Events

Do not miss Dr. Craig Evans events in Calgary starting Friday

3 Comments

The Faith Beyond Belief team is doing a series of events in Calgary featuring Canadian historical Jesus scholar Craig Evans. Evans specializes in the historical reliability of the New Testament documents.

Who is Craig Evans?

New Testament scholar, Craig Evans, is the Payzant Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College of Acadia University, in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada. A graduate of Claremont McKenna College, he received his M.Div. from Western Baptist Seminary in Portland, Oregon, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from Claremont Graduate University in southern California. A well-known evangelical scholar throughout the world, he is an elected member of the prestigious SNTS, a society dedicated to New Testament studies.

After teaching one year at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Evans taught at Trinity Western University in British Columbia for twenty-one years, where he directed the graduate program in Biblical Studies and founded the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute. He was also a Visiting Fellow at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey.

Author and editor of more than sixty books, including a feature in Lee Strobel’s the Case for the Real Jesus, and hundreds of articles and reviews, Professor Evans has given lectures at Cambridge, Oxford, Yale, the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, among others. He also regularly lectures and gives talks at popular conferences and retreats on the Jesus, Archaeology, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible.

Along with countless interviews on radio networks across Canada and the US, Evans has been seen on Dateline NBC, CBC, CTV, Day of Discovery, and many documentaries aired on BBC, The Discovery Channel, History Channel, History Television and others. He also has served as a consultant for the National Geographic Society.

To find out more about Dr.Evans, please visit his website.

The event schedule is here.

Event schedule

Dr. Craig Evans will be speaking at the following Calgary* events. Except where otherwise noted, the talks are free of charge.

To RSVP for any of these events, please email info@faithbeyondbelief.ca or call (403) 689-5890.

Friday, September 24th, 2010

Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospel

Pastor’s breakfast
Full Gospel Tabernacle
9 am – 11 am

The New Testament: Reliable, Relevant and Redemptive

A talk for Christian post-secondary students & faculty
Rocky Mountain College, Chapel
1 pm – 3 pm

4039 Brentwood Road NW, Calgary, Alberta T2L 1L1
rockymountaincollege.ca

Is the Bible Reliable History?: A Discussion

An interactive forum (talk followed by Q&A); open to the public
University of Calgary, Room KNB 132
5:45 pm – 9 pm

Co-sponsored by the Freethinkers of the University of Calgary

2500 University Dr NW, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4
ucalgary.ca

Saturday, September 25th, 2010

The Origins of Christianity & the Importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Also includes a talk from our special guest, Dr. Craig Hazen (founder of the M.A. Program in Christian Apologetics at Biola University)

Public seminar, $20 at the door ($10 for students) – cash only
Full Gospel Tabernacle
9 am – 5 pm

Why We Trust the Bible

A youth event
Full Gospel Tabernacle
7 pm – 10 pm

Sunday, September 26th, 2010

The Crux of Christianity: Evidence for the Resurrection

Sunday service
Full Gospel Tabernacle
10 am – 12 pm

Where is this happening?

* Note: All events will be held at the Full Gospel Tabernacle, unless otherwise indicated. A free-will offering will be taken at events at this venue only.

Full Gospel Tabernacle
155 Falconridge Cres NE, Calgary, Alberta T3J 1Z9
fullgospeltabernacle.org

If you would like to donate to Faith Beyond Belief, and you should, you can donate at the Faith Beyond Belief web site. The Faith Beyond Belief team informs me that they could really use your support, and please tell them that WK (me) sent you.

Craig Evans is first-rate scholar who is respected across the ideological spectrum. He has been doing stuff with John Ankerberg, participating in debates with John Dominic Crossan, and debating against Bart Ehrman. Canadians should be thrilled to get someone of his caliber in their country. The fact that the organizers have not neglected to schedule academic outreach events is significant. Calgary is the best city in Canada, and located next to the Rocky Mountains.

If you can’t attend the events, but want to learn more about Craig Evans, try this:

Commentary

Is recycling efficient? Is recycling sustainable?

19 Comments

First one from the Boston Globe.

