All posts by Wintery Knight

https://winteryknight.com/

Mike Licona lectures on historical methods and the New Testament

Here’s a quick overview of Michael Licona’s latest book on the resurrection, entitled “The Resurrection of Jesus“.

60 minutes of lecture, 20 minutes of Q&A.

Summary:

  • Dr. Licona’s background and education
  • The definition of history and philosophy of history
  • Postmodern approaches to history
  • Historical bedrock: facts that are historically demonstrable
  • Historical criterion 1: Explanatory scope
  • Historical criterion 2: Explanatory power
  • Historical criterion 3: Plausibility
  • Historical criterion 4: Ad Hoc / Speculation / non-evidenced assumptions
  • Inference to the best explanation
  • Investigating miracle claims: is it possible? How?
  • Objection of James D.G. Dunn
  • Objection of Bart Ehrman
  • New Testament sources: Gospels and Paul’s letters
  • The Gnostic gospels: are they good sources?
  • The minimal facts
  • The hallucination hypothesis
  • The best explanation

While watching this lecture, it struck what good preparation it was for understanding debates. This lecture is more about historical methods, but if you’re interested in Mike’s minimal facts case for the resurrection, here’s a video on that:

This is the case he uses in his debates with Richard Carrier, Dale Allison, Bart Ehrman, etc.

Mike Licona’s ministry is here: Risen Jesus.

If you are looking for a good book to read on the resurrection of Jesus, the best introductory book on the resurrection is “The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus” and the best comprehensive book is “The Resurrection of Jesus“.

New leaked documents reveal IRS discriminated against conservative groups

Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote testifies about being persecuted by the fascist IRS
Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote testifies about being persecuted by the fascist IRS

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Staff at IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., buried conservative groups’ tax exemption applications beginning in 2010 and lasting through President Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, according todocuments released this week by Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group.

The group released 105 pages of FBI documents, which included interviews with Cincinnati IRS employees who disclosed that applications by Tea Party groups were automatically denied approval and assigned to a special group until they heard from the IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“The FBI’s 302 interviews with Cincinnati IRS employees reveal that the agency adopted a series of policies assuring that Tea Party and other conservative group tax exempt applications would not be approved before the November 2012 presidential election,” according to a statement from Judicial Watch.

[…]Additionally, the IRS began a “BOLO” or “Be On the Lookout” list in 2010, adding Tea Party groups to that list in July or August 2010.

The IRS had a bucketing system, which determined whether applications were quickly approved or would be delayed. If an application was put into the “merit close” bucket, it meant the application met all criteria and was approved quickly.

According to the documents, IRS officials directed that no one on the BOLO list, which included Tea Party applications, could be put in the merit close bucket. This means that Tea Party applications would never be quickly approved.

“The BOLO was used as a tool for the screeners/classifiers and all revenue agents were expected to know what was on the list,” the documents read. “If an item was on the BOLO list, then that case could not be merit closed by the screeners/classifiers.”

[…]“IRS officials described for the FBI unlawful and purposeful bureaucratic delays orchestrated by top IRS officials in Washington, D.C.,” said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “One IRS official details how concerns about the Obama IRS targeting of conservatives were ignored. We hope a future Justice Department follows up on this information in a renewed criminal investigation.”

More documents obtained by Judicial Watch revealed that Justice Department attorney Barbara Bosserman, who investigated the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups, is an Obama campaign and Democratic Party donor.

Bosserman donated $6,750 to Obama campaigns and the Democratic National Committee from 2004 to 2012.

“Is it any surprise that this compromised investigation found no reason to prosecute anyone in the Obama IRS scandal?” said Fitton.

The IRS did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Naturally, the corrupt Obama administration – the most corrupt and deceptive administration in United States history – declined to prosecute anyone in the IRS. Because this is government working as designed – where is the defect? It would only be a defect if the IRS discriminated against gay rights groups or abortion groups or black supremacist groups or groups that promote voter fraud or eco-terrorism groups.

Here is True the Vote’s CEO’s testimony at the House of Representative’s investigation of the IRS:

At the end of the investigation, the corrupt DOJ declined to press charges. Because Obama doesn’t charge Obama.

I just want to say that during the GOP primary, we had two choices. Ted Cruz would have abolished the IRS and reduced the process of filing taxes to filing out a one-page form. Tax rates would have gone down, and government spending would have been curtailed by abolishing several other departments of the federal government.

