Apprentice Owl Apologetics

                What I have seen on both sides of the aisle is for people to legislate religion in the United States, or the lack thereof. I have seen people who want to create a theocracy for Christianity or Islam (which has been done and we see how well that works), or banish religion entirely. All of these views are flawed in my opinion. What I would like to do is to explore the idea of a theocracy, and what it would mean to try and legislate Christian values.                 A theocracy would mean that the church is practically in charge of the government. The Webster’s definition also includes God or deities as the head of government, which Israel had at first, but they went the way of judges and eventually kings. At first thought, one might now think that it wouldn’t be that bad, but I can see some problems, even as a Christian myself. This theocracy would have to ...

                Recently, I have had a discussion with an atheist over a meme that he posted. He decided to use two verses from Genesis (30: 37-39) as an argument for how the bible allegedly describes how animals got their stripes versus the scientific explanation of the development of stripes over time. There is a problem with this interpretation. If one looks at this whole story, we see a wager that Jacob had with Laban, his father in law. Laban had cheated Jacob twice, and Jacob wanted to leave with his family so he asked for his wages in striped and speckled and colored goats and sheep. Laban sorted out the sheep and goats so that none of these were in Jacob’s flocks. Jacob tied strips of poplar to the trees where his herds were breeding. All of the offspring born were such that they satisfied the wager and Jacob could keep them. The glaring problem in the atheist argument here about the origin of striped animals is that they already existed ...

                I recently wrote a post encouraging Christians who make mistakes because I and friends I know have tendencies to let the enemy steal our joy in our salvation by having us focus on our mistakes. What I want to write about today are those who don’t yet believe in the saving grace of Jesus but are on the fence about it. I want to try and answer a few of your questions that may be keeping you on the proverbial fence.                 I have had a few friends who have come to me with questions and concerns about the Christian faith, and the 3 common questions are what I am going to frame my post around. The first question I usually get is “isn’t the church full of hypocrites?” This question is meant to torpedo the idea that Christians are perfect beings once saved. The problem is that they are already right, Christians aren’t perfect; we are only forgiven ...

                This one may be most of an extremely odd, or extremely basic question, but I have spent 2 weeks working on a frustrating work project and this hit me at bible study. People have different ideas about Christianity, even within the religion itself (see my thoughts on prosperity gospel). What do I personally think of Christianity?                 To start, I want to give a quick testimony over how I got here. I was born and raised in a church, so when I was young I accepted much of what I was taught, but thought to ask questions that my parents answered for me. When I was in college I was seriously challenged by other worldviews for the first time. I was depressed for a while thinking about if I had been brought up wrong or that there wasn’t anything after death. My father helped me through the depression and both of my parents supplied me with my first...

                I’ve been thinking about a lot of the media events where sports stars have been sitting or kneeling to protest racial discrimination in our country. People have thought poorly of these people and have shared their thoughts. People of color have come forward in defense of the protesting athletes saying, you don’t get to say anything because you didn’t grow up a person of color. A thought hit me tonight. Jesus tells a parable that strikes a chord with me on this topic. In Matthew 20, Jesus tells the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16). In this tale, an owner of a vineyard who goes out throughout a day to hire workers at a set wage. Now when the day came to an end, the owner called in the workers that he had hired in the order of the last workers he had hired to the first. When the first hires came, they expected more, but they were paid the same as those who were hired later in the day. Instead they were al...

                I have made this title rather similar to a previous title of mine (Is God still relevant?) for a reason here. With all of the need for checking and verifying information and methods of living, does prayer still have a “prayer” for people to talk to God today? I would say yes, and I want to take a few minutes to unpack why prayer still works, even when the answer from God is no.                 So what is prayer? A casual definition for it is a conversation with God. In my prayer life, I talk to God about things that happened in my day, thanking him for what happened and asking forgiveness if I could have handled a situation in a more Christ-like manner. I also ask him to take care of myself, my family, and the needs of others. What people like to focus on in objections to prayer is the requests of God. They will set up “experiments” to test God’s pro...

                This is a letter of encouragement to my fellow believers whom have made a mistake or stumbled in their walk with Christ. If you are like me, then you have this attitude about being a Christian that you cannot make a mistake because a mistake could ruin your testimony. Something that God has been working on me during this summer is that it is ok to make mistakes. When you think about it, a lot of the leaders in the Old Testament made mistakes during their service to God. What I would like to do is to run through a few examples of these and show how these mistakes are actually used in ministry to bring people to God.                 We can look at the first people Adam and Eve. God forbade them from eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent convinced Eve to eat of it, then Eve convinced Adam, introducing sin and deat...

                Within the past few weeks, we have seen racial tensions in the United States rise to the highest they have been in decades. I do not want to comment on who is right and wrong in these police involved shootings, but I do want to talk about a topic that I’m sure will come up. What role does race play in the church? Should we care as Christians? Does God see race? Well let’s take a minute and look to scripture to see how the church should be handling race.                 In the beginning God created man in His image (Gen 1:26-27). Notice this did not say one group of people or the other. Just man as humanity. We fell as mankind, but God so loved the WORLD that He gave His only son, that we would not perish but have everlasting life (John 3:16). God does not show favoritism based on outward appearances (Deut. 10:17, Acts 10:34, Romans 2:11, Eph 6:9). We...

