Podcasts

J.P. Moreland asks: does truth matter when choosing a religion?

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Dr. J.P. Moreland
Dr. J.P. Moreland

This lecture contains Moreland’s famous “Wonmug” illustration. Ah, memories! If you don’t know who Wonmug is, you can find out in this lecture.

The MP3 file is here.

Topics:

  • Is it intolerant to think that one religion is true?
  • Is it more important to be loving and accepting of people regardless of worldview?
  • How should Christians approach the question of religious pluralism?
  • How does a person choose a religion anyway?
  • Who is Wonmug, and would you like to be like Wonmug?
  • Is it enough that a belief “works for you”, or do you want to believe the truth?
  • Can all the religions in the world be true?
  • Is it wise to pick and choose what you like from all the different religions?
  • Is it possible to investigate which religion is true? How?
  • Which religions are testable for being true or false?
  • How you can test Christianity historically (very brief)

This is the most fun lecture to listen to, you should listen to it, if you like fun.

Commentary

Growing up with two lesbian mothers: a child’s perspective

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A man raised by two lesbians tells his story in the latest Public Discourse. (H/T Brian)

Introduction:

The children of same-sex couples have a tough road ahead of them—I know, because I have been there. The last thing we should do is make them feel guilty if the strain gets to them and they feel strange.

Between 1973 and 1990, when my beloved mother passed away, she and her female romantic partner raised me. They had separate houses but spent nearly all their weekends together, with me, in a trailer tucked discreetly in an RV park 50 minutes away from the town where we lived. As the youngest of my mother’s biological children, I was the only child who experienced childhood without my father being around.

After my mother’s partner’s children had left for college, she moved into our house in town. I lived with both of them for the brief time before my mother died at the age of 53. I was 19. In other words, I was the only child who experienced life under “gay parenting” as that term is understood today.

Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors. People in our community didn’t really know what was going on in the house. To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A’s.

Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast.

A striking snippet:

In terms of sexuality, gays who grew up in traditional households benefited from at least seeing some kind of functional courtship rituals around them. I had no clue how to make myself attractive to girls. When I stepped outside of my mothers’ trailer, I was immediately tagged as an outcast because of my girlish mannerisms, funny clothes, lisp, and outlandishness. Not surprisingly, I left high school as a virgin, never having had a girlfriend, instead having gone to four proms as a wisecracking sidekick to girls who just wanted someone to chip in for a limousine.

When I got to college, I set off everyone’s “gaydar” and the campus LGBT group quickly descended upon me to tell me it was 100-percent certain I must be a homosexual. When I came out as bisexual, they told everyone I was lying and just wasn’t ready to come out of the closet as gay yet. Frightened and traumatized by my mother’s death, I dropped out of college in 1990 and fell in with what can only be called the gay underworld. Terrible things happened to me there.

It was not until I was twenty-eight that I suddenly found myself in a relationship with a woman, through coincidences that shocked everyone who knew me and surprised even myself. I call myself bisexual because it would take several novels to explain how I ended up “straight” after almost thirty years as a gay man.

Click here for the rest. I blogged before about a study that found that gay parents are more likely to raise children who become gay.

Another good book that gives a first-person account is “Out From Under” by Dawn Stefanowicz.

News

Andrew Klavan signed to write the script for the Gosnell movie

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They got an experienced screenwriter – Life News reports.

Excerpt:

The producers of the Gosnell movie raised the $2.1 million they needed to make the Hollywood-style film that will tell the story of the gruesome abortion practitioner. Now, they’ve hired a screenwriter to produce the script to tell the story.

“We have some great news that we are excited to share with you,” the producers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer told LifeNews today in an email. “We’ve just signed up the best-selling author and screenwriter Andrew Klavan to write the script for the Gosnell Movie.”

Klavan, whose books have been made into movies directed and starring Clint Eastwood and Michael Douglas, said he had wanted to write the Gosnell screenplay “from the moment I heard it was underway.” He said the Gosnell project was “a great story” but also an important tale to tell.

Klavan said: “This is so much more than a job of work for me. As I’ve begun to get into the research materials, it’s started to come home to me that we’ve all taken on a huge responsibility. The women who were brutalized by this Gosnell monster — they can tell their stories.  But all his victims, all those babies — we’ve got to figure out a way to speak for them somehow.”

[…]In a lengthy writing career Klavan has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice. He has recently published a bestselling series of thriller novels for young adults, The Homelanders, and his YA novel If We Survive was nominated for an International Thriller Writers Award. His latest novel for adults, Werewolf Cop, is due out next spring.

His essays and op-eds on politics, religion, movies and literature have appeared in theWall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, and elsewhere. His 2008 WSJ op-ed “What Bush and Batman Have in Common,” topped the Technorati list as the most-read online piece of the day. He has also produced several popular political satire video series, including “Klavan on the Culture,” for PJTV.com, “A Very Serious Commentary,” for Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze.com and his current series “The Revolting Truth,” for TruthRevolt.org.

I’ve featured some of Andrew Klavan’s videos on this blog before, so I already know who he is. If you don’t know who he is, then trust me when I say this is a home run for the movie. They chose well!