Atheist Tuesday: Is the Bible Reliable?

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“The Bible has been changed and translated so many times over the last 2,000 years it’s impossible to know what it originally said. Everyone knows that.”

How can we know that the Bible and what Jesus said in the New Testament is true? Is it one gigantic leap of faith? Atheists and other unbelievers will say so. Greg Koukl answers these questions in his article below, while this video gives a great overview of why Christians believe the Bible to be true.

“Misquoting” Jesus? Answering Bart Ehrman!”
By Greg Koukl

In “Misquoting Jesus”, the New York Times bestseller subtitled “The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why,” author Bart Ehrman fires a shot meant to sink the ship of any Christian who thinks the New Testament documents can be trusted. Here it is:

What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways….There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Ehrman is right on the facts, as far as they go.

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Atheist Tuesday: Sound and Fury from the SMRTies (Part 4 of 4)

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I have been prayerfully considering how I should write this post. I’ve thought about it, turning it over and over again in my mind, hoping to write something witty, provocative, poignant and ironic.

Not today.

The best way to go with this post on this Atheist Tuesday is to be real, sans flourish. So here goes.

The first three parts of this series, Sound and Fury, dealt with unbelievers’ comments in response to my YouTube videos. (Click here to start the series.) I selected the most extreme postings to show the extent of the hatred people have for the truth of the Gospel message.

The commenters on this blog have vociferously objected that I unfairly picked the worst of these posts to make atheists look bad, as if they were somehow above the fray of using obscenity, profanity, invective and crudeness to make their points.

They aren’t.

Though (mostly) polite and self-controlled on my site (they have to be or their comments get deleted) they are a lot different when they get together.

I have proof.

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Atheist Tuesday: Beware of Atheist Evangelists!

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I was handed an article by a friend over the weekend and was greatly encouraged that so many atheists are taking a renewed interest in the supernatural, especially God! So much so that they had a convention in L. A. a month ago about how to deal with us superstitious types; yet they couldn’t quite agree on how best to combat them. Here’s an excerpt:

The tension was evident at the Biltmore, where about 300 nonbelievers from across the United States and Canada gathered for three days of lively and, at times, gleefully blasphemous debate. (“I have a personal commitment to committing blasphemy every day,” biologist P.Z. Myers said.)

Religion was dismissed as “nonsense” and “superstition”; those who believe were described variously as “ignorant” and “stupid.”

Fellow nonbelievers were not spared, however, as lines were drawn between “new atheists,” who encourage open confrontation with the devout, and “accommodationists,” who prefer a subtler, more tactical approach.

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