Category: Apologetics

Hitchens Debates Craig On The Existence of God … Three Clips

“Moral behavior doesn’t need God. We need to act moral for social cohesion. Morality evolved for our survival and that’s why people act morally. It is degrading to humans, and servile, to require God for morality.”

Christopher Hitchens
Debate w/ Wm. Lane Craig
Biola University
1.) Hitchens insists that moral behavior doesn’t need God and yet turns around and implies that he can know it is good to have social cohesion. That is a moral judgment that has no grounding except in Hitchen’s say so.

2.) Hitchens then says that people act morally in order to survive but who says that survival is a moral good? How would we know that survival is a moral good without an objective standard for what is good? Are we to take Hitchen’s word alone that survival is a moral good? On this basis Stalin’s ongoing survival was a moral good that needed to be defended.

3.) Hitchens says it is degrading to humans and servile to require God but one must ask from where is Hitchens drawing his standard to suggest that it is a bad morality that degrades humans and makes them servile?

Hitchens, at every turn must presuppose himself as god in order to talk about his own version of morality. We must conclude that Hitchens was a theist who took himself as god.

“After all, Dr. Craig, to win this argument, has to believe and prove to a certainty. He is not just saying there might be a God because he has to say there must be one, otherwise we couldn’t be here and there couldn’t be morality. It’s not a contingency for him. I have to say that I appear as a skeptic who believes that doubt is the great engine (the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery, and all innovation), and that I doubt these things.”

Christopher Hitchens
Debate w/ Wm. Lane Craig 

Hitchens believed that doubt is the great engine and that he doubts all that Craig, as a Christian, is certain of. Hitchens thus is praising doubt over certainty and Hitchens is damn certain that doubt is certain.

“You cannot get from deism to theism except by a series of extraordinarily generous—to yourself—assumptions.”

Christopher Hitchens
Debate w/ Wm. Lane Craig

Hitchens is exactly correct here. This is the failure of all evidentialist apologetics. Another failure is that evidentialism can only bring one to probability. It can only argue that the greatest percentage and preponderance of evidence supports the assertion that “God exists.” However, evidentialism faces the problem that it can not know if something has 90% certainty of something being true unless it first knows with 100% certainty that something like God exists is true. How can anyone know that something is 90% likely of being certain unless they first know where the 100% marker of certainty is? Evidentialism fails because it argues for a high degree of certainty of matters being true even though it has no idea of what constitutes 100% certainty. Only be presupposing 100% certainty as given in God’s revealed word can we begin to talk about other degrees of certainty when it comes to evidence but after we have 100% why do we need 90%?

Christianity As An Adjective

Dr. Thomas Shirrmacher, in the April, 1992 Chalcedon Report, called attention to the fact that the word religion came into use with the Renaissance, and that previously, the word used for differing faiths was law; the Christian Law, the Islamic Law, the Buddhist Law, and so on. A faith was either polytheistic or catholic; that is either limited in scope or universal. The term catholic properly belongs to the faith and only to a church if it insists that God’s Law—not the church—is universal in its jurisdiction. But since the Enlightenment, or about 1660, Christian catholicity has waned, especially since the French Revolution. Christianity has been replaced, or Christendom has been replaced by the concept of the West, that is Humanistic Statism.

R. J. Rushdoony
Lecture — Religious Earthquake I

All religions are law systems and all law systems are the servants of some religion. This explains why theocracy is an inescapable concept. All governments must enact laws and when they do enact laws they do so on the basis of religion since law is a statement of morality and morality a reflection of religion. This, obviously, means that all governments are the reflection of some religion. No form of government is religion free. All forms of government are as equally intensely religious. This is true when the government says it eschews all religion, or, to the contrary when it insists, that it accepts all religion. When any government says that it is religious free it only means that it is basing all its legislative and governmental work on its own authority, which tells us that it is based on the religion of humanism where man dictates the morality upon which all legislation is based.  Religion has not gone away. When any government insists that it accepts all religion, once again we have a testimony of humanism since in the accepting of all religion it is the government which will determine which religion will be the religion that dictates the morality upon which legislation will be based.

The above is true for any institution in any jurisdiction wherein laws are made for the institution. Because, families, for example, have laws that govern the family, families are downstream of some religion, since the laws for the family are based on a morality and the morality in turn is based on some religion and God concept. Because this is so families will be “Christian families,” or “Humanist families” or “Jewish families,” or “Muslim families,” etc. However no family will ever be a non-religiously defined family. The same is true for law courts, for educational institutions, for workplaces, for political parties, etc. Religion is an inescapable concept and never goes away, though often it is insisted that this or that is “irreligious.”

