Christianity and Self-Defense

Despite popular beliefs to the contrary, the Christian God is an advocate of fighting -- in the right circumstances.

In Luke 22:36, upon instructing His disciples to go be ready for His earthly execution, he tells them to acquire swords, if they haven't already. So urgent is the need that He directs them to sell other valuables in order to gain the weapon. The obvious intent here being that such a tool will be necessary if the disciples are faced with gratuitous violence.

This is just one of the many places in the Bible that depicts God directing His followers to be ready to fight physically with their enemies. Consequently, anyone who thinks fighting is to be entirely rejected by the church has an unfamiliarity with Scripture.

Many people claim that fighting in the Bible is only self-defense. Any sort of fighting practices are allegedly disallowed. But surely anyone who seeks to defend himself has to be proficient with his chosen mode of defense -- be it physical or weaponry. But typically the practice required to gain this familiarity is in a sense violent. One often must experience violence to fend off violence.

Against my taste for the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA), some claim that my faith conflicts with my interest. But, as I've noted, Scripture itself advocates self-defense, and thus implicitly allows training in that area. Thus, since training and practicing MMA is simply a way of mastering self-defense methods, MMA itself is not inherently in conflict with biblical Christianity.

Only if one uses his MMA skills to inflict unprovoked harm on others does it so conflict. But this is never done by professionals. Even in the ring or Octagon, such skills are used only against another man ready to end the fight. Both fighters are in self-preservation mode.

Anyone seeking to show MMA and Christianity to be contradictory needs to overcome such considerations.

Gary Habermas website

Gary Habermas is an excellent Christian philosopher and Resurrection scholar who teaches philosophy at Liberty University.

He has written extensively on apologetics and especially on Jesus's Resurrection since the early 1980's. He (along with William Lane Craig) is perhaps the greatest defender of the historicity of the Resurrection writing today.

Several months back I was pleasantly surprised to find his website (www.garyhabermas.com). At the start, the site didn't have much content, but for the past few months, there's been a lot of items added there.

See especially his online text copy of his book, Dealing with Doubt and the various audio lectures and interviews available.

Habermas's work is a treasure to the church and a great inspiration to apologists. Let us read and learn.

Reppert on Judging the Debate

After having seen the assessments/judging for my debate with Richard Carrier, I was dumbfounded to see that the judges didn't follow Rule 7 of the debate, which explicitly said their own personal opinions of the arguments/evidence cannot play a role in their evaluation of the debate.

The judging was supposed to follow "college debate" rules. On this, judges merely determine whether or not the debaters were able to provide coherent, pertinent objections to each other's arguments and counterarguments. At the end of the day, the winner is the debater who was able to present the most unrebutted arguments and defeat more of his opponent's arguments.

If you read the judges' assessments of my debate, however, one quickly sees they didn't follow this judging methodology in the least. Rather, they merely decided to tell us which arguments they "liked" or were "persuaded by." But their own opinions on the strength of the arguments is irrelevant to college debate judging. Indeed, my whole point in requesting college debate rules was to avoid the subjectivism inherent in such judging.

If such subjectivism is allowed, all you'll get from the judges is a mere restatement of their own opinions coming into the debate. But who benefits from that? The point of the judging isn't to merely trot out your own likes/dislikes in the philosophy of religion, but to give a straightforward summing of which debater was ultimately to salvage his own arguments and rebut the others', regardless of what strength the judge would assign those arguments.

Since the judges clearly didn't follow the rules set out before the debate began, I requested that the moderator of the debate disallow them on the debate webpage. We could post them at the Secular Web, but only as sidenotes, not the official scoring, since the official scoring was to be done by college rules, not subjective ones.

Carrier has continually said I'm wrong in thinking the judges violated this rule. But they clearly did do so, as is shown throughout their assessments. Moreover, Dr. Reppert, a philosophy professor who agreed to judge the debate, has blatantly admitted taking matters into his own hands and judging it on his own terms, not those in the debate rules. He admits this at his "Dangerous Idea" blog at http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/05/assessment-of-carrier-wanchick-debate.html.

The proof is there for all to see.

Islamic 'Londonistan'

Upon watching C-Span's Book TV this weekend, I came across the excellent British author and scholar, Melanie Phillips (www.melaniephillips.com).

She recently wrote a book entitled Londonistan, which details how Muslims have invaded England's society and taken root. This was evidenced by the Islamic bombings that recently took place in the city of London.

In a nutshell, Phillips documents that this Islamic foothold has largely been gained because traditional British culture and values have been abandoned. In their place is an irreligious apathy or nihilism that is so obsessed with 'openness' to new cultures that it will let even its enemies to flourish within their borders.

Phillips's books sounds highly insightful and interesting (I plan on buying it soon). Judging from the excellent articles/columns at her website, this should be a valuable bit of reading.