Ronald V. Huggins

William Benjamin Smith (1850-1934) Mythicists do not, as a general rule, "play well with others," and so they usually don't interact much with current scholarship on the Historical Jesus. [1] Instead they tend to copycat one another and recycle the outdated material of older Mythicists. As a result, their books generally have the musty feel of Old Curiosity Shops specializing in scholarly rags and bones, kitschy, period-piece intellectual objets d'art , bundles of keys, darkened by oxidation, to doors and locks that no longer exist, heaps of damp, moldering, deservedly out-of-print books, and long-discounted notions.  One such discounted notion Mythicists sometimes recycle is William Benjamin Smith’s idea of the Pre-Christian Jesus. So, for example, in one of his books, Dan Barker, the angry atheist ex-pastor who built a career around detailing the bad behavior of the God who doesn’t exist, tosses out the following claim as one of his proofs that...

Just got introduced to the name Dan Barker in the past couple of weeks. I'd actually thumbed through his books at the bookstore on one occasion or other, but seeing that he was very careless and in the few instances where he actually cited sources for his claims they tuned out mainly to be worthless rubbish, I had quickly decided they didn't really warrant attention. To quote Richard Carrier, one of Barker's brothers in arms: "No serious scholar wants to waste his time reading something that’s full of claims he can’t even check because they won’t even properly source them." Almost everything Barker says about history is flawed if for no other reason than his being unable to even adequately describe the ancient sources whose contents he claims he is describing Since my friend mentioned him, I have been looking at him a little more closely. Many, many times what he says is simply false, and the only thing that one can say in response is, "I'm sor...

One thing that is important to remember is that news is a product just like cigarettes are a product, and just like cigarettes, it isn't very good for you. It might even be a good idea for the Surgeon General to write up a little warning to be shown in connection with the news. Just as cigarettes calm you down, coffee wakes you up, and alcohol makes you feel jolly and sociable, news gives you a satisfying rush of self-righteous rage, and that make's you feel all good and warm inside.  News has nothing to do with "just reporting the facts." That's boring. No...facts aren't news unless they can somehow be served up on a dish of scandal, unless there is a clearly identified good guy and bad guy in the story and so on. And as cigarettes comes in both regular and menthol, so news is packaged according to our likes and dislikes. As a result when people tune into the news they are literally being served up carefully edited stories from alternate universes, ea...

 Someone commented about this: "I take issue with this. By no measure will we have 'done well' by just meeting those standards. Christians should be held to the highest standards of obedience." Well naturally. Yet I think Hauerwas's comment underscores an social dynamic, namely, that When a society embraces evil it invariably hides the true character of what it is doing from itself under the guise of a campaign promoting some great moral good. At such times the Church will be applauded for joining in the great campaign and even perhaps for taking moral stands on any number of other issues as well. They will never be applauded or taking a stand on whatever THE crucial issue of the time happens to be, THE issue that faithfulness to both the well being of their community and to Christ requires them to take a stand on. Quite the contrary they will be viewed as opposing the good that is being used to veil the evil, and of being motivated by an unhealthy foc...

The title gives the false impression that 1/3 of Americans are Holocaust deniers, which was doubtless their intention. But when you read the article  you discover that the numbers presented relate to people being ignorant about and not at all denying the Holocaust. "93 percent of those asked think the Holocaust should be taught in schools, while 96 percent believe that the genocide happened." and Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), told Newsweek that the ADL's research shows Americans “overwhelmingly—almost universally,” know the Holocaust happened. The basis of the article is a survey published by he Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany entitled: " New Survey by Claims Conference Finds Significant Lack of Holocaust Knowledge in the United States ." (see at http://www.claimscon.org/study/) The survey shows that Americans are generally ignorant of the basic facts of the holocaust. Here is an example: ...

"Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear." Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (chap. 40). While the issue of when a fetus becomes human is one that can and should be discussed in certain contexts, such as the cases of individual conscience, the clear message of the recent New York abortion law is that such considerations are no longer relevant to the legal debate, since there can really be no grounds for legitimate doubt that in aborting a full-term baby you are killing a fully viable human being. Indeed, at this point in New York the term “infanticide” represents a fully appropriate synonym for what they are actually endorsing. Henceforth therefore when discussing the issue of the progress of abortion in America, we should avoid being detained by questions regarding ambiguities related to early stages of fetal development.  On the level of public policy, they are simply no lo...

One of the things that the New York law should do is to cause the Church to seek clarity.  I used to think that the human conscience, being, as Charles Spurgeon once described it, “the candle of the Lord,” would ultimately lead a person right if they followed it. I no longer believe that. While it is true that the conscience drives us in the direction of moral rectitude the reality is that it can be co-opted and subverted into endorsing evil when that evil is plausibly presented to it as a positive good, through the means of a narrative in which the actual bad guys are cast in the role of good guys, victims, heroes, and so on, and the good guys or neutral guys are cast in the role of villains, persecutors, devils, etc. If such a false story is believed by the person, the conscience can really embrace it, even if in reality the narrative is actually a dangerous, even monstrous lie. And then once the person takes the additional step of actually acting on the belief, actually...