Reza Aslan’s Zealot is Riddled with Errors and Falsehoods

Zealot is Riddled with Errors and Falsehoods by Craig A. Evans –
There are numerous problems with Zealot, not least the fact that it heavily relies on an outdated and discredited thesis. But it also introduces a number of its own novel oddities and implausibilities. Aslan has canvassed much of the responsible scholarship in the field, but he does not always choose his options prudently. He often opts for extreme views and sometimes makes breathtaking assertions. I cannot help but wonder if Aslan’s penchant for creative writing is part of the explanation. Indeed, Zealot often reads more like a novel than a work of historical analysis.

Aslan assumes the latest possible dates for the Gospels and Acts, dating Mark after A.D. 70, Matthew and Luke-Acts in the 90s (perhaps later), and John somewhere between 100 and 120. After assigning such late dates he declares that there is no tradition of eyewitness accounts (without engaging Richard Bauckham’s important book on this subject, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses). The circularity of this reasoning is hard to miss.

Zealot is riddled with errors, probable errors, and exaggerations. Aslan tells us a builder in Nazareth had “little to do.” Excavations at Nazareth and nearby Sepphoris suggest otherwise. [Read more…]

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Liberalism Makes It Easier to be Bad

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –
There are many liberals who lead thoroughly decent lives. And there are conservatives who do not.

But that is not the whole issue.

There is something about liberalism that is not nearly as true about conservatism. The further left one goes, the more one finds that the ideology provides moral cover for a life that is not moral. While many people left of center lead fine personal lives, many do not. And left-wing ideals enable a person to do that much more than conservative ideals do.

There is an easy way to demonstrate this.

If a married — or even unmarried — conservative congressman had texted sexual images of himself to young women he did not even know, he would have been called something Anthony Wiener has not been called — a hypocrite. [Read more…]

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Leftist Policies Trap the Poor in Cycle of Poverty – The Mindset of the Left

Welfare state: Immoral and irredeemable by Thomas Sowell –
The political left has long claimed the role of protector of “the poor.” It is one of their central moral claims to political power. But how valid is this claim?

Leaders of the left in many countries have promoted policies that enable the poor to be more comfortable in their poverty. But that raises a fundamental question: Just who are “the poor”?

If you use a bureaucratic definition of poverty as including all individuals or families below some arbitrary income level set by the government, then it is easy to get the kinds of statistics about “the poor” that are thrown around in the media and in politics. But do those statistics have much relationship to reality? [Read more…]

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God’s Providence Leads Us Through Life

Orthodox Nun Iconby Sister Paula –
God’s providence leads us through life; and how good it is for those who can hear it in time, who try to understand God’s will for themselves. If we make plans for one thing or another but find numerous obstacles on our path to attaining it, we have to slow down and try to discern—is this plan God’s will for us? Sometimes the Lord protects us from danger, holds us back from our impulsive race through life, but we don’t understand it, we keep fussing, insisting upon our own will, instead of simply stepping back, waiting a bit, trying some other way…

God’s will is revealed through circumstances in our life. St. Ambrose of Optina used to advise people, “Go where they lead you, look at what they show you, and always say, ‘Thy will be done!’” This seems very hard for us in the modern world; in fact it seems downright impossible. How could we, intelligent people, who know everything and are the creators of our own destiny, go wherever they lead us?! Why, they could lead us anywhere! But the saint was in no way talking about breaking the commandments; he was instructing us to see signs from God in our lives, to seek God’s will in circumstances, in coincidences that are not really coincidences at all. [Read more…]

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For Democrats, Abortion is Their Religion

Democrats Pro Abortionby Fr. Ben Johnson –
Why would the radical Left increasingly use such religious language to defend the indefensible, the gruesome murder of the unborn?

Because abortion is their religion.

Its promoters cling to it more closely than any other political principle. They consecrate it as “sacred” and brand any attempt to constrain it as “an abomination,” a blasphemy against their idolatrous creed. Any attempt to reason about it is met with emotion-laden non-sequiturs and fulminating excommunications. How else can one even conceive of a book like The Sacrament of Abortion?

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The rhetoric is getting weird out there.

As the House of Representatives considered passing a ban on abortions beyond the 20th week of pregnancy, Congresswoman Gwen Moore of Wisconsin filled the chamber with the rhetoric of a fundamentalist preacher. Reacting with righteous fury, the representative from the Milwaukee shouted, “This bill is an abomination!” [Read more…]

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Abortion and the Mother’s Life and Safety

Abortion and the Mother's Life and Safetyby Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon –
Inasmuch as abortion is the willful taking of the life of the unborn, we are not permitted to do it even to save the life of the mother. Indeed, we are never permitted to commit any sin, for whatever praiseworthy motive. In addition, it is hard to imagine any case in which the death of an unborn child, considered in itself, would save the life of the mother.