All this explains, in part, why R2K is so disastrous. R2K insists that these different realms (family, arts, juridical, education, politics, government etc.) all should be, by definition, areligious. R2K, bone-headedly, insists that the adjective “Christian” should never define these different realms. Indeed, R2K goes so far as to say that it is sinful before God to insist that the adjective “Christian” should be supplied as a descriptor for any of these areas. In doing so, R2K turns over all these areas to non-Christian religions. This is so because once R2K has successfully convinced Christians that they should not pursue “Christian Education,” “Christian Politics,” “Christian Jurisprudence,” “Christian Art,” then all that is left as an adjective to define these jurisdictional disciplines is some non-Christian religion. This explains, in part, why R2K is idolatry and an abandoning of the Christian faith.

Doug Wilson Camping On The Holocaust

“Do you believe the Holocaust happened? Are you a Holocaust denier? This is right where this stuff [the woke right stuff] leads.”

Doug Wilson

 
Does Doug believe that the Bagels had and have a vested interest in exaggerating what’s called the holocaust? Does he believe that the Holocaust conveniently serves the global purposes of those who style themselves to be Bagels? Doesn’t the once recorded and accepted but now dismissed idea of lampshades made of Jewish skin and soap made of Jewish fat indicate that there is reason to continue to ask questions surrounding “the holocaust?” If Lampshades make out of Bagel skin and soap made out of Bagel fat is now seen as ridiculous isn’t it at least possible that the numbers surround the holocaust are also ridiculously inflated?

One wonders if, for Doug, one can question the six million number and not be a holocaust denier?  How low of a number of total Jewish deaths can one affirm and still be called a “holocaust denier?” If one affirms, let’s say, three million Jewish deaths is one a holocaust denier at that point? two million? One million?

And one might wonder why Doug focuses in on this holocaust? Why doesn’t the man ever talk about the holodomor where Ukrainian Christians were the target of genocide by the Jewish Bolsheviks, or the Armenian genocide by those claiming to be Turks or the German holocaust recorded in the book by James Bacque titled “Other Losses?”

On top of this we might ask if the Bagels have a history of lying. Did they lie about the USS Liberty? Did they lie in their early claim that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” A few decades later did the Bagels lie about their oversight and involvement with the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees? Did the Bagels lie about the the 1994 blood-shedding of Palestinian worshippers in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque. According to Doug Wilson should we take any stock that the motto of Israel’s Mossad is “by  way of deception.”  If the Bagels lied about all this why is it not at least possible that they have lied about the 6 million number? Does it matter to Doug Wilson that the Bagels repeatedly prior to WW II insisted repeatedly that six million Bagels were being harrassed, persecuted, and in danger in publication after publication in different circumstances and instances across the world? How much of a pattern does one have to see repeated before it is rational to say … “I wonder if a particular well reported incident is also part of this ‘by way of deception’ pattern?”

Why is it that questioning the facts around death totals during WW II becomes the sine qua non of Wilsonian and neo-con (leftist) orthodoxy?

Further, does Doug think R. J. Rushdoony is “Woke Right” because he questioned the holocaust? Does Doug think David Irving is “Woke Right” because he questioned the holocaust? Does Doug think Michael Hoffman or E. Michael Jones are “Woke Right” just because the ADL says they are?

What does Doug do with Fred Leuchter’s testimony in the Ernst Zundel trial?

Doug Wilson has become a leftist normie.

The Difference Between Andrew Fraser’s “Ethnoreligious” Vision & McAtee’s Ethno-Christian Vision

Over at the link provided at the bottom of this page Andrew Fraser published an article that spilled some ink mentioning myself and Iron Ink. Upon reading the article my first thought was, “Given Andrew’s concerns in this article, I’m not sure why my name and my article dealing with dismissing the accusation that the Dissident Right is really ‘WOKE Right,’ even got into Mr. Fraser’s sites.” Most of his article dealt with the way he was dismissed and ignored by the “Right Response” chaps at a recent conference the Right Response guys held. It seems they refused Mr. Fraser the opportunity to set up a book table at the conference.

I should say at the outset that I am a wee bit familiar with Mr. Fraser’s works. Several years ago, I read, with great delight, his “Dissident Dispatches.” There was very little in that book with which I found myself disagreeing. As such, it was quite the surprise when Mr. Fraser should find himself disagreeing with me so strenuously.

