Prospective Tither?

(H.T - David for more good stuff)

Critical Thinking

"Herein lies one of the big problems in conservative Christianity. Evangelicals are not encouraged to think for themselves, not encouraged to do critical thinking, not encouraged to be open minded in the good sense of that phrase. They have too often been taught to blindly accept what they are told. This of course becomes dangerous when it is applied to watching the news and we are dealing with vital life and death matters and some aspects of politics. Of course it is true as my granny used to say that "we should not be so open minded that our brains fall out". Christians should be leading the search for the truth. Christians should be committed to finding out the truth, however uncomfortable and however much it makes us adjust our political or even religious views. The question is can we handle the truth?"

(H.T Ben)

Naive or Gullible

Some people are either and sometimes both and because they are they don't know that they are. Seems like a quandary of inescapable illogic - but true nevertheless.

If you're one who is easily conned or tricked or sucked into something - how did you let yourself get into such a position. Was it that you were too trusting? Didn't you see the warning signs of a fraud? Did you think that everyone speaks and lives the truth?

A lot of times incidents that suck us in to believing a fallacy actually allow us to learn something - so we don't repeat our mistakes.

Why is it that many seemingly intelligent Christians fail to learn from their own life experiences of being had or conned. Far too many Christians who read anything 'Christianesque' in books; the internet; or listen to so-called 'sermons' automatically believe them - even of people they have never met or know nothing of their backgrounds. Why is it that their 'conman radar' doesn't give them warnings of false teacher; false prophet; false values; false words.

No wonder so many fall into cults.

There are so many internet sites that want you to believe their dribble and want you to pay for them to dribble their false ideas all over you like so many of the Word of Faith 'ministries' of the calibre like Benny Hinn, Dollar, Tilton, Crouch, and Steve Shultz and his amazing Elijah List (what a joke).

The mark or sign of any (and all) true prophet/teacher/preacher is 100% correctness and truth and their life, standards and values should dovetail with the Scriptures - if they don't match up the only logical, sensible andbiblically correct thing to do is run, run now, run fast, run like your life depended on it, don't look back, run away.

So when the carrot of prosperity doctrine is dangled in front of you - how will you react.
(Hint - run)

When the carrot of false teachings and prophecies looks attractive will you be conned?
(Hint - run now)

Will you renew that magazine subscription of false teachings and piffle that wants to sell you Jesus oil; Jesus handkerchiefs; blessed doilies; or anointed hats?
(Hint - run away, run away)

Will you grow into maturity and discerning truth from fallacy or will you be gullible and naive?
(Hint - follow God not man)

Bull Flop

Bull Flop Absolute Bull Flop

Read this - if you are game - to gain an understanding of the total amount of how much anti-bibilical awesome bull flop coming from "Dr Increase - Bob Harrison" - where does he get his material from - oh that's right he makes it up out of the Harrison bible and the rest of the plagiarism - thanks to Lance and John. I wonder how much moola they raked in after such a disgusting lead up. As Halieus says - utterly tragic.

How tragic is it that suckers actually believe and worse still - give their hard earned dollars to these charlatans in a bid of selfishness to increase their own personal wealth.

So sad.

L'inferno

A heavy peal of thunder came to waken me
Out of the stunning slumber that had bound me,
Startling me up as though rude hands had shaken me.

I rose, and cast my rested eyes around me,
Gazing intent to satisfy my wonder
Concerning the strange place wherein I found me.

Hear truth: I stood on the steep brink whereunder
Runs down the dolorous chasm of the Pit,
Ringing with infinite groans like gathered thunder.

Deep, dense, and by no faintest glimmer lit
It lay, and though I strained my sight to find
Bottom, not one thing could I see in it.

“Down must we go, to that dark world and blind,”
The poet said, turning on me a bleak
Blanched face; “I will go first – come thou behind.”

Then I, who had marked the colour of his cheek:
“How can I go, when even thou art white
For fear, who art wont to cheer me when I’m weak?”

But he: “Not so; the anguish infinite
They suffer yonder paints my countenance
With pity, which thou takest for affright;

Come, we have far to go; let us advance”

Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy L’inferno

True Evangelism

A.W Tozer has written many quality works and had an almost timeless grasp on what was going on around him and within the church as a whole.

Mere evangelism is not our present need. Evangelism does no more than extend religion, of whatever kind it may be. It gains acceptance for religion among larger numbers of people without giving much thought to the quality of that religion. The tragedy is that present day evangelism accepts the degenerate form of Christianity now current as the very religion of the apostles and busies itself with making converts to it with no questions asked.

We must have a new reformation. There must come a violent break with that irresponsible, amusement-mad, paganized pseudo religion which passes today for the faith of Christ and which is being spread all over the world by unspiritual men employing unscriptural methods to achieve their ends.

