Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

How historians assess the historicity of New Testament passages

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Here is an article by Gary Habermas on the resurrection. (H/T The Poached Egg)

Summary:

The usual attempts to defend the historical reliability of the New Testament are often fairly general in nature. These arguments are typically based on the quantity, quality, and early date of the available New Testament manuscripts; the traditional authorship of the books; extrabiblical confirmation; and a few archaeological discoveries. This evidence for the trustworthiness of the New Testament is often contrasted with ancient classical Greek and Roman writings, which do not exhibit the same wealth of data.

Lesser known among conservative scholars, however, are several, more recent and specific approaches that critical scholars apply to the Gospel texts. One of these approaches involves applying certain critical criteria of authenticity to particular texts, namely, to events and sayings that are reported in the four gospels. These contemporary techniques have mined many gems that indicate the historical richness of the Gospel accounts, while illuminating many aspects of Jesus’ life.

This is a nice essay that will help you to answer question #5 in my list of courting interview questions, in case you are not able to yet!

Commentary

Is there a gay gene? Are gay people born that way?

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Stanton L. Jones writes about what the research shows in First Things.

Excerpt:

Frank Bruni, in his essay “Genetic or Not, Gay Will Not Go Away“(New York Times, January 28, 2012), makes a broad point regarding which I am in complete agreement: Our societal, legal, and cultural debates will not be solved by science. But when you do cite the science, you ought to get it right.

[…]In support of the argument that at least sometimes sexual orientation is a condition of birth, Bruni describes how “One landmark study looked at gay men’s brothers and found that 52% of identical twin brothers were also gay.” This brief explanation both fails as a description of that 20+ year old study and fails to reflect the better research published since.

Bruni gets the number right; the 1990 landmark study by Bailey and Pillard reported a 52% “probandwise concordance” for homosexual orientation among genetically identical sibling groups, but this does not mean what Bruni says it means. A proband wise concordance is a technical calculation, one that in this case results from the following actual results: There were 41 genetically identical sibling groups (40 identical twin pairs and one triplet trio) and of these 41 groups, only in 14 of the groups did the genetically identical brothers match for sexual orientation; in the remaining 27 sets the identical twin brothers did not match.

But this 1990 study was actually based on a sample that was apparently distorted by volunteer bias and hence not representative of homosexual persons in general. Bailey’s own study of a decade later, and the recently published “gold standard” study by Långström et. al. of the Swedish Twin Registry, both found even lower matching among identical twins with much larger and more representative samples. Both studies reported about 10% matching (for Långström, 7 identical twin pairs matched with both identical brothers gay out of 71 total pairs of male identical twin pairs).

So in plain English, the best contemporary scientific findings are that when one identical twin brother is gay, the probabilities of the second twin being gay are approximately 10%. This suggests that the contribution of genetics to the determination of homosexual orientation is modest at best.

When forming your views on any controversial issue, it’s important to get your facts straight.

My previous post discusses what the peer-reviewed research shows about homosexuality.

Commentary

Being pro-life starts with having sensible views of sex and relationships

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Mary insisted that I blog on this snarky pro-life post. The author of the post likes to read Thomas Sowell, and like me, she blogs at Right Wing News.

Excerpt:

4. I have this habit — and I suggest you save time and energy and just go ahead and find it charming — of calling TV shows what they actually are. I got the idea from the movie Snakes on a Plane. I never saw the movie, but I appreciated the directness of the title. I like that it just cuts to the chase and tells you, “Hey, this is about snakes on a plane,” instead of calling it something like Dangerous Altitude, and then you go see it and it’s just snakes on a plane. And you’re like, “Hey, that was just snakes on a plane!”

So I took to naming TV shows the same way. Hence, the show “House” became “Mean Doctor.” The Kyra Sedgwick police drama “The Closer” became “Lady Detective.” “Intervention” became “Party Stoppers,” and so on.

I have watched exactly two episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy,” and that is all it took for me to name it “Sexy Hospital.” The original “Sexy Hospital” back in the day, better known as “E.R.,” cannot hold a candle to the wanton libertinism of the panting young surgeons of “Grey’s Anatomy.” I don’t know how they ever even find the time to perform surgery. From what I can tell, all they do is jump out of their scrubs and into bed with one another, cheat on each other, have extramarital affairs, and utter dialogue that sounds like it was written by a Divorced Feminist Poets club after about four glasses of wine.

Have you ever been to a real hospital? It is not sexy. It is full of sick people and it smells like wee and the chairs are made out of torture. The doctors look like regular people, not TV people, and the nurses are all bored and in a hurry and pokey. “Sexy Hospital” is not only bad television, it is a filthy lie.

It also encourages the kind of behavior — namely, having lots of recreational sex — that leads to people visiting Planned Parenthood or, in TV world, Kate Walsh’s “Private Practice,” to have their babies sucked out of them by that mythical creature, the gentle, understanding abortionist who knows your name and cares about you and is not at all in it for the money.

This is something I’m always hammering away at, and so should you be: abortion does not exist in a vacuum. It starts with viewing sex as something fun to do instead of something that was designed to lead to babies. Abortion is the effect, not the cause, of a tragic formula. Sex – nature = death. When we try to divorce sex from its natural purpose, we get problems. We get unwanted pregnancies, broken hearts, broken homes, diseases, and death.

[…]I don’t know if “Sexy Hospital” is still on the air… [b]ut if it is on the air, consider not watching it. It launched the career of Kate Walsh, who raises money to kill babies, and it pushes a sexual agenda that points straight to Walsh’s beloved Planned Parenthood.

I find a lot of people are pro-life without really being serious about developing a view of courting and marriage that is pro-life. The author of this post is right to urge us to be careful about where we get our views of romantic relationships. Abortions don’t just happen, someone has to have sex first. And whether you have sex or not is very likely to depend on what you think relationships are for. Are they for recreation?