It seems that Mr. Fraser thinks that the chaps at Right Response (Joel Webbon, Wesley Todd, and Michael Belch,) are somehow intellectually linked with myself. I would like to say here to Mr. Fraser that I’m pretty confident that’s not true, especially given the fact that they would move heaven and earth to avoid being labeled as “Kinists” while Rev. Andy Webb has called me “The Godfather of Kinism.”

Mr. Fraser, on the other hand, seems to embrace the idea of Kinism given what he writes in one of his analysis pieces explaining his recent book;

“Accordingly, in the Anglosphere at least, the postmodern restoration of Christian nationhood should be inspired by a neo-Angelcynn theopolitics best organized around four “orienting concepts”: process theism, preterism, kinism, and royalism.”

And he complains in that same analysis piece that;

 Even Stephen Wolfe, the most prominent American Christian nationalist, downplays, when not outright denying, the intractably biocultural dimension of Anglo-Saxon identity.  He has suggested, for example, that even black men such as Booker T. Washington and Justice Clarence Thomas (who happens to be a devout Catholic) have been assimilated into the Anglo-Protestant ethnonation.

So, on the narrow points of esteeming Kinism and thinking Stephen Wolfe is in error when Wolfe downplays the biocultural dimension of Anglo-Saxon identity Fraser and I are in league. If the blokes in charge of the Right Response conference knew of this conviction of Mr. Fraser regarding Kinism that would have been, by itself, reason enough for them to block Mr. Fraser from setting up a book table. For reasons that continue to completely mystify me, the Christian Nationalist movement remains scared out of their skin at the idea of Kinism. Alternately, they have no problem with the idea but the word itself makes them wet their pants with fear. They would, it seems, rather be flayed alive then to be associated with Kinism. Go figure.

In terms of the other three pillars that Mr. Fraser is building advocacy for his position upon (Royalism, Preterism, and Process Theism) I am personally indifferent to the first one (Royalism) am cautious about the second (Preterism) and am radically opposed to the third one (Process Theism).

I could easily live within a Monarchical system though I would prefer it to be a Constitutional Monarchy with the King hemmed in by the parameters of God’s Law. I have no problem with a healthy Partial Preterism though I remain convinced that Full Preterism is unabashed heresy. The Scriptures are unmistakable about the literal resurrection of the persons and physical bodies of those who have died — some to eternal misery, with the vast majority resurrected to eternal life in the renewed heavens and earth. The problems with Process of Theism are so vast that anybody who embraces it can no longer be considered a Christian. Process theism holds to a god that is a stranger to the God of the Bible. The God revealed in the Bible is immutable, eternal, impassible, and is taught to have aseity. The God of process theism to the contrary is a God who is affected by temporal processes and so therefore is mutable, time-bound, passable, and lacks aseity. This is the god of Hegel who is constantly becoming as he responds to mankind in history.

Of course by embracing Process Theism one can’t help but wonder if Fraser is a Christian in any traditional, orthodox, or historical sense. If the chaps at Right Response Ministries understood all this about Mr. Fraser it stands to reason they wouldn’t give him a book table to hawk his books. I wouldn’t either. Christians don’t promote non-Christianity at their conferences.

The somewhat ironic thing about this is that I agree with Mr. Fraser that what is needed is the Christ who is not only Universal but who is also particular. Christ is indeed a global Christ but He is a global Christ who rules over a confederated church that is represented by and comprised of many national churches. The New Jerusalem, we are taught, is populated by people from every tribe, tongue, and nation, in their tribes, tongues, and nations. When Revelation 21 teaches that it is nation by nation that enter into the New Jerusalem we learn that Christianity is a faith that does not champion the Universal Jesus to the neglect of the particular Jesus. Because of this teaching there is no threat in my theology, as Mr. Fraser writes;

 “Of an exclusive ecclesiastical allegiance to a generic cosmic Christ reducing the distinctive character of every earthly ethnoreligious identity to mere adiaphora (i.e., things inessential in the eyes of the church).”

And so I have no problem with what Mr. Fraser writes that “the rebirth of Anglo-Protestantism demands an ethnoreligious foundation.” However, I would war against any ethno-Christian foundation that included process theism or full Preterism. Further, I would vigorously argue that one doesn’t need either full Preterism, or process theism, in order to have the rebirth of a folk Christianity that is Anglo-Protestant. Indeed, I would argue that any Christianity that is characterized by full Preterism and/or process theism would be anti-Christ and so anti-Christianity.

