Mike Licona is one of my favorite Christian historians, and so I’m going to rely on him to answer the questions in this post. He explains why the four biographies in the New Testament should be accepted as historically accurate: (55 minutes)
Summary:
What a Baltimore Ravens helmet teaches us about the importance of truth
What happens to Christians when they go off to university?
The 2007 study on attitudes of American professors to evangelical Christians
Authors: Who wrote the gospels?
Bias: Did the bias of the authors cause them to distort history?
Contradictions: What about the different descriptions of events in the gospels?
Dating: When were the gospels written?
Eyewitnesses: Do the gospel accounts go back to eyewitness testimony?
This is basic training for Christians. They ought to show this lecture whenever new people show up, because pastors should not quote the Bible until everyone listening has this information straight.
Dr. Licona has a new book on the differences between the gospels coming out with Oxford University Press in 2016 (I just found out!), and so I thought it would be a good idea to re-post a lecture featuring the man himself.
He tweeted this about the new book:
The manuscript for my new book pertaining to why there are differences in the Gospels is almost complete and is scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press sometime in 2016. This book will reflect my research in Plutarch during the past 7.5 years.
I’m excited! Will definitely get this! Oxford is the most prestigious academic press, so it must be good.
I heard CNN trying to blame the shooting on violent video games (“maybe he played too much Call of Duty”) yesterday. But today they decided to do some journalism for a change:
Syed Rizwan Farook — one-half of the couple behind the San Bernardino shooting massacre — was apparently radicalized and in touch with people being investigated by the FBI for international terrorism, law enforcement officials said Thursday.
Farook’s apparent radicalization contributed to his role in the mass shooting, with his wife Tashfeen Malik, of 14 people on Wednesday during a holiday party for the San Bernardino County health department, where Farook worked, sources said.
[…]Farook traveled to Saudi Arabia for several weeks in 2013 on the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are required to take at least once in their lifetime, which didn’t raise red flags, said two government officials. It was during this trip that he met Malik, a native of Pakistan who came to the United States on a “fiancée visa” and later became a lawful permanent resident.
Officials had previously said that neither Farook and Malik were known to the FBI or on a list of potentially radicalized people. Nor had they had any known interactions with police until Wednesday’s deadly shootout that culminated in their deaths.
Yet Farook himself had communicated by phone and via social media with more than one person being investigated for terrorism, law enforcement officials said. A separate U.S. government official said the 28-year-old has “overseas communications and associations.”
Breitbart News reports on Obama’s reaction to these facts:
President Barack Obama says that it’s possible yesterday’s attack in California, where two people killed 14 and injured 17 others, was terrorist related. But he’s also holding out the possibility it was workplace violence.
“It is possible that this is terrorist-related, but we don’t know; it is also possible this was workplace-related,” Obama said, adding, “we don’t know why they did it.”
Obama added that it was important to understand the “nature of the workplace relationship” between the individuals to fully understand the attacks, raising the possibility that it could be “mixed motives” for the attacks.
[…]The president’s remarks show he still hasn’t changed his tone since he first reacted to the event as a another mass shooting in the United States.
Obama thinks it might be “workplace violence” again? That’s what he said about Major Nidal Hasan, who was also in touch with radical Islamic terrorists before his terrorist attack at Fort Hood.
Workplace violence?
Time magazine reports that their house was full of bullets and explosives:
The married couple whose shooting rampage left 14 dead and 21 wounded at a social work centerin San Bernardino, Calif. had filled their home with thousands of bullets and hundreds of tools to make bombs, authorities said Thursday.
Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik had enough ammunition to pose a further threat had they not been killed, according to San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan.
“Clearly they were equipped and they could have done another attack,” Burguan said.
The couple had than 1,400 rifle rounds and 200 9-mm handgun bullets with them as police hunted them down. Authorities found 12 pipe bombs and “hundreds of tools” to make more explosives at their home at Redlands.
Investigators also found nearly 5,000 more bullets and several hundred long-rifle rounds at the home, according to police.
[…]The FBI said it’s investigating whether the suspects’ IED designs came from Al-Qaeda’s “Inspire” magazine.
Workplace violence? What planet is Obama living on? And this isn’t the first time that he’s pulled this stupidity, either.
Remember, the Obama administration describes Islamic terrorism as “senseless violence“. Democrats describe shootings my Muslims at army bases as “workplace violence“. Democrats describe attacks on Israeli civilians as “random violence“. Democrats called shooting at Jews in France “random“. Democrats describe investigations about the Benghazi terrorist attack a “sideshow“, after they lied and tried to say the attack was a spontaneous reaction to a video. And this is the party that more than half of our country votes for at election time. The State Departmentsays that radical Islam’s root cause is that we don’t give them “job opportunities“.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are hard at work protecting us from… global warming?