Here he is talking about the plan with Megyn Kelly on Fox News.

Donald Trump, the Democrat clown, was all in favor of keeping the IRS, and probably was not even aware of the IRS discrimination scandal. We had a choice. We chose the adulterous clown who inherited money from his sugar Daddy.

People who thought that the IRS was a problem to be solved voted for Ted Cruz, and people who thought that the IRS was doing a good job and didn’t need any reform, voted for Donald Trump the adulterous, pro-abortion Democrat.

Related posts

Doug Axe on the burden of proof on the Darwinian evolutionist

Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed
Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed

An article on what it takes to prove Darwinian evolution, authored by Doug Axe, and posted at The Stream.

It says:

According to Darwin, evolution invents remarkable things like wings and eyes and brains bit by tiny bit — one little change at a time. That part of his idea might sound reasonable to us because we build things bit by bit as well. Essays are composed one letter at a time. Software code is written one instruction at a time. Buildings go up one brick at a time.

But Darwin’s theory runs into trouble when we consider our own inventive activities more closely. Whether essays or software or buildings, we never start a project without having thought about the objective. We always have a plan in mind, and while this plan may be revised as we work, we’re always working toward something. These plans of ours enable us to evaluate our work all along the way. Are we making good progress? If the answer is yes — judged with respect to the plan — then we’re motivated to double or efforts in anticipation of seeing the fruit of our labors. In this way we invest in our creations — pouring into them with the hope of future benefit.

Darwin’s blind evolutionary process has no way to do this. It has no ability to plan or to hope. Natural selection can’t labor in anticipation of future benefit. Instead, it goes with whatever works best now. The patience and foresight and insight we know to be absolutely essential for invention are completely absent from evolution. If things can’t be improved immediately, then they won’t be improved at all. We can dream up fanciful stories where amazing things happen though little Darwinian improvements, but the sober reality is that they are nothing more than that: fanciful stories.

Charles Darwin, to his credit, recognized the problem long before we had discovered DNA and long before mathematicians had crunched the numbers. It’s the key problem he set out to solve. His solution: These biological novelties arose one tiny random variation at a time, with natural selection tending to seize and pass on the useful variations so that they accumulate over thousands and millions of generations until something as blingy as the eye could emerge.

But Darwin’s solution comes at a price. The Darwinian pathway must proceed by a series of tiny, functional variations. Each new step needs to be functional. The Darwinian process can’t look ahead and say, “Hey, this variation doesn’t help Species G a bit right now. But when I get it put together with a few hundred or thousand other random variations, then it will give the little fellow a real boost, so I’m going to keep this presently useless variation on hand till then.” The Darwinian mechanism can’t look ahead like an intelligent agent can. It can only judge the present step in the process.

This is where Nye runs into trouble. If I were to challenge him to come up with actual evidence for his evolutionary interpretation — a series of mutations that improves bird wing structure one tiny, beneficial step at a time — I’m pretty sure he’d come up empty handed, and not just for owl winglets, but for all the stunning inventions that characterize life. Indeed, the most strikingly consistent characteristic of the whole Darwinian evolutionary story is the complete lack of evidence that it could actually work.

It’s worse than that, though. As I explain in my book, there’s plenty of counter-evidence — evidence that the clumsy cost-cutting effects of natural selection prevent even very modest acts of invention. As passionate as Nye is about science, then, why would he choose to ignore all this evidence?

Now I have never seen a gradual genetic pathway from one body plan (phyla) to another body plan (phyla) in any peer-reviewed paper. What I need to see to believe in the ability of Darwinian mechanisms to drive change from one body plan to another is that sequence of changes at the genetic level. And I don’t just need to see the steps, I need to see the probabilities of getting the correct sequence of changes at the genetic level within the time available by chance. That’s what Darwinists assert in their theory – that’s what they need to prove. Talking about how one creature looks like another creature is irrelevant. My winter car looks like my Dads car, because we drive the same model, but different model years – and both cars are designed by engineers.

When people ask our side for evidence for our claims, we are able to produce the evidence to substantiate our claims, e.g. – cosmic fine-tuning factors or protein sequencing probabilities. I would like to see the other side do the same, and not just tell me a story.

Axe needs to challenge Nye to a debate about this, and then we can find out whether there is any evidence for Darwinian evolution at all.