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Many times I hear otherwise committed Christians ask whether logic and reason have ever helped anyone come to faith or not. They largely view Paul’s speech in Acts 17 as a failure and claim he changed his tactics after the incident on Mars Hill. The Sunday after EPS (which was awesome), I attended Dr Craig’s class with my wife and Wintry Knight. While there we were treated to a tag-team presentation by Holly Ordway and Stephen Notman. ...

What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man. ...

Like clouds and wind without rain is a man who boasts of a gift he does not give. -Proverbs 25:14 While many churches hold birthday celebrations for Jesus this time of year. It is tragic to think that many who will be celebrating or otherwise name themselves as party guests regularly neglect to give to God the gift of their minds. Surely the sight of so many unwrapped minds grieves our Lord. ...

The human mind is a pattern-matching machine. I have a habit of pattern matching license plates as I drive. Since I work in the field of IT, I’ve developed quite a list of acronyms that I recognize and can match for. My license place, for example, contains the letters AJX, which I expand to AJAX. This behavior, I believe, gives us great insight into how the mind works. First of all, the mind is wired to try and make sense out of the environment in which it finds itself. It is almost as if we expect the world around us to make sense. ...

I had a revelation the other day about the state of the Christian church. This revelation came while talking with a friend of mine who told me a story about a family member who recently “felt called” to go be a missionary (as if that werent possible where they were at). They lamented that their family member’s reasoning and plan was deeply flawed and largely based on emotion and not good solid reasoning and planning. He was thankful that their apparent call from God had been thwarted, however it was evident that he victory had taken a toll. ...

At a wedding the other night I wittnessed an event that charactarized the state of marriage in America. This event ocurred when it came time to throw the bouquet and fling the garder belt, a tradition which supposedly determines or indicates who is the next to be married. First the women When the bride went to throw her bouquet the single ladies dutifully lined up. Their attitude was less than enthusiastic. They reluctantly shuffled over to the area where the bride was to throw the bouquet. And when it came time, the bouquet was begrudgingly caught by the woman it hit. ...

I got into a discussion a while back about the legitimacy of corporal punishment. Liberal parents are fond of labeling any form of punishment child abuse (That discussion led to this post on the sovereign status of parents over their children.). Corporal punishment aside, lets look at the notion of child abuse a bit more. Let’s say a couple has casual sex, sex outside of marriage, sex outside of a framework that is designed to facilitate the life that could result. If a life were to come about under such circumstances, I believe the couple has committed an act of child abuse by not providing a suitable environment for this newly created life. ...

Contra to Politifact, the government takeover of healthcare, characterized by the existence of strict government oversight as to who gets what treatment when and where (aka, “death panels”), or none at all, is very real. Its also increasingly hard to sustain the notion that the government takeover of healthcare is not an established fact when it has already lead to an increase in premiums, a loss in care (so much for the whole “if you like your existing plan, keep it”, we’ve experienced this one as well), and reduced coverage of the very people it was supposed to help (children and the poor). ...

[HT Alan Knox] Alan shares a list of things he doesn’t worry about as a pastor (teaching elder) in a home church context. They include: getting fired for saying the wrong thing sermon preparation week after week finding someone to “fill in” budgets (Professional pastors have to worry about these things because they are business owner/operators.) the meeting place number of participants (Large events are not required if money from multiple sources is not need to cover the expensive overhead.) I find it amazing how prevalent professional pastor burn out is and how no one wants to come to the obvious and Biblical conclusion. No one man or small group of men should have to shoulder the burden of caring for and feeding an assembly of Christians. ...

[HT Brian Auten] William Lane Craig presents this talk calling on Christians to be intellectually engaged. Entitled In Intellectual Neutral, this talk can be found in the audio/video section of ReasonableFaith.org. Craig offers three reasons to become fully engaged intellectually in order to impact the culture for Christ.