Excerpt:

Unlike commercial and industrial recycling — a thriving voluntary market that annually salvages tens of millions of tons of metal, paper, glass, and plastic — mandatory household recycling is a money loser. Cost studies show that curbside recycling can cost, on average, 60 percent more per ton than conventional garbage disposal. In 2004, an analysis by New York’s Independent Budget Office concluded, according to The New York Times, that “it cost anywhere from $34 to $48 a ton more to recycle material, than to send it off to landfills or incinerators.”

“There is not a community curbside recycling program in the United States that covers its cost,” says Jay Lehr, science director at the Heartland Institute and author of a handbook on environmental science and technology. They exist primarily to make people “feel warm and fuzzy about what they are doing for the environment.”

But if recycling household trash makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, why does it have to be compulsory? Why the fines and computer chips? Mandatory recycling programs “force people to squander valuable resources in a quixotic quest to save what they would sensibly discard,” writes Clemson University economist Daniel K. Benjamin. “On balance, recycling programs lower our wealth.”

Second one from the Boston Globe.

Excerpt:

Most of the stuff we throw out — aluminum cans are an exception — is cheaper to replace from scratch than to recycle. “Cheaper” is another way of saying “requires fewer resources.” Green evangelists believe that recycling our trash is “good for the planet” — that it conserves resources and is more environmentally friendly. But recycling household waste consumes resources, too.

Extra trucks are required to pick up recyclables, and extra gas to fuel those trucks, and extra drivers to operate them. Collected recyclables have to be sorted, cleaned, and stored in facilities that consume still more fuel and manpower; then they have to be transported somewhere for post-consumer processing and manufacturing. Add up all the energy, time, emissions, supplies, water, space, and mental and physical labor involved, and mandatory recycling turns out to be largely unsustainable — an environmental burden, not a boon.

“Far from saving resources,” Benjamin writes, “curbside recycling typically wastes resources — resources that could be used productively elsewhere in society.”

Popular impressions to the contrary notwithstanding, we are not running out of places to dispose of garbage. Not only is US landfill capacity at an all-time high, but all of the country’s rubbish for the next 100 years could comfortably fit into a landfill measuring 10 miles square. Benjamin puts that in perspective: “Ted Turner’s Flying D ranch outside Bozeman, Mont., could handle all of America’s trash for the next century — with 50,000 acres left over for his bison.”

I think people recycling because they want to feel good about themselves, and maybe show off to their neighbors. It’s not done because it makes any sense. For the record, I don’t recycle.

News

What is the most important issue for independent voters?

1 Comment

From the Weekly Standard.

Excerpt:

What’s the one issue that independent voters most strongly demand that a candidate get right?  According to a survey of 1,000 independents (and likely voters) recently conducted by Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen and commissioned by Independent Women’s Voice, the answer isn’t “national security,” “taxes,” “immigration,” “the size of government and its level of spending,” “putting a mosque near Ground Zero,” “the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” or “the stimulus and bailouts” — all of which were listed as options.  Rather, the answer is “health care reform.”

Nearly half (48 percent) of all independent voters said that even if a candidate otherwise held perfect views (in the eyes of the voter) — even if they “agreed with him on all other issues” (italics added) — they still couldn’t vote for him “if [they] disagreed with him on health care reform.”  (Another 13 percent weren’t sure whether they could abide such a costly error in judgment or not.)

And what must the candidate’s position on health-care reform be?  For 83 percent of the respondents who said their vote would hang in the balance, the candidate must oppose Obamacare.  So, according to the survey, if you support Obamacare, you’ve just lost 40 percent (83 percent of 48 percent) of the independent vote — before any other issue is even addressed.

Upon hearing this result, the 34 Democratic House members who voted against Obamacare must be breathing a sigh of relief that they’re not one of the 219 Democratic House members who voted for it.  (No Democratic senator can breathe a similar sigh.)  And they must be desperately hoping that their Republican opponents don’t force them to voice their position on repeal — for it’s hard to appear opposed to Obamacare when you don’t want to get rid of it.

This is only going to get worse as health insurance premiums go up.