News

IRS e-mail backups destroyed shortly after targeting of conservatives was discovered

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Investors Business Daily reports.

Excerpt:

The IRS canceled a contract with an email storage contractor weeks after Lois Lerner reported lost personal files and before other IRS officials had their hard drives crash as Tea Party-targeting investigations began.

Timing is everything, the saying goes, and sometimes the timing of events is also very curious, as in the case of the lost emails of Lerner and at least six other officials at the very same time the IRS canceled its contract to back up and preserve those emails as required by federal law.

So the IRS did at one time have back-ups of the e-mails. And they seem to have admitted it in Congressional Testimony:

Perhaps this is what IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was referring to when in March testimony before the House Oversight Committee he assured Rep. Jason Chaffetz that the reason requested emails were difficult to provide was that IRS emails “get taken off and stored in servers.”

Later we would be told that the emails were lost forever and, as we noted, Koskinen was lying in March, when he said they were somewhere, or in June, when he said they were nowhere to be found. Let us ponder another possibility: that the emails were taken off and stored in Sonasoft servers, emails that would be deleted when the IRS contract for their storage ended. They were not lost, but, in effect, deliberately destroyed.

[…]Sonasoft’s fiscal 2011 contract with the IRS ended Aug. 31, 2011. Eight days later, and about a month after Lerner’s computer allegedly crashed, the IRS officially severed its relationship with Sonasoft.

Three months later, IRS official Nikole Flax, who visited the White House more than 30 times, had her computer crash with a similar loss of critical emails, something that afflicted at least half-a-dozen IRS officials in a chain of events that defies logic and the smell test.

You can kind of form a hypothesis of who ordered the hit on the conservative groups by seeing whose e-mails are being deleted and who they were talking to. If I had to bet on it, I’d say that the order to persecute the conservative groups came from the White House, perhaps from the community organizer Barack Obama himself.

George Will has a good column up in the leftist Washington Post about how the Republicans can respond to Obama’s decision to act outside the rule of law.

Polemics

How do you respond to the conquests and wars in the Old Testament?

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Joe Coder has an article about it on his web site.

Here’s his overview:

In the Old Testament are the military campaigns of Israel inconsistent with being led by a just and loving God, and inconsistent with his own commands?  Here, I would like to make the case for consistency and justness.

1. The nations of Canaan were evil, harming others, and needed to be stopped.  They had carried out incest with children/grandchildren and performed child sacrifice by fire. (Lev 18:6-30, Deut 12:31, Deut 18:9-10, Psalm 106:35, 37-38)  They launched unprovoked attacks on Israel (Ex 17:8-9, Num 21:1, Num 21:2-23, 33) and even guerrilla attacks against Israel’s “stragglers in the rear of the march when you were exhausted and tired.” (Deut 25:18)

2. Warfare language was likely rhetorical.  There are five reasons to support the rhetorical nature of languge such as “completely destroy” (Hebrew תחרימו, literally “ban”) in Deut 20:17.  It likely meant a destruction of armed soldiers, buildings, and religious icons.

  1.  Semitic language professor and NIV, NAB, and ESV bible translator Richard Hess argues that Hebrew “ban” is “stereotypical for describing all the inhabitants of a town or region, without predisposing the reader to assume anything further about their ages or even their genders” and “need not require that there really were children, senior citizens, or women there who were put to death” even when followed by the terms “men and women” (Joshua 8:25) or “young and old” (Joshua 8:25).
  2. In Israel’s destruction of enemies we see phrases like “left no survivor” and “utterly destroyed all who breathed” (Joshua 10:40, Judges 1:8).  But in Joshua 21:12-13 the author has no problem telling us these people were still there afterward: “if you ever turn away and make alliances with these nations that remain near you… God will no longer drive out these nations”.  In 1 Sam 15:3-4 Israel was to “strike down the Amalekites. Destroy everything that they have. Don’t spare them. Put them to death–man, woman, child, infant, ox, sheep, camel, and donkey alike.”  In 15:8 Saul “executed all Agag’s people” and Agag himself was killed in 15:33.  But later in  1 Sam 27:8 we’re told they’re still there and ” had been living in that land for a long time”.  Hundreds of years later in Esther 3:1 we’re even told Haman was an Agagite, a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag.
  3. Most verses on the subject speak of “driving out” and “disposessing” the land rather than language suggestive of genocide.  E.g. Num 33:51-53, in “the land of Canaan, you must drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images, all their molten images,  and demolish their high places.  You must dispossess the inhabitants of the land and live in it, for I have given you the land to possess it.”  It’s the same story in Lev 18:25, Num 23:31-32, Deut 6:19, 9:4, 18:12, Joshua 3:10, and 23:9.
  4. Jer 4:20 suggests inhabitants fled before armies arrived:  “At the sound of the horseman and bowman every city flees; They go into the thickets and climb among the rocks”
  5. Deut 7:22 specifically says that Israel was forbidden to “destroy them all at once” and instead they would be expelled “little by little”.

