Tag Archives: Debate

Videos

Christians debate Jewish rabbis on the Trinity and the identity of Jesus

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Is God three persons and one being?

This debate on the Trinity was noted in a comment by Woody Lordless.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Cool. I am pleased to see a Jewish teacher get up there and slug it out with our guys.

Was Jesus the Messiah?

Here’s a debate on the question of whether Jesus was the Messiah. I recognize both of these names and have heard them both speak. These are the top guys, unless you go and get Jewish historians like Geza Vermes or Paula Fredriksen.

Part 1:

Part 2:

I want to see a full-length formal debate on the identity of Jesus with some Jewish scholars and some Christian scholars. We should organize a conference and let each side pick their best guys and have it out so everyone else will learn what the arguments are on either side. We should hold the conference at a university, and broadcast it n the Internet, then make the videos available for download after the event.

Commentary

Did Christianity invent stories by borrowing from pagan religions?

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Have you ever had someone tell you that Christianity borrowed from other pagan religions in order to create history out of nothing? Me either. Because the people who make such arguments are all confined to lunatic asylums. Almost no reputable historian makes arguments like this.

Well, Shane over at Caffeinated Thoughts wrote a post to answer the objection. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

…the basic premise is that since Horus and Mithra both pre-date the New Testament, Christianity merely borrowed from that mythology ascribing to Jesus the virgin birth, the disciples, the tomb, and the resurrection.

Go here to read the rest.

And then you can see how well these theories do in formal academic debates. Listen to these two debates with the two best “mystery religions” people, squaring off against William Lane Craig.

Notice how neither of these debates is even close. Carrier admitted defeat after his debate, and Price admits that  virtually no one agrees with him during his debate. This is fringe stuff that is very interesting to people who have no interest in testing their ideas in debates with professional scholars.

Debates about the historical Jesus are listed in this previous post.

Related posts

UPDATE: Dr. Glenn Peoples has a refutation of the lame Mithra hypothesis here.

News

Does global warming increase the frequency of hurricanes?

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Story by Michael Fumento in Forbes magazine. (H/T ECM)

Do greenhouse gases corelate with increases in hurricane frequency?

Here’s the data we have today:

True, both greenhouse gas emissions and levels in the atmosphere are at their highest, but this year had the fewest hurricanes since 1997, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the first time since 2006 no hurricanes even made landfall in the U.S.; indeed hurricane activity is at a 30-year low.

Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote a paper to demonstrate that hurricane frequency was independent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Pielke published a report in the prestigious Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society… that analyzed U.S. hurricane damage since 1900. Taking into account tremendous population growth along coastlines, he found no increase. His paper was dutifully ignored by the powers that be.

How did the global warmists at the IPCC respond to Pielke’s paper?

But the so-called Climategate scandal, which illuminated efforts by climate change scientists to squelch opposition viewpoints, has now caught up to one scientist, Kevin Trenberth, who vociferously and influentially demanded that Pielke’s paper be shunned.

Trenberth works in the same town as Pielke and is one of the top researchers on the strongly warmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In a leaked e-mail from two months ago, he admitted to colleagues what he had hidden from the outside world: that there’s been no measurable warming over the past decade.

Yet two years earlier he told Congress that evidence for man-made warming was “unequivocal” and things were “apt to get much worse.” And in 2005 he told the local newspaper that Pielke’s Bulletin article was “shameful” and should be “withdrawn.”

My recommendation is to test everything by watching debates. Unless you hear both sides in a debate, you just can’t have any degree of confidence about what is really true. Be wary of people who say that “the debate is over” or that “everyone agrees” or that “there is no case on the other side”. That’s how people lie. Find the two best people you can on either side and watch them duke it out. A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.