Barack Obama says that fighting global warming is a rebuke to Islamic terrorism
CNS News explains the Democrat response to Islamic terrorism:
Not radical Muslim terrorism, not an unsecured border, not an ever-growing federal debt that now exceeds $18 trillion, not the fact that 109 million live in households on federal welfare programs. These are not the greatest threats facing us today.
“No challenge–no challenge–poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union Address on Tuesday night.
[…]President Obama then said that the U.S. military is saying that “climate change” is causing immediate risks to our national security–although he did not explain exactly what this meant or how the “Pentagon” had arrived at this conclusion.
“The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security,” said Obama. “We should act like it.”
As Secretary of State in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton pledged $100 billion a year of American taxpayer money to help other countries combat global warming. That’s the real priority, you understand.
The cost of political correctness
And lest you think that it is harmless when Democrats call people “racist” for pointing out the links between Islam and terrorism, read this article from CBS News: (H/T Sooper Mexican)
Neighbors in Redlands were shocked that the suspects had ties to their area.
“I was in awe that it was happening four houses down from my property,” one neighbor said.
A man who has been working in the area said he noticed a half-dozen Middle Eastern men in the area in recent weeks, but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.
“We sat around lunch thinking, ‘What were they doing around the neighborhood?’” he said. “We’d see them leave where they’re raiding the apartment.”
Should we really be trusting Democrats to keep us safe? Are they really capable of calling evil “evil”, or does their ideology force them to call Americans evil, and America’s enemies good?
If you get your news from the headlines, you can be excused for thinking that “Minnesota men” pose a special risk of taking up the terrorist jihad at home and abroad. As the Wall Street Journal reported this past April, for example, “U.S. charges six Minnesota men with trying to join ISIS.” The “Minnesota men” featured in such headlines are almost invariably drawn from Minnesota’s swelling population of Somali Muslim immigrants. The state—mostly the metropolitan Twin Cities area—is home to 35,000 such immigrants, the largest Somali population in North America.
Starting in the 1990s, the State Department directed thousands of refugees from Somalia’s civil war to Minnesota. As Kelly Riddell pointed out in the Washington Timesthis past February, in Minnesota these refugees “can take advantage of some of America’s most generous welfare and charity programs.” Riddell quoted Professor Ahmed Samatar of Macalester College in St. Paul: “Minnesota is exceptional in so many ways but it’s the closest thing in the United States to a true social democratic state.” After a dip in 2008, the inflow of Somalis has continued unabated and augmented by Somalis from other states. If it takes a village, Minnesota has what it takes.
Unfortunately, according to a September report of the House Homeland Security Committee task force on combating terrorist and foreign fighter travel, Minnesota also leads the country in contributing foreign fighters to ISIS. Reviewing the public cases of 58 Americans who had joined or attempted to join ISIS, the task force found that 26 percent of them came from Minnesota. When it comes to exports to ISIS, we’re number one.
But I thought that the government was serious about terrorism, and we could trust them to do a great job of screening out terrorists? After all, isn’t Obama doing a great job on illegal immigration? Isn’t he doing a great job cracking down on sanctuary cities? He puts the security of ordinary Americans first – doesn’t he?
President Obama on Tuesday compared the threat posed by climate change to that of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), saying they require a similar kind of response.
The comments, during a news conference at climate talks in Paris, double down on the controversial position of his administration that climate change is as bad as terrorism, if not worse.
“In some ways, [climate change] is akin to the problem of terrorism and ISIL,” Obama said, using an alternate acronym for the terror group.Both threats, Obama said, require a long, sustained effort by the United States to assess and neutralize them.
The administration has long maintained that the effects of climate change — like rising sea levels, extreme weather, drought and crop problems — could create more harm and unrest than terrorism, and require a similar response.
Republicans have overwhelmingly dismissed the idea and excoriated Obama for understating the threat of terrorism and not taking it seriously.
Obama’s comments came weeks after the ISIS killed 130 people in a series of coordinated gun and bomb attacks in Paris in one of the deadliest attacks perpetrated by the extremist group.
Oh dear. We really are being led by a deluded nutcase, aren’t we? And yet, the geniuses on the secular left are 100% behind this unqualified, incompetent clown. They believe him. I guess they are used to deluding themselves… what’s one more delusion?
WINTERY KNIGHT 