Overheard at Table 3: Santa Ana Winds

 https://californiaherps.com/info/songsgroups/SongsThatMentionTheSantaAnaWinds.html

Overheard at Table 4: Truth Matters

Truth Matters: Confident Faith in a Confusing World

Andrea Kostenberger, Darrell Bock, & Josh Chatraw

(c) 2014

B&H Publishing Group, Nashville TN

 

 

The premise reminds me of he first God is Not Dead Movie, in that this book is geared toward the young student entering college, who has been woefully unprepared for the rhetoric and mind-opening discourse they are about to encounter.   While the book aims at "arming" the student with better defenses against the arguments against Christian Faith, it also admits that our churches and our parenting has done a piss-poor job of raising people with any sort of true knowledge of Christ or Scripture.

Which one could argue, is the greatest problem with Christianity today: too much Sunday School Elementary-level Bible Stories for children and very little by way of true edification in the tenets of our Faith tradition.

I found the book quite helpful, and I'll highlight some of the passages that I liked, but it's best to start with the biggest critique of the book, which is that it seems to focus too much on one man, Bart Ehrman.  This professor was apparently raised in the Christian faith but left as a young man when he could not find valid answers to the apparent contradictions among different parts of the Scripture (again, a most evident demonstration of the late 20th Century's lack of coherent and logical apologetics)

Basically, this book is a direct refutation of every book Ehrman has written, which weakens the argument as a book of apologetics when it seems so petty.  It's as though these three authors all took one of Ehrman's classes and got resoundingly slapped (rhetorically) by the professor.

That said, some of the passages that seem interesting are as follows:

p 13  Paul writing that, at the time of his writing the First Letter to the Corinthians, there were still at least 500 living witnesses to Jesus's earthly ministry.   Basically, Paul was saying, "You can still go check original sources."  (I make a note of this, as this ties into a literary WIP I've been toying with)

p19 A quote from Tim Keller "The Reason for God" (2008) - a book I need to check out

    "Just because you can';t see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen         doesn't mean that there can't be one.  Again we see lurking within this supposed hard-nosed                     skepticism an enormous faith in one's own cognitive faculties.  If our minds can't plumb the depths         of the universe for good answers to suffering, well, then, there can't be any!  This is blind faith of a         high order."

p34 Root Issues

    "Most of people's doubts about God in relation to suffering stem from two taproots:

        1) a refusal to see God as having divine rights over His creation, and 

        2) a minimization of the extent of human rebellion against our Creator."

This is a hard pill to swallow for most.

p113 is a section of the book in which the authors do concede that there are no original hand-written documents by the original Apostles, and they show where Ehrman uses this to cast doubt on all New Testament scripture, albeit stating that "perhaps" his agnosticism could be mollified if there were, say, an original manuscript by Mark which was 99.999999% close to the texts that we do have.   The authors make a good point that papyri do wear out.   However, they take much time to demonstrate how meticulous were the Old Testament scribes that they maintained a high level of authenticity; they also show how such scrutiny by the skeptics is not applied to other texts of the contemporary times (although this is a False Equivalence - other texts do not claim to be THE WORD OF GOD)

I wish that the authors would have taken a moment to insist that the Holy Spirit, the third part of the Triune God, if we teach ourselves that such God inspired and guided the scriptures, then the Holy Spirit can move these texts as God desires, throughout all the transcribing, and that our Bible is not the actual original ink on some papyrus, but the Word as it is spoken to humanity and accepted by the individual.

[that's a note for a future essay on the subject]

p 138 - is in a section that makes a fair point that while most skeptics think the OT was written in the 5th or 6th Centuries, that the original Gospels and Epistles were written in the 1st century, only a generation or so after Jesus's Death, Resurrection, and Ascension.

p150 "AD 33- Jesus dies and rises from the dead.  No later than AD 35, Paul is converted and adopts the church's exalted Christology and teaching on salvation."

    [NOTE: I really need to delve more into that timeline, because that does seem a bit too soon in the timeline for those events to occur.  However, I am no expert - this warrants more study on my part]

p 180 - from the Notes ... Ch 2 Note 8. Alvin Plantinga "A Christian Life Partly Lived" in Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of 11 Leading Thinkers, ed. Kelly James Clark (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1997), 72

    Alister E McGrath,
Mere Apologetics: How to Help Seekers and Skeptics Find Faith (Grand Rapids, Baker, 2012), 166-67

   

Overheard at Booth 3: The Church Today

How does the Church look today?

The Church is supposed to look like Christ,
but if we are to be honest,
it looks more like Satan.

The Church today
roars like a lion - 
hunting meat - 
eating without ceasing - 
ravenous, raving.

It searches for those whom
it can destroy, the Church 
yells and rages in the streets,
it turns people into hunters of each other

The Church today covers itself in
rich clothing, gold, diamonds, dripping with jewels
but if can't cover the stench of 
bile in its wretched mouth,
or the venomous pus in its clouded eyes.

Overheard at Booth 2: Truth Matters

 

Overheard at Booth 2: John Steinbeck "Tortilla Flat"

John Steinbeck Tortilla Flat

Overheard at Table 2: Starting the Year Off With a Bang ... or Two

2025 

Day 1: Army Veteran runs into crowd in New Orleans, killing 14 or 15.  Gets out, shoots two police officers before being gunned down.  Was flying ISIS flag from his truck.  Early reports said he was from Eagle Pass TX, to which Fox and other RW MSM outlets stated meant that he was an illegal alien and blamed Biden for the attack.  Trump posted that this proved his point about illegal immigration.

That the man was born in the USA and spent ten years in the Army apparently doesn't matter to the official Fascist government narrative.

Same day: In Las Vegas, a white man drove a Tesla Cybertruck to the front of the Trump hotel, shot himself in the head, and then the truck exploded.   Nobody really knows the motive, but the photo has been named as a perfect symbolic image for the incoming Administration.

The man was also a currently active Army soldier, and was also stationed at Fort Bragg and could have been in contact with the NOLO killer.

Here are a few articles:

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/new-orleans-truck-attack-suspect-01-02-25-hnk/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/jan/03/new-orleans-truck-attack-latest-updates

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/blaming-biden-new-orleans-attack-trump-setting-failure-rcna186008

https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-orleans-terrorist-man-las-vegas-cybertruck-explosion-shared-more-links-attacks-just-hours-apart

https://apnews.com/article/trump-hotel-explosion-tesla-cybertruck-5c5a8fd13a50e2bcde46370ae926d427

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/02/us/tesla-cybertruck-trump-hotel-wwk-hnk/index.html

Overheard at Table 1: New Years Day 2025

Otis Redwing: So, how are YOU planning to face these next four years.

Lucky Moran: I plan on taking up Day Drinking.  You?

Otis: Trying to figure out how to put myself on a morphine drip.