Apologetics Diary Archive 1999b

Tuesday 13 April 1999.

Dear diary,

What an opportunity today! I had taken a sheet of Greek noun endings and definite articles to work today and took it to morning tea break to see if I could memorise some of them. Fat chance. One guy asked me if I was learning Latin (not bad!) but nobody else seemed to have any idea what it was. So when I told them they of course asked why I wanted to do that. So I told them that the New Testament in the Bible was written in Greek.

I think that answered the question, because one (rather opinionated) man started explaining how he had seen a TV programme at Easter with a Hindu(!?) on it who claimed that during Jesus' lost years he had been in India learning everything from the Hindus - which he thought was quite funny. Unfortunately all I did at the time was exclaim about how there wasn't any evidence for that at all. What would have been much better would to have said something like:

"Yeah, and Elvis is alive and running a burger bar in Taihape," which would have less meaning for those not knowing New Zealand small towns - it rhymes with die happy, BTW. "And there's actually more evidence for that than Jesus visiting India. I challenge you to name one statement of Jesus that can be traced back to something he would have learnt from a Hindu."

And then proceed to list a few simple differences, nay, direct contradictions.

Hinduism	Jesus' Teachings
Millions of gods.	One God.
No god of love (lust yes, love no).	"For God so loved the World that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life." John 3:16. (Just hit him with the whole verse, making it more personal if you really want to go for the jugular. eg, "God loved you so much...)
We get recycled through reincarnation.	Jesus wasn't reincarnated, but was resurrected. Big difference, since he had the same body. This also has big implications for us.
Karma is a cosmic law and there is no way out. People slowly work off their own sins from previous lives.	"I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me." John 14:6. In the person of Jesus Christ, God reached out to us rather than forcing us to work for salvation. We don't have to do anything other than accept Him (Jesus) and what He has done for us.

Jesus taught the complete opposite of the basic Hindu beliefs.

Moving on, though, and just to show that I don't come up with everything after the event, somehow the same man got onto how the original Mormons had been shown by DNA testing to be one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. What absolute rubbish. I told him so in no uncertain terms, too. (If you remember your Israelite history, the ten tribes which formed the northen Israelite kingdom abandoned worshipping God and were "lost" when they were assimilated/overtaken by the surrounding nations. The southern kingdom - the other two tribes - included Judah and eventually became the "Jews" as we know them today.)

Since this Mormon DNA fallacy has so much in common with the Missing Day rumour, check out the article on the Cultwatch site. See if you can figure out a rebuttal of the DNA postulation, then come back and read what my answer was.

But

I

Won't

Wait

Very

Long.

My answer, of course, went along the lines of our complete ignorance of having any DNA from the lost tribes to compare the supposed Mormon DNA to, to actually see if it's a match or not. The only Israelite DNA we do have to compare to is from the existing Jews - ie, from the tribes that were not lost. So we may be able to tell from DNA testing whether they are a Jew or not, or perhaps even if they had Jewish ancestry, but not having any DNA from the lost tribes (the lost tribes' DNA is as lost as the tribes are) we wouldn't know what to look for in their DNA to figure out if they were from a lost tribe. Even if we only got a "partial match" all we could tell is that they may be distantly related to the not-lost tribes. Logic (or even common sense) isn't so common these days.

Furthermore (and I didn't mention this one) the original Mormons were not Semitic (Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were "white and delightsome" for example) so how could they be a lost tribe anyway?

Saturday 17 April 1999.

Dear diary,

I watched a debate on video last night with a few friends on the subject of Atheism or Christianity - Which Does the Evidence Best Point To. To cut a long story short, the poll at the end showed that 97% of those who voted thought the Christian had presented better evidence for his side of the argument than the atheist had. 82% of the atheists who had turned up also thought this.

Yes, Dr William Lane Craig is one of the best Christian apologists in the world, but the atheist debater was also one of the best atheist apologists in the world - and was so clearly outclassed the debate was almost farcical. In fact, he seemed to be more a "hard-boiled" agnostic than a true atheist, saying that he did not make any claims about God, a tack which can make one's position harder to argue against, but really just shoots intself in the foot - it's a bit like saying "your way is not right but I don't have anything else which I can claim is better."

World famous (former?) atheist (and now deceased) Isaac Asimov was a very intelligent man - he knew he could not prove there is no God. Instead he said he believed there was no God (which incidentally highlights atheism's religious nature).

Perhaps what annoyed me the most about the atheist's arguments is that he continually referred to "good" and "bad" without clearly explaining how he defined those; without explaining how he determined that something was good. Since he, as an atheist, has no absolute external reference point for what is good and bad, how can he say that anything is good? Like I said, he continually missed that important point.

Here's a question brought up by this debate: If a top atheist apologist's arguments can be completely ripped to shreads by a top Christian apologist's arguments, why is atheism so popular, and why do discussions on the street go the way of the atheist so often?

The answer is two-fold: 1. There is not enough good teaching in Christian churches. 2. Atheists on the street are normally not interested in having a reasoned argument, which stands to reason - they don't want to look at what they believe because they'd be faced with having to change not only what they believe but their whole life.

Friday 23 April 1999.

Dear diary,

The importance of understanding what someone is talking about (ie, what they mean when they speak, not what we think they mean) was highlighted to me this last week. At work, we were on a tea break and someone was reading out a list of CDs that were advertised in the newspaper as being on sale. Things like Aerosmith, Bryan Adams, etc. Then he read out "Animals Greatest Hits" and I almost blew my Vitafresh out my nose. There I was thinking that the drummer Animal from the Muppets had released a CD, but it wasn't that at all.

Of course, in print it was obvious that it was the group The Animals, although the position of an apostrophe can still make a big difference. "Animals' Greatest Hits" vs "Animal's Greatest Hits."

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