So either all of these verses contradict one another, or the conquest language was rhetorical.

3. Many of the “cities” were probably military outposts.  For example with Jericho and Ai, Richard Hess argues there are no references to noncombatants (apart from Rahab), no archaeological evidence of non-millitary use, the term melek (Hebrew מלכי)  for “king” of the cities often meant mean a military leader in Canaan (e.g. in Joshua 2:2), they were located at defensive positions, and Jericho and Ai weren’t described as a large city as Gibeon and Hazor explicitly were.

4. A just God requires wrath.  It’s not possible to have a God who is just but not wrathful–otherwise wrongdoers continue unabated. Paranormal investigator James Randi wrote in Skeptic Magazine, “I accuse the Christian god of murder by allowing the Holocaust to take place” yet Dawkins and Hitchens condemn God for judgment against the Canaanites.  Which is it? Ultimately the the problem is we view death as the ultimate judgment, when in the theological context of the bible it’s only a graduation to what’s next with accountability for what we’ve done with what we were given.

The four points are developed with links for support. If you get this a question a lot, it’s a good resource to bookmark.

Mentoring

A friend of mine is learning apologetics, here’s what she is using to learn

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The woman I am mentoring the most energetically in apologetics sent me this list of resources below. I was so impressed by how disciplined she is that I wanted to post it.

This is what she does every day:

  • William Lane Craig’s Defenders podcasts (1 or 2 a day)
  • Bible in a year (a few chapters as per the schedule)
  • Read/listen through 6 chapters of the Bible, 20 times
  • Is God Just a Human Invention? by Morrow and McDowell (a few chapters per day)
  • True U DVDs (all 3 volumes) by Focus on the Family (one episode per day)
  • Knowing God by J. I. Packer (one chapter per day)
  • Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer (one chapter per day)
  • Signature in the Cell by Stephen C. Meyer (one chapter per day)

In addition to that, she is on chapter 3 of Scott Klusendorf’s “The Case for Life”. We are also working our way through “Money, Greed and God” by Jay W. Richards, we are on chapter 4 there.

She has books, podcasts, and DVD lectures in there. I also got her some debates on DVD to see what the other side can say. I got her the Lennox-Dawkins debate from the Oxford Museum of Natural History and the Craig-Hitchens debate at Biola University.

When we started out, I was trying to go over the chapters with her to get her started, but now she is busy learning these things on her own. I didn’t even know about most of this stuff that is on her list.

So here are some points I want to make about this.

  1. I think it’s good for Christians to study hard subjects and get good jobs so they have money to spend on books, lectures and DVDs. Not only can you loan out books and show DVDs to groups, but you when you get the resources for yourself, you can learn from them and share what you learn with anyone who is interested. They’ll be more interested in hearing it from you than reading a whole book anyway.
  2. I also think it’s good for Christians to be like this woman. She is interested in apologetics because she had a co-worker who asked her a lot of questions. She decided to answer his questions rather than to attack him personally for his unbelief, or punt to faith not needing reasons or evidence. So she started to look for answers on her own, and then I came along to guide her search, provide materials and practice with her.
  3. She is shy and not used to speaking up or disagreeing with others. So we are spending time discussing these materials and also debating issues. When we discuss a chapter, I highlight the three parts that are the most useful and relevant for debates, and try to show her the structure of the argument. She learns better when we discuss the material and when we practice debating it. I ask her – what would you say if I said this to you? And she answers. Role-play is good for learning apologetics.

So those are my three points.

I would just urge you all to be on the lookout for people who are smart and want to learn more about how to give an answer to anyone who asks them for a reason for their hope. If you are looking for a mentor, then pray that God will send you a mentor. If you want to be a mentor, pray that God will send you someone to mentor.