Mr. Fraser complains about a lack of particularity in current versions of Christian Nationalism and yet that complaint is what one would expect from a man who has the lack of the Universal in his theology. For Mr. Fraser there is no Universal to hold his particulars together into a cohesive whole. Without a Universal the particulars are not possible, just as without a “Uni” in University, there can be no “(di)versity.”

Mr. Fraser did me the courtesy of correctly stating my position when he disagreed with it. I do believe that;

“Biblical Christianity … believes in a universal ‘history directed towards the postmillennial end of God’s Kingdom being built up on planet earth’ in fulfillment of God’s plan ‘to have the Kingdoms of this earth become the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ.’”

And in that statement we find the presence of the Universal and the particulars. There is one Kingdom of God (Universal) that is occupied by the “Kingdoms of this earth” becoming “the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ.” Further, as mentioned earlier, these sundry and varied Kingdoms all come into the New Jerusalem on that final day in all their particular nationalistic glory.

Revelation 21:22 I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. 23 The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. 24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it.

In the end, I quite agree with Mr. Fraser that “the rebirth of Anglo-Protestantism demands an ethnoreligious foundation,” though I would prefer the phrase “ethno-Christian.”

Much more might be said but I think this covers both my agreements and disagreements with Mr. Fraser. Given his embrace of Process Theism with its implicit Hegelianism I would lack kindness if I did not end with politely asking Mr. Fraser to consider repenting of such non-Biblical axioms.

Those wanting to read a more exhaustive explanation of Mr. Fraser’s position should read here;

Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus: Projects of Peoplehood from Biblical Israel to the Collapse of British Patriotism

If more questions by the readers arise from reading Mr. Fraser’s article I would be more than glad to answer them.

The CREC is NOT Conservative & Rev. Rich Lusk Proves It

The CREC is chock full of ministers who man the walls of the “conservative” Left. Rich Lusk is one of them. Uri Brieto is another. Doug Wilson is the godfather of the WOKE LITE Left. These chaps, if you recall, were the ones who just a few years ago, led the charge in trying to redefine Reformed theology by giving us the heresy called Federal Vision. Now, they are back at it seeking to implement a kind of Christian Nationalism that is not particularly Christian nor especially concerned with Nationalism. As the old proverb goes these chaps on these subjects are all hat and no cattle.

One of their schticks is to try and gate-keep the Reformed world by thinking they can tell us who among the Reformed can be in the inner circle of the Christian Nationalism movement and who is going to be kicked out. They are the modern day version of Wm. F. Buckley kicking out one person after another (Sobran, Francis, Brimelow, Derbyshire, etc.) from the “Conservative” movement. These chaps of the CREC think they are the sheriffs of the Christian Nationalist movement and that they get to round up anybody who disagrees with them.

Well, I disagree with them. I detest their propositional nationhood type approach. I abhor their Boasian approach to race and nationhood. As such I routinely pray that they will fail and be tossed on the ash-heap of history. I especially don’t want to see their version of Christianity becoming hegemonic since Federal Vision is a return to semi-pelagian non-Reformed theology.

Recently, one of their acolytes, Rich Lusk, has been on the net insisting that certain people get read out of the Christian Nationalist movement. In this brief piece I interact with Lusk a wee bit;

Rich Lusk writes,

1. Whatever shift you think you’ve seen, none of us are multiculturalists or cultural egalitarians. Wilson, myself, and others are still happy to cite Rushdoony, Dabney, etc., when it’s fitting. I don’t subscribe to their infallibility but I do appreciate them. The question is not, “Would Dabney be excommunicated if he were in the church today?,” but, “Would Dabney make the same errors if he were in the church today?” I think Wilson has done a fair job evaluating Dabney.

Bret responds,

A.) Actually, Wilson, Lusk and company are soft multiculturalists. Sure, they aren’t as extreme as the Clergy in the mainline churches but if you compare them to Machen, or Rushdoony, or John Edwards Richards, or Clarence McCartney, or Francis Nigel Lee, or Morton Smith — Reformed theologians only a generation or two removed from Wilson — then the CREC chaps are indeed multiculturalists. It’s not even close. I have the quotes to prove it.

So, the question these blokes present to us is; “Do we want to settle for ceasing the multicultural slide thus sticking with the present status quo or do we really want to reverse and undo what is now known as the Post-War consensus that includes all the advances of the civil rights movement — a movement that was driven by Marxist ideology?” Getting on the CREC wagon means that we codify as normal where we are right now. Sure, it might mean an end to the continuing slide leftward (though I seriously doubt that) but it will do nothing to reverse the hell-ward slide we’ve been on since the 1960s.

