dated to the 40's, Ahmed's argument still shows that belief in the resurrection is unreasonable.

In the end I asked Matt to chew on it and I'd call back to see what his thoughts are. I'll post that when it happens.

Seriously?

Listening to some of the "Best of Bob Dutko" this weekend I couldn't help but laugh. He spent a long time talking with callers about the second coming of Jesus and the logistics of it. The Bible says that everyone will see him coming in the clouds of glory. Does this mean Jesus will use television and other man made technology, or will he not have any use for our the technology of us pathetic mortals.

Bob grilled his callers. A caller would say something like "Jesus has no need for mere human devices. He'll come and everyone will see." "But," Bob would respond "the earth has curvature. If he flies over Detroit, people in California can't see. They can't see clouds in Detroit." Bob would jump on these callers and their inconsistency.

Bob offered his own solution. Jesus will use some sort of refractory abilities so that everyone can simultaneously see his appearance in the clouds.

I wondered to myself, what if a foreigner, say perhaps a Chinese immigrant, was passing through Detroit listening. It must sound like seemingly intelligent people having a serious conversation about how Santa Clause manages to get up and down all those chimneys on Christmas Eve. People explaining and arguing about it. How does the tooth fairy manage to sneak into the bedroom and replace those teeth with money undetected? Grown men, the type of people you interact with every day in board meetings and design reviews arguing about the logistics of Santa and the tooth fairy. How bizarre it must sound to their ears.

A girl I'd met recounted her experience leaving the Catholic faith. She said that she had a roommate in college from China. One time they had a very brief conversation about religion. The girl explained that she believed in Jesus and how he died and rose from the dead for our sins. The Chinese girl said one word in response. "Seriously!?!" And that was it. They never discussed it again, but the Catholic girl for the first time stepped into the shoes of an outsider and started to see how bizarre it must sound to the ears of those not indoctrinated with it. And her faith crumbled.

Cool Christian Rappers

Listening to Christian radio, as I often do, I heard an old Carman song played. "JC In Da House". Robin Sullivan from WMUZ in Detroit played it like it was a normal song in her rotation. As if it was cool and hip. Though I have to say that there was a sense in her voice that she thought it was kind of silly. Can you tolerate more than 30 seconds of it?

If you make it and you want to take it up a notch, try the Huckabee show on Foxnews where two white nerd boys rap it up for abstinence and Jesus. Check the looks on the face of the two attractive females in the audience with their pained politely smiling faces which say "How did we ever get involved in this?"

Of course there are a lot excellent Christian musicians that I listen to all the time on my iPod, including MercyMe, Third Day, Casting Crowns, and Chris Tomlin. I like to mix that in with a little Pantera and some Megadeth.

The Power of Photographs

Many have seen the gruesome video of "Neda" in Iran. Apparently shot by Iranian military forces, she's become a symbol for their quest for democracy. Our President understands the power of these types of images. He says that you can recognize the fundamental injustice just from viewing it.

Press corps veteran Helen Thomas, who was almost always ignore by Bush because her questions aren't milk toast, interrupted to ask Obama how he reconciles this statement with his own refusal to release the torture photos. Obama quickly cut her off as the rest of the press corps laughed, and he just ignored her inquiry.

Above I have a famous photo of an Iraqi detainee comforting his own son. It won World Press Photo of the Year in 2003, but I only first saw it recently. I wonder how many Americans have seen it. Maybe not so many. So I thought I'd provide it here. Like the photos at Abu Graib (the background of which is well detailed in a documentary by Errol Morris called Standar Operating Procedure, which is well worth seeing), I think this is the type of thing that is important to see to improve our understanding of what is really happening so far away in Iraq.

History Lesson

German comedian Volker Pispers explains the history of U.S. foreign policy and terrorism in youtube clips starting here. It's worthwhile to see how foreigners view the United States.

Fascinating Discussion on the Dutko Show

I spoke with Bob Dutko today. He's been spending a lot of time this week beating the drums of war, trying to convince his listeners that Muslims are scary, crazy, irrational people that blindly follow the dictates of their faith, which requires them to kill all things non-Muslim.

The Qur'an may not be the greatest book in the world in my view, but I know that Bob misrepresents it anyway, at least in some parts, to make Muslims look as bad as possible. So I challenged him on his presentation of Sura 9, which he offers in a grossly out of context fashion. In his mind it teaches that Muslims should now and forever more kill non-Muslims wherever they fid them. This is absurd, and I had corrected Bob on this before, but it didn't take. So I went into more detail this time. Listen here.

I thought my call went fine, but what was even more interesting was a subsequent call from a Muslim, which I did record. I've never heard a Muslim call in to the Dutko show before. This person likewise challenged Bob's claim that Islam teaches violence against Christians. He said that he was from Pakistan, had Christians friends, knows there are churches throughout Pakistan, so why is Bob claiming that Islam has some sort of problem with Christianity?

Bob engaged in a lot of spin, but the caller didn't bite. Bob pointed out that many people in Pakistan support Osama bin Laden, as if this was evidence of Muslim hostility to Christianity. The caller didn't deny that some in the Middle East support Osama bin Laden, but said that this was because they had a conflict with the United States, not Christianity. If they had a problem with Christianity, why were they traveling all the way to the United States, when there are many other Christians closer to them that they could attack? These people supported Osama bin Laden when he fought the Soviets and they were aligned with the Christian United States at that time. Why would they do this if their problem was with Christianity?

Bob did nothing but spin that point as he justified U.S. support for OBL at that time and subsequent shift. He didn't want to deal with the fact that this shows that the conflict with Muslim nations is not about their problem with Christianity, which Bob has been arguing all week.

It was a tremendous call, because Bob demonizes Muslims week in and week out. This is typical of people that are very aggressive in their militarism. It's easier to bomb people when you think of them as demons rather than humans. Now Bob has encountered a flesh and blood Muslim that doesn't fit the caricature he wants to draw. Bob will assume he's an exception to the caricature, but then why does he struggle so much to justify this caricature when confronted with a Muslim? This may make him pause in the future, and perhaps have a slightly more empathetic mentaility, knowing that Muslims are listening and expect him to back up his claims logically.

Then again, maybe it won't make any difference.

More on Obama's "Changes"

Bill Moyers has a great interview with investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill. He discusses the contrast between Obama rhetoric and the facts on the ground. Did you know that right now we have 250 thousand private contractors fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since the latest increases under Obama? That's about the same as the number of troops that are over there. Is that wise? That many people fighting war for profit? A basic rule of economics is that when you incentivize something and you get more of it. So far under Obama we're getting a lot more war. That makes sense from an economic perspective, but is it moral?