Civil Commotion

It’s difficult to imagine that yet another story about Donald Trump’s shady and underhanded business practices might actually be needed but, just in case you haven’t heard yet what a sleazy gasbag the Republicans have put forward as presidential material, this piece by Kurt Eichenwald ought to convince you.

Trump regularly cheats at golf, even revising his scorecard after a match to transform defeat into victory, according to two people who have played with him. He persuaded an elderly couple who ran a Florida antique store to let him “try out” two valuable pieces, then refused to return or pay for them, according to someone close to the Trump family. He bought expensive jewelry at Bulgari on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, then colluded with the store to have empty boxes supposedly containing his purchase shipped out of state so he could dodge New York sales tax, court records show. After dragging a buddy through years of litigation, Trump told the man he had filed the suit only because he was angry the friend had not given him enough public credit for his success, according to a person who witnessed the conversation.

When business executives came to his office, Trump bragged about his current wife, Melania, and showed them nude photographs from her modeling days, two bankers say.

Some experts are dissing a recently-discovered trove of Dead Sea scrolls as fakes.

American Steve Green, the evangelical Christian heir to the Hobby Lobby craft chain fortune and the force behind the Museum of the Bible, an endeavor Newsweek covered earlier this year, has spent millions on the new finds. One fragment sold to the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary conveniently refers to the biblical prohibition against homosexuality in the Book of Leviticus.

The problem is, experts suspect many of these sensational and pricy new fragments are expertly crafted fakes. For example, the fragment references passages in Leviticus 18 and 20 that contain the two strongest condemnations of homosexuality in the Bible. Such a strong coincidence is a flag of fakery.

“It is extremely unlikely that a small Dead Sea Scroll fragment would preserve text from both chapters” of Leviticus, says religion scholar Arstein Justnes, at University of Agder in Norway, who called the new fragments “amateurish” imitations that seem to have been copied from modern textbooks about the scrolls. “I think this fragment was produced for American evangelicals.”

This is why it always amuses me when people suggest that I was in the ministry for the money. I ALWAYS made more money in the secular world than I did as pastor. If I had it to do all over again, I would have worked bi-vocationally, providing for my family and scratching my God-inspired itch to preach. We wouldn’t be facing some of the financial problems we now face if I had put my family first.

Bruce Gerencser, former pastor

Christian talk-talk-talk about ‘family values’ is a marketing lie; what is actually taught is that good, decent, godly people always put the pleasure of Our Invisible Friend first — which is a cult-like teaching that connives against healthy families.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical
tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Alfred North Whitehead

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary will soon offer a philosophy degree.

Regarding why a theological seminary would teach philosophy, Southwestern President Paige Patterson explained, “Everybody is a philosopher. The question is: Are you a good one or a bad one? We’ve already seen what bad ones can do; they’re a dime a dozen.

“And so we are committed to having good philosophers and to making good thinkers and philosophers out of our people.”

Patterson added that Southwestern has multiple faculty who specialize in the field and are making “monumental contributions” to discussions on such matters as the problem of evil, the existence of God and evidence for Jesus’ resurrection.

The problem of evil and the existence of god are topics within a subdivision of philosophy known as Philosophy of Religion. Many schools are closing down their Philosophy of Religion groups outright, and we are less than one month away from publication of John Loftus’ new book urging just that in all secular schools.

The difficulty is that Philosophy of Religion isn’t intellectually serious. All of the philosophical arguments for the existence of god were debunked by David Hume at about the time of the American Revolution, and the so-called Problem of Evil never rises to the level of a bona fide problem because it is setup by premises for which there is no entitlement. The result is that most Philosophy of Religion has devolved into de facto Christian apologetics; that is doubtless what SWBTS’ program will be.

It was on this day in 4004 B.C., according to the most exacting calculations of Learned Theologians, that He created the earth at 9:00 AM (Greenwich Mean Time).