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Showing posts from April 24, 2011

Reasons I Believe — Part 4: Minutiae

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Buona sera. At first, this was going to be a simple addendum to Part 1 of this series, but decided it would be a force fit instead of complementing the existing material. So, here we go with some new-ish material. As I had stated before, if someone was going to simply make up a religion and write a holy book (a ludicrous idea even on the surface when applied to Christianity), they would not be clever enough to put in all sorts of details where people deny the faith, betray God, do dreadful things to each other, get severely disciplined by God and so on. That is, these details in the Bible add to the "ring of truth". Know the expression, "The devil is in the details"? Well, details show lack of the either the devil or of conniving men. People will come up with a book of sayings and say that it is a "lost" Gospel. Those "gospels" were "lost" for a good reason: They stink. If someone wants to read one of those things, I recommend that

Reasons I Believe — Part 3: Changed Lives

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Buon giorno. There are too many testimonies to count of people who where involved in crime, porn, drugs, sexual affairs and every other evil under the sun who had their lives were turned around because they surrendered to Jesus. I have put occasional videos on this Weblog ( like this one and this sequel ) of people giving their stories. There are also testimonies that are less dramatic. Like mine. I was raised in a "religious" home, but the theology was liberal. When I went to a Christian school, I realized that I had to examine what I believed, how it was different from what they believed (it was much more theologically conservative than I had experienced). I became a "chapter and verse" kind of guy, wanting to know, "Where did you get that?" when some doctrine was put forward. Later, I needed to know about the Bible itself. OK, these people are showing me where they find their beliefs in the Bible, but can I trust it in the first place? This led to