A few years ago I was shocked to read in an Orthodox publication that the Orthodox Church condemns abortion “in all cases, except to save the life of the mother.” It was the sort of theological slipup anyone might have made, I suppose, but it was nonetheless a seriously defective statement of the teaching of the Orthodox Church.

A friend just sent me a statement from a rather famous conservative Episcopalian, a man of considerable learning and culture, who began by remarking on “the unholy alliance of abortion-on-demand and the feminization of God,” but continued in the very next sentence to announce that “No one, except fanatics and mechanists, would argue that abortion is in every case and without exception evil.” [Read more…]

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Christ Was Not a Communist

Jesus Christ Was Not a Communistby Bill Flax –
Christians desire to live virtuously with beliefs grounded in love, truth and justice. However, for many churches, justice has been perverted from its biblical meaning — conformity to God’s statutes — into a quest for egalitarianism. Truth — consistency to the character and will of God — has lost its clarity. Love has been reduced into a mere emotion. Many mainline denominations afford more certainty to atheists in academia and media than Scripture.

Many Christians abandoned Scripture, embarrassed by its teachings anywhere they differ from what passes for progressive, nuanced or sophisticated thought. Paul warned against being deceived by the world’s philosophies (Colossians 2:8), but many mainline churches were overrun by the same leftist ideologies that overran every other facet of America’s intellectual current. Babel rises anew.

Salsman perceives this but mistakes its foundations. The religious left and, more frequently, irreligious opportunists transform Christ’s teachings from the spiritual to the political/economic. They even interpret the gospel through the decidedly un-Christian lens of humanistic socialism. [Read more…]

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Natural and Sacramental Marriage, An Orthodox Christian Perspective

Natural and Sacramental Marriage, An Orthodox Christian Perspectiveby Fr. Alexander Schmemann –
We can now return to the sacrament of matrimony. We can now understand that its true meaning is not that it merely gives a religious “sanction” to marriage and family life, reinforces with supernatural grace the natural family virtues. Its meaning is that by taking the “natural” marriage into “the great mystery of Christ and the Church,” the sacrament of matrimony gives marriage a new meaning; it transforms, in fact, not only marriage as such but all human love.

It is worth mentioning that the early Church apparently did not know of any separate marriage service. The “fulfillment” of marriage by two Christians was their partaking of the Eucharist. As every aspect of life was gathered into the Eucharist, so matrimony received its seal by inclusion into the central act of the community. And this means that, since marriage has always had sociological and legal dimensions, there were simply accepted by the Church.

Yet, like the whole “natural” life of man, marriage had to be taken into the Church, that is, judged, redeemed and transformed into the sacrament of the Kingdom. Only later did the Church receive also the “civil” authority to perform a rite of marriage. This meant, however, together with the recognition of the Church as the “celebrant” of matrimony, a first step in a progressive “desacramentalization.” An obvious sign of this was the divorce of matrimony from the Eucharist. [Read more…]

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Catholic Bishop: Supreme Court ‘Giving Legal Protection to an Intrinsic Evil’

Bishop Thomas John Paprockiby Terence P. Jeffrey –
Bishop Thomas John Paprocki, leader of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, Ill., says the U.S. Supreme Court is giving “legal protection to intrinsic evil” in its decisions late last month that advanced the cause of legalized same-sex “marriage” in the United States.

“As in the case of Roe v. Wade striking down abortion laws forty years ago, the United States Supreme Court has again usurped its legitimate prerogative through a raw exercise of judicial power by giving legal protection to an intrinsic evil, this time by striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in the case of U.S. v. Windsor and in refusing to take up the defense of Proposition 8 in California in the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry.

“These hollow decisions are absolutely devoid of moral authority,” said the bishop. “It is becoming increasingly and abundantly clear that what secular law now calls “marriage” has no semblance to the sacred institution of Holy Matrimony. [Read more…]

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The Left, Bert and Ernie, and Lost Innocence

The Left, Bert and Ernie, and Lost Innocence by Dennis Prager –
Premature sexualization of kids is only the latest fallout from left-wing social-justice crusades.

If a Martian were to observe the human condition, he would have to conclude that the Left has an agenda to deprive children of their innocence. The Martian would have no other explanation for the premature sexualizing of children that the Left has engaged in for decades, and which seems to increase almost weekly.

The most recent example is the cover of the current issue of The New Yorker, which depicts the Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie. They are seated on a couch snuggling, and Bert’s head rests on Ernie’s shoulder as the two watch television. The TV features a picture of the U.S. Supreme Court.

To their credit, the creators of Sesame Street and of Bert and Ernie have stated that the two characters are not only never depicted as having anything other than platonic interest in each other; they are also never depicted as having any interest in females. As indeed they should be; they were characters for children to enjoy. [Read more…]

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