We should all rememeber that

Evangelicalism is in need of a serious overhaul. It has become a self-grandizing, over indulgent glutton devouring the hearts and minds of many. If evangelicalism started to get back to proper principles of being an evangelical by re-examining themselves and thereby seeing the need for reformation.

(H.T The Blind Beggar)

Ranting

Is the descriptive conclusion used by many reviewers of the recent body of work by Dawkins in The God Delusion. Back in October '06 Terry Eagleton wrote a fine and lengthy review of the book and aptly named his piece 'Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching':-

Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be...

...Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is self-evidently absent. He thinks, for example, that the ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if religion did, which to someone like me, who lives there part of the time, betrays just how little he knows about it. He also thinks rather strangely that the terms Loyalist and Nationalist are ‘euphemisms’ for Protestant and Catholic, and clearly doesn’t know the difference between a Loyalist and a Unionist or a Nationalist and a Republican. He also holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion rather than politics...

...Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass.

...Dawkins could have told us all this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.

The most recent review and discussion of Dawkins is by the esteemed Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga.[Renowned for many works and one of my favourites is God, Freedom, and Evil (1974).]

From Page 8 ...So why think God must be improbable? According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds. But if God is a necessary being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the probability that he exists, of course, is 1, and the probability that he does not exist is 0. Far from its being improbable that he exists, his existence is maximally probable. So if Dawkins proposes that God’s existence is improbable, he owes us an argument for the conclusion that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God—an argument that doesn’t just start from the premise that materialism is true. Neither he nor anyone else has provided even a decent argument along these lines; Dawkins doesn’t even seem to be aware that he needs an argument of that sort.

...People like Dawkins hold that there is a conflict between science and religion because they think there is a conflict between evolution and theism; the truth of the matter, however, is that the conflict is between science and naturalism, not between science and belief in God.

By way of conclusion: The God Delusion is full of bluster and bombast, but it really doesn’t give even the slightest reason for thinking belief in God mistaken, let alone a “delusion”. The naturalism that Dawkins embraces, furthermore, in addition to its intrinsic unloveliness and its dispiriting conclusions about human beings and their place in the universe, is in deep self-referential trouble. There is no reason to believe it; and there is excellent reason to reject it

Tom Gilson (H.T) has also picked up on the way Dawkins describes God:-

So Dawkins is objecting to a God that Christians don't believe in either. Ho hum.

As does Prothesis and Brian.

That then raises the question of do we actually believe that Richard Dawkins exists?

Ben Witherington (H.T)

Yet we do have people like Richard Dawkins are writing best selling books like "The God Delusion". Now Dawkins is an Oxford don. He's erudite and clever. He is also arrogant and ignorant when it comes to the Bible and theology.

Keep an eye out for the new book The Dawkins Delusion by Prof Alister McGrath expected in Feb 07. You can find mp3 of his lecture here.

Update: Check Al here for an update and further comment.

Faith or Fake Healer

Watch as you see the pain just fade away from this healed man.

Straw Man Makes Hay

Does anyone seriously believe this guy?

Why do the media actually court him for comments?

There are so many gullible people in this world who don't use their brains - when will people start respecting and expecting some truth?

Who is he allegedly speaking for (other than himself)?

I think I know where he gets his material from.

He uses up more ink in apologizing for wrong predictions than he did in actually making the so-called 'God told me so' prediction in the first place. Missing 'sometimes' or at any time is a sign of falseness.

(H.T. Get Religion)

Unamuno

"I am a man;
All men are mortal;
Therefore, I will die."

Church Marketing

There is a veritable plethora of supermarket shelves within both secular and non-secular bookstores containing a variety of books for the self-help or church-help manifestations and fads. These money making machines are well oiled with a high productivity. There is so much crap - for lack of a better word - that is pushed and promoted for the well being of the individual and for the betterment (allegedly) of one's church. Naturally, there are some great theologically sound and scripture adhering books and products also available in thse stores, however, it would be good to sort the rubbish out every now and then.

As Michael Spencer says:-

Let me ask any sheep out there who are offended that I said your Jabez wall hanging might be a bad choice if they have any idea how much money is made by Christian authors, publishers and marketers? How much money is made and where does it go? When you see Joyce Meyer handing out a bag of rice, are you actually taken in that she deserves $50 million a year rather than mission agencies and humanitarian ministries?

It is a “scam.” Most of evangelicalism is becoming so “scammable” it’s embarrassing. The rhetoric defending this nonsense is even more embarrassing.

Why don’t we just stop? I’m almost certain that if we quit buying this stuff, they’ll quit marketing it. If we can get over our fetish for successful fads, new trends, the next big thing, quick fixes, cool promos, ads and hype, we make do something startling in our walk with Jesus. What a shame that a newspaper editor has to tell us this. We already know it, because we know Jesus wouldn’t approve of all this marketing and he wouldn’t participate in it on the level we do.

Perhaps we allshould all be more discerning (myself included) in our selecting of resources that are actually truthful and full of truth.