Christianity and Antisemitism

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Antisemitism is prejudice against and hatred of Jewish people. One of the most frequently made moral charges made against Christianity is that it is antisemitic. While Christianity teaches that Christians should love all people, many argue that Christianity actually produces hatred against Jews. If true, this would be a major contradiction within Christianity that would … Read more

Biblical Ethics and Slavery

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One of the most common criticisms of biblical ethics antichristians make is that the Bible supports slavery. However, it is a gross misrepresentation of biblical teaching to claim that the Bible “supports” slavery just because there is no explicit condemnation of slavery in the Bible. In this post, I will briefly examine what the Bible … Read more

The Coherence of Christian Ethics, Part 2

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Biblical Ethics: Violence In the book of Psalms, there are a number of imprecatory psalms, in which the psalmist calls on God to smite his enemies. The most infamous of these is Psalm 137, which ends by saying, “O Babylon, you will be destroyed. Happy is the one who pays you back for what you … Read more

The Coherence of Christian Ethics, Part 1

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In a previous apologetics series on this blog, In Defense of Christian Ethics, I responded to a number of common objections to the reasonableness of Christian morality. These next few posts will supplement that series, responding to a number of additional objections to the coherence of Christian ethics. Divine Command Theory Critics of Christian morality … Read more

The Use of Moral Arguments in Apologetics

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One of the most popular arguments for the existence of God is the moral argument for God. The argument runs as follows: In spite of the fact that this argument is very popular among Christian apologists, I do not think it is a sound argument. First, it is not at all clear that premise 1 … Read more

There is No Universal Morality, Revisited

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Previously on this blog, I made the case that there is no universal morality; there are only a variety of particular moralities. Furthermore, I made the case that any claim to objective moral truth must logically be based in some kind of transcendent reality. Thus, while Buddhist morality, Hindu morality, and Christian morality may be … Read more

Can We Trust the Text of the Bible?

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We do not have access to the original compositions of any of the books of the Bible. Instead, we have access to copies of copies of those compositions. Since the printing press did not exist in the ancient world, all those copies had to be painstakingly made by hand. Whenever a text is copied by … Read more

The Integrity of the Torah and Isaiah

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The Torah, Isaiah, and Modern Biblical Scholarship Traditionally, Christians have believed that the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) was in its entirety written by Moses. However, in the modern period, critical biblical scholars began to call this belief into question. A number of passages in the Torah contain historical details from after the … Read more

Are the Right Books in the Bible?

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The Bible is not a single book. It is a collection of dozens of books written by many different authors over the course of centuries. Eventually, these books were acknowledged by the Church to be the inspired word of God and were collected into an official “canon” of Scripture, which we today call the Bible.  … Read more

Was New Testament Christianity the Original Christianity?

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New Testament Christianity was not the only form of early Christianity. In the second and third centuries, there were other Christian groups–the Gnostics, the Ebionites, the Marcionites–which were regarded as heretics by orthodox Christians. Antichristian skeptics often argue that the existence of these various early forms of Christianity means that we cannot know what the … Read more