B.) When Lusk says that he and his CREC mavens are happy to cite Rushdoony and Dabney when it is fitting he means that the CREC mavens are glad to cite Rush and Dabney when it is convenient. I promise you that both Rush and Dabney would want nothing to do with Wilson, Brieto, Lusk, and the CREC headcases. If Rush could criticize Francis Schaeffer (and he did) then Rush would certainly light out after these compromisers.

Secondly, on this score, keep in mind that Wilson has publicly said that he has no interest in being Rushdoony 2.0 preferring instead to be Rushdoony 0.5. Which being interpreted means that Wilson wants to dilute and water down Rushdoony. It means that he thought Rush was too extreme. Wilson wants to be a kinder and gentler Rushdoony, which means he’s not interested in Rushdoony except for when Wilson can cloak himself in Rush’s mantle.

C.) Note that Luks speaks of Dabney’s errors in the same breath as saying he appreciates Dabney. Lusk does so without saying what errors it is that Dabney would no longer embrace. I guarantee you that if Lusk were to list Dabney’s “errors” that Dabney would no longer embrace a vigorous debate would immediately break out as to whether or not what Lusk says was a Dabney mistake was indeed a Dabney mistake.

D.) The idea that we should take seriously Wilson evaluating Dabney is akin to saying we should take seriously Joel Osteen evaluating John Calvin.

Rich Lusk wrote;

2. A Christian, conservative political agenda can be accomplished without racial identity politics (the successes of the Trump administration are an excellent test case for this).

Bret responds,

First, we are way way too early to talk about the “successes of the Trump Administration as a test case for the CREC’s position on negating multiculturalism.

Second, a conservative political agenda might have been accomplished without racial politics back when Pat Buchanan was running for President but we past that exit long ago. There will be no genuine conservative political agenda accomplished apart from racial realism. This reality is seen by the voting patterns in Presidential elections. To this point only white people are voting in majority for conservative, populist, or nationalist candidates. This has been the case for several Presidential cycles and there is no reason to think this is going to change UNLESS Trump is able to send upwards of 30 million illegals back home while at the same time extremely narrowing the amount of legal immigration.

Rich Lusk wrote,

3. Racial identity politics from the right, including making a big issue of interracial marriage, is bound to lose. If you want to be a martyr for racial identity politics, go ahead. I’d rather win as a Christian – and I do think significant victories are possible if Christians will be wise and vigilant about it. The alt right, or Neo-Nazis, or whatever they should be called, are fools and a distraction from the task at hand.

McAtee responds,

Here we find the proof that the CREC is not serious. Our culture is being bombarded with the New World Order push for interracial marriage. It is being pushed in our advertising world, in our film world, in our television programs, on University campuses and in “conservative” churches and Lusk is saying that resisting this New World Order push for interracial marriage is a loser issue. This is proof that the CREC is multicultural. If they are willing to give up on this issue they have planted their flag on the side of the One Worlder types. This is an example of CREC pragmatism at its worse.

Lusk says he’d rather win as a Christian but I’m here to tell you if Lusk and the CREC wins like this then the Christian faith loses. Lusk wants to lose gracefully and then call that losing, “winning.”

Fools like Lusk from the Lite-left or Neo-Cultural Marxists, or whatever they should be called, are idiots and will only, in the end, at best temporarily slow down but not reverse the slide we are currently experiencing. People need to realize that “Conservative” denominations like the CREC and “Conservative” clergy like Joe Boot, Andrew Sandlin, Rich Lusk, Doug Wilson, Uri Brieto and Peter Leithart are in reality just a variant of what is called “controlled opposition.”

___

Addendum

So similar analysis from Nate Keane;

They live in a complete echo chamber of their own creation. Any of us outside that echo chamber recognizes that a reckoning is coming on these issues, and a tearing down of all the presuppositions and theories that have undergirded the modern egalitarian world. They’re busy saying they’re not woke, while endorsing all of those assumptions. They think that because they can purge dissent in THEIR ranks, that they can stave off the reckoning by just Tabula Rasa-ing harder. That reckoning is coming, the question is Will Christians have a voice in it or not. They’re doing their best to ensure that we don’t. They won’t like what comes next. The lesson they took from WW2 is “we must root out racism and antisemitism” not, “when the magistrate abdicates his duties, you will get an Absalom”.