Salt :: Resurrection

the latest AFES magazine is OUT. lots of zombie talk. among other things...

check out mark's blog for his thoughts on the issues - he's one of the editors of Salt.

check out also websalt, there's not nearly as much there as the hard copy, but some interesting articles to get you thinking and (hopefully) talking. included for your reading pleasure is my latest review on Lee Strobel's the Case for Easter.

a little primer:

The only thing that I perhaps missed was the other side – surely the atheists they line up for these apologists to knock down have heard their arguments and remain unconvinced? Does Strobel, writing after his conversion, truly represent the 4 billion plus who remain unconvinced about the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth?

But I guess that book is for others to write. Yet I still had a bucket load of questions I wanted to ask his experts – and that is as a Christian. To play the Devil’s advocate would have raised many more. As a journalist, he was surprisingly soft on his subjects. By no means was he the rock-hard Dick Tracy character he painted himself as in his introduction.

The Case for Crock?

i've just finished reading Lee Strobel's The Case for Easter for a webSalt review (which i'll publish here after they are happy with it).

in my reading for it, i went surfing to see what others thought of some of his experts. i enjoyed his Christ, but felt Faith was much weaker. i was then given Creator and was thoroughly unconvinced. sadly, it seems Strobel's journalistic gravitas has given way to his bias. time to hang up his quill, i suggest.

via Wikipedia i chanced upon infidels.org, a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to defending and promoting a naturalistic worldview on the Internet. with their bias clear, i could happily read the article responding to Creator, and i saw how low Strobel seems to have sunken.

not only is he far less selective about his experts, but he is happy to use anyone who will give his case credibility - definitely contraryto what his premise had been for all his books (hard-hitting investigative journalist, not taking anything for granted, asking the questions others never got to etc).

so Paul Doland quotes one of Strobel's experts, a Dr. Jonathan Wells,

Father's [Sun Myung Moon's] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.

although such bias may fit with Strobel's, it is by no means scholarly.

i'm not trying to have a go at the guy, i'm sure he's got great intentions. but there are times when what you set out to do isn't what you finish up doing. and you need to rethink things. you end up creating a god of the gaps, by only interviewing people who support your viewpoint.