Apprentice Owl Apologetics

                Unfortunately this week one of my best friends had his mother pass away, and at the end of this past year my grandfather passed. I am a rather young man at 23 years old compared to the apologists I like to listen to (William Lane Craig, Ravi Zacharias, John Lennox, Hugh Ross, etc.) and I have been blessed to not have to deal with much death in my lifetime. I have only had a handful of relatives and friends pass away and they have all been reported to be Christians. Don’t get me wrong I was sad to see them go but I had hope in the fact that I would see them again when my time comes. I stumbled across a video from The Thinking Atheist youtube channel on the afterlife, as well as a Christian response on the Inspiring Philosophy youtube channel (I will probably post them together on my facebook page closely after I post this on the site). These videos got me seriously thinking on the nature of the ultimate destination of man on t...

                If you watch a lot of evangelists on television, I imagine quite a few of them are like Joel Osteen and they preach what I am going to call the prosperity gospel. For those of you unversed in this, the prosperity gospel says that God is waiting to bless you with material wealth; you just have to believe hard enough that He is going to give you this wealth, as well as donating to that certain minister who happens to be speaking at the time. While there are certain characters in the Bible, such as Job, who God blessed with material wealth and health, I think this line of thinking grossly misrepresents the character of God and the reasons behind what we as Christians do what we do. Christians are called to make disciples and serve where we may be needed. We are also told numerous times in the New Testament that the life of a Christian will be a hard one, and that we may be persecuted and outca...

                A common argument that the gay community uses when one calls their lifestyle sinful is that they were born this way, so no choice is involved. Why would God make someone a certain way then call that way wrong? While this argument seems to hold water at first glance, I believe it falls apart once analyzed. Before I go to far into this article, I want to emphasize a few things. I hold no hatred towards the gay community; believe it or not, I love you equally to everyone else. I just happen to disagree with your lifestyle choice and believe it to be spiritually and psychologically harmful. What I present here is not supposed to be hate speech, though if anyone quotes me in an attempt to promote hate speech toward the gay community, let me say it right here that this is not my intention. My intention here is to examine the “born this way” argument and see if it is the end-all argument for this ...

People like to generalize topics in life. Generalization makes life easier and saves people time of explaining the intricacies of each and every situation that may arise within the topic at hand. Unfortunately, not all generalizations are good. Bad generalizations, or stereotypes when we are referring to people groups, typically serve as comedic devices to make people feel better at the expense of certain people groups. When taken to extremes, stereotype jokes become serious racism, where people outright hate other people groups for one reason or another. Unfortunately, racism does exist and it causes all of us to fall back on the preconceptions we have of others every now and again. These assumptions may sometimes be true, but more often than not, at least in my experience, they are hurtful and way off the mark. The ideal situation is that we can take the time to get to know each and every individual and have deep fellowship with everyone. Unfortunately as I said, generalizatio...

                Recently I have seen a surge of memes over the internet and quotes from people like Ricky Gervais (English comedian/actor) that atheism is not a faith or religious system, but merely the result of critical and rational thinking. Naturally given my position on this blog I was puzzled by this statement. I would like to take a few minutes of your time to ramble a bit over some of my avenues of thought that I have pursued to provide an answer to this statement.                 So to begin, one should probably start with a fundamental assumption, being the definition of atheism. From the Greek “atheos” meaning “without gods”. So by this framework, one would assume that atheism means literally no God or gods. Atheism to me is the belief that the Christian God or any other gods exist. Also by this anyone who claims that monoth...

                I just got back from seeing the new movie “God’s Not Dead” and I was pretty impressed with the movie as a whole. I will preface this by saying that the style of the movie is very clichéd in places and some people may view the set up as unbelievable. Please understand that this is a movie and that I believe that the message is what is important here, and there are quite a few messages to be had. Before I get there I should back up and start from the beginning.                 The movie opens up at the beginning of every main character’s day. The characters involved are Josh Wheaton, a Christian freshman starting at university (I can’t recall if they ever name what university this is set at, but I do recall LSU apparel in the background so maybe it is in Louisiana), Philosophy Professor Jeffery Radisson, Mina, a Chin...

                We live in an age where, at least in the United States and the developed world, we are told that if something is broken, or inconvenient for us to fix, to simply throw it away. If I have a television or a kitchen appliance that goes bad, I can go out and get a new one and toss out the broken. If this were the case only for material possessions, I probably would have talked myself out of writing this because all this is to me is sentimentalism, which is fine in its own right, because I am sentimental about many of my own possessions and I would not like to throw them away even if they are broken if they hold some sort of memory or meaning to me. No, unfortunately I cannot stop at bewailing the downfall of the mechanical skill of the common man that he or she cannot fix what has been broken. The last time I checked, the divorce rate in the United States was at 50 percent. That is absolutely i...