                When one considers the ideas and philosophies and the demand for tolerance these days, the word absolute becomes a four letter word. We come across these people who allow us to cherry pick ideologies, or say that ideologies are true for us but not for them. There is a spectrum of these claims. All of this, however, boils down to one question. Are there absolute truths in this world? If there are, it provides serious implications for the exclusivity of the claims of Christ. What I would like to do here is explore the possible scenarios of truth claims and see which one makes the most sense.                 In the best sense, I can see two scenarios in which absolute truths need be examined. Either they do exist or they do not. Now if we examine the claim that absolute claims do not exist, we run into our original problem? Do we take that as an absolut...

                “This hurts my feelings!” “That triggers me.” “You shouldn’t say that, someone could get offended.” I hear this way to much, and not just on Christian issues, but also in religious discussions as well. We are expected to handle everyone with kid gloves now because someone can get offended. This has been taken so far that discussions are stifled because people are so afraid of being offended, or get so offended that violence is perpetrated against those who are speaking, and everywhere in between. Naturally emotions can run high, especially so during election season, but when discussing the fundamental truths of humanity and God, are we to allow our emotions to control our thoughts and logic? I don’t think so, but that’s not to say we are to be emotionless robots. What I am saying is that we cannot allow fear or anger or any other emotions to dictate our conversations. What I would like to do here is show that, at least as Chr...

                When I’m browsing around online, I always see a meme or two in my facebook feed that say that the burden of proof is on the theist to prove the existence of God and that atheism is the default position that we have from birth. Now are both of these tenants true? What I would like to do here is to posit that the burden of proof is in fact on both the theist and the atheist, because we both make positive statements on the existence or lack of existence of a God or gods.                 So first off, what is a definition of the burden of proof? A quick search yields the definition of “the obligation to prove one’s assertion”. So does the theist have a burden of proof by asserting God exists? Definitely. Does the atheist have a burden of proof by asserting that God or gods do not exist? Absolutely! Both the atheist and the theist is making a positive cla...

                Good morning. If you thought getting up to preach was intimidating. Try getting up to preach on Mother’s Day, with your mother present to listen to you. To all the mothers present today. Thank you so much for bringing us into this world and for raising us. What I would like to do today is to explore a famous passage in scripture that describes a godly woman and mother. Proverbs 31 is the last chapter of the book of proverbs, and speaks about a mother, woman, and wife of noble character. The first 9 verses of the chapter. “The saying of King Lemuel-and oracle his mother taught him: “O my son, O son of my womb, O son of my vows, do not spend your strength on women, your vigor on those who ruin kings. It is not for kings, O Lemuel- not for kings to drink wine, not for rulers to crave beer, lest they drink and forget what the law decrees, and deprive all the oppressed of their rights. Give beer to those who are perishing, win...

                Recently my bible study class has been running through a book called Culture Shock by Chip Ingram. We ran across a section talking about the church and the environment. It is actually shocking what we have done to the environment through our negligence, wastefulness, and dependence on fossil fuels. Global warming leading to increased temperatures, severe weather patterns, increased rate of animal extinction, among other tragedies. Massive piles of garbage floating in the oceans, with an island cumulatively larger than smaller countries floating in the Pacific! Strip mining and deforestation, leading to the destruction of habitats, and further feeding of the global warming problem. What leads to these problems? What are we as Christians supposed to do to slow, stop, and maybe even reverse these problems? I hope to write a quick blurb over what has led to this point, what the Bible says about what we should think/do about the e...

                This one is a midnight think piece, so no idea on length as I get into this. As you may have noticed, I have been posting to Facebook from David Wood (Acts17Apologetics) about the Top 10 Lies that the media has told about Islam. I do not intend to expand on that series here, but instead on a thought that I had while watching this. How should we judge religions, including our own? By their followers, or by the text?                 So the first video in the series talked about how only a certain fraction of Muslims identify with extremism. So what? There are multiple passages in the Quran that mandate the killing of non-Muslims that do not convert to Islam. There are also passages that command Muslims to lie and follow the crowd if they are in the minority. Though once they gain the majority, Muslims are called to spread Islam like wildfire, by any me...

                Have you ever been in a relationship (not necessarily a romantic one), where you questioned what you were worth to them? How about an explicitly abusive relationship, where you were demeaned verbally or emotionally; or even physically abused? These situations, and I’m sure an infinite amount of others, illustrate toxic relationships where someone has questioned their value as a party in that relationship or even as a person in general. In some cases people will turn to God and ask, why me? Why do you value me so little? I would like to explore what exactly each and every individual on this earth is worth to the all mighty creator of everything that is, was, or ever will be.                 So we have God, who I am assuming that anyone reading this will at minimum, accept Him as the creator of us as humans for the sake of this discussion. We have a pl...

                Ask me what gets brought up as an objection to Christianity or the existence of God in general, then I can probably give you a top ten pretty quick. The number 1 on that list of mine would include the problem of suffering and evil. Now this is a moral argument against God that goes like “If God is all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful, then he should be able to get rid of evil. Since evil exists, God is not one of these 3, if He exists at all.” Now that argument is used in longer and shorter forms, but I hope you have the idea in mind. What I would like to do this morning is explore this problem and show that the problem of evil, like every other supposed problem I come across, can actually point people to God instead of away from Him. I will not be so arrogant as to say I understand why evil happens and to what purpose, but I will say that my God knows what he is doing.         ...