Another common argument used against christian belief is that the New Testament is unreliable and historically inaccurate. The argument focuses on a number of apparent inconsistencies in the gospel accounts, which, it is said, make the accounts unbelievable. Is there any substance to these claims?
I have previously reported on the ethical dilemmas posed by eating chocolate, due to the trafficking and exploitation of children in growing cocoa in West Africa (see My pleasure, their misery? and Easter eggs and slavery), and on the responses to my letters to chocolate manufacturers (see Fair Trade chocolate – report 1). I have […]
Bart Ehrman, a respected New Testament scholar who is not a christian, has recently written: “Jesus is best understood as a Jewish apocalypticist from the backwaters of a rural part of the Roman empire, a Jewish preacher who got on the wrong side of the law and was executed for crimes against the state, how […]
Another common argument used against christian belief is that the New Testament has been significantly changed since it was first written, so we cannot have any confidence in we are reading. Who knows if it is an accurate reflection of what the original authors wrote? Eminent scholar Bart Ehrman’s 2005 book Misquoting Jesus outlines his […]
Continuing my discussion of common arguments used against christians. This post: arguments that seek to undermine faith in Jesus by arguing that the gospels aren’t reliable as history, or that we can know little factual about Jesus, or that Jesus could not have been divine.
We can read the statistics which show that, in most western countries, church attendance has fallen in the last century. In some cases it is still falling, though in others it has levelled out. The ‘leavers’ are not necessarily giving up all belief in God – many list themselves as ‘not committed’ – but some […]
In philosophy, an idea is incoherent if it is self contradictory, and cannot even be properly defined. There are many things about the idea of God that some atheists think are incoherent. Here is a brief summary and comment on seven arguments, all of which I have seen presented, sometimes by philosophers, as serious and […]
It is the Thursday night before Good Friday. I was at a Tenebrae service, where Mark 14:61-64 was read out: Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” “I am,” said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the […]
More arguments unbelievers often use against christians. These ones are common, but not very good, but at least they provide a little amusement.
This post continues the series into preparing disciples of Jesus to stand against attacks on their faith, and specifically on arguments unbelievers often use against christians. I have seen every one of these arguments used in books or on the internet, even some that are clearly not very effective. Several arguments are based (loosely) on […]