Who is a Christian? Who is a Muslim?

For many people the word “Christian” has lost or changed meaning.  It used to mean someone who was an authentic follower of Jesus.  Now it is often used as a synonym for nice, as in, “She’s a really Christian person,” or to describe someone who goes to church sometimes while rejecting the essentials of the [...]

The truth and “the truth”

I always enjoyed this bit from The Simpsons with Phil Hartman playing Lionel Hutz, Real Estate Agent and how it played on the concept of truth.
Lionel Hutz: Marge, I had a lot of calls about you.  Customers love your no-pressure approach.
Marge: Well, like we say, “The right house for the right person.”
LH: Listen, it’s time I let [...]

Budget deficits: One picture says it all

For the record, I thought that President Bush spent way too much money.  But even more for the record, consider these projected deficits.  They make the Bush spending look like break-even years — and this is before the atrocious health care bill. 

I know Obama likes to blame Bush for all his problems, even though that is 180 [...]

Materialistic philosophy: A heaping mound of FAIL

. . . nobody will ever die from thinking God created the universe or having some doubts about the proposition that hydrogen is a substance which, if you leave it alone for 13.5 billion years, will turn into Angelina Jolie.
Mark Shea (Hat tip: regular commenter LCB)
By materialistic philosophy I don’t mean the “acquire all the things you [...]

Whoa! This was on TV?!

It was surprising but so encouraging to see that the clip below was on the TV show ER a couple years back. 
The chaplain is the classic fake Christian you’d expect to find in most theologically liberal churches today.  I love how the patient doesn’t buy her “just make up a god in your own image” type of platitudes.
[...]

Inerrant, infallible, inspired

I’m re-running this post with some more thoughts.  Even though I believe that the original writings of the Bible were without error, God-breathed and incapable of error, those views aren’t required for belief in God or the resurrection.  You can take a minimal facts approach and see that even if there were slight discrepancies in the [...]

The Apostle Paul: Two major salvation lessons

There is a fabulous paradoxical combo-lesson about salvation from the life of Paul: (1) If someone as bad as Paul can be saved, then so can we and (2) If someone as good as Paul needed to trust in Jesus to be saved, then so do we.  In other words, he was so bad but [...]

The Great De-Commission

One of the most convicting things about pluralistic Christians is how radically their actions differ from their professed beliefs.  Oh, we are all hypocrites at times, but their hypocrisy is foundational.
A pluralist is one who believes that all religions (or at least most of them) lead to God, and that Jesus is not the only way to salvation. 
Now [...]

Confronting fake concerns about religion in the public square

Friendly reminder: Many people advancing liberal arguments will try to dismiss the views of religious people just because they are religious people.  Too often people let them get away with that truly bigoted, prejudiced anti-religious argument.
These responses specifically address the marriage debate, though they also work when they try to dismiss your pro-life or other views [...]

“Good people” & Heaven

The Pugnacious Irishman had a thoughtful post titled My own goodness is enough . . . or is it?  It had a good illustration to consider about how you’d evaluate your “goodness.”  It also reminded me of this post, so I thought I’d re-run it.
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It is common for people to say, “I’m a good person. [...]

“Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”

The title is a memorable line from the movie Mean Girls, where the gym coach is teaching sex education (see the video below).  Whether by design or not, it demonstrated the ineffectiveness of both extremes of teaching kids about an extremely important topic.
Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.  Don’t have sex [...]

A “blogment” conversation about abortion

A recent commenter made so many common pro-abortion claims that I thought I’d post my reply as a “blogment” (a comment turned into a blog post).  Sadly, these are common arguments, but they are easy to respond to if you do some preparation. 
He had claimed elsewhere, among other things, that genocide, the Holocaust and starvation [...]

“Lights, Camera, Blasphemy”

These videos highlight the dramatic influence movies have had on public perceptions of Christianity. 
If you only have time for one, please watch the second (along with the last minute of the first).  It addresses the major errors in the movie Inherit the Wind, a pro-Darwinian evolution / anti-Christian propoganda piece about the “Scopes Monkey Trial” [...]

Catch ‘em then clean ‘em

Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason (my favorite apologetics ministry and Podcast - check ‘em out!) has a great saying about how God deals with us in the same order that we handle fish: He catches us and then He cleans us.
In fancy church word terms, He justifies us (makes us right with him through Jesus’ payment for [...]

I’m too pro-science to be pro-choice

 <=== The shirt says, “Now that I’m safe I’m pro-choice” 
One of my favorite techniques to use when debating pro-choicers is to highlight how pro-life views are in concert with science and how their views are not.  It is easy to demonstrate the scientific fact that life begins at conception.  They may try to argue that but [...]

World religions & evangelism videos

I did a one hour presentation on world religions for a church group and decided to video tape it as an experiment.  I was pleased with the content of the presentation but learned some things about lighting, sound and pace.  That will make the next one much better. I was hoping it would be shorter but it [...]