After the show, Jones said, "It's takes the honesty and integrity of a PZ Myers to get theists to question their fixed beliefs. His willingness to confront the best and the worst of theologies is why he keeps moving people forward. And tonight, I think that he demonstrated his passion for truth and his love for all humanity, and it's truly something that we so desperately need."

I used to be a hard core, righteously angry, fire breathing, straight down the middle, fundamentalist preacher. My influences were John R. Rice and Charles G Finney. I loved my time spent at Bob Jones University. I used to think the way to lead someone to Christ was to preach sin and righteousness with such effective power that they lost all hope of surviving the presence of a holy God...

Is it possible for morality to exist without it having a divine source or creator? Based on a talk given on the New Covenant Group 'Inspiring honesty' show, Sept 23rd, 2012

Introduction and general remarks:

I’m particularly glad to be focussing on the moral argument tonight because it is sometimes objected that the traditional arguments for God do not lead to the God of the Bible. And that is true that taken individually they do not prove the Christian God but what each argument does is provide evidence for different aspects of God’s nature which adds up to a cumulative case for the God of the Bible. So the Cosmological points to a timeless, spaceless, powerful Cause of the universe, the design argument points to an intelligence behind nature but not 

The rhetoric and logic system of Jesus isn't even in the same field of reasoning that presuppositional apologetics are. So, I'm thankful that Joshua Tongol left apologetics to pursue something closer to the real Christ. 

Click on continue to watch one of his videos.

Words have usage, not inherent meaning; meaning is derived from a context by which phonemes are put together from systems of inflection, i.e., in how they are used morphologically and syntagmatically by the design of each author/speaker, and this creates a lexemic field to/for the receptor/hearer. 

The etymological, diachronic, and synchronic use of a word does shape, to a degree, a semantic domain field for analysis, but none of this should be thought of as inherent meaning, for each word is always subject to the arbitrary nature of its user. In this sense, meaning should be thought of as a contextually driven extension of word usage. So, words, in and of themselves, are meaningless, i.e., without the linguistic and non-linguistic elements.

~michael w. jones

PZ Myers will be on our show tomorrow night. We will be discussing the non-sense of the crucifixion, i.e., its theology....

It's rather strange how theists generally use the same philosophical arguments, and yet, tie them to completely different canons, doctrines and Gods. So, the atheist has no clue as to what a theist might say in a conversation, for it's rare to find theists who agree and are willing to be honest about empirical evidence etc. 

Link to live show: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ncg-studios

If you have a theistic position that you would like to share with Greg Brahe, I'm quite certain that he would count it a privilege to hear your thoughts. 

Here's what Greg wrote a few minutes ago:

"I believe in humanity. I believe in love. I believe in empathy, compassion, in the incredible power of people experiencing those things to move mountains even in the face of the most crushing and devastating of circumstances. I believe in freedom. I believe that humans have the basic fundamental right to decide what path they follow and the responsibility to recognize that and to choose their paths wisely. I believe in curiosity, in wonder, in imagination, and in the ability of a child to exhibit all of these in limitless amounts about things that we, as adults, have come to take for granted.

I believe in myself, my wife, my son, my family and my friends. I believe that the happiness that we share and the memories that we make together are valuable to us, and that it does not matter if they will be remembered in a thousand years because they are happening to us, now. I believe that we all must determine the meaning of our own lives and...

The Cult of Honesty will feature 2 linguistic experiments this week plus a Q & A with our Hangout panel. Contact Greg Brahe if you would like to be part of these experiments and the conversation that follows. 

Click on continue to watch last week's show.

 Bob Greaves wrote the following:

"Religious devotion to Theology tends to divide people; however a scholarly dispassionate devotion to theology tends to unite. I think the reason for this is because religious people, without realizing it, tend to think in an “us opposed to them” mentality. In other words they tend...