The Bible: Gospel, Guide, or Garbage - N.T. Wright and Daniel Bonevac at UT Austin 

He makes Christian faith real, instead of a bunch of Bible quotes taken out of context by too many.

No, please don't, keep your God to yourselves.

@@fidenfulnot a believer

@jwesley7152, my home church is just starting bi lingual teaching and it has really made me happy. We need to reach out, realistically, to more people, a broader range of people, as demographics change. Shalom Aleichem and vaya con Dios

No. God says beforehand that Job is a righteous person, and affirms it throughout. God didn’t put Job through this to elevate Job and prove to the world how righteous he was. The whole point of the book is that Job demands God explain why he let this happen to him, and God responds by questioning Job about whether he’s qualified to run the universe. Job humbly admits that he is nothing compared to god, and that he possesses no Wisdom. God restores job’s family and wealth, not because Job succeeded, he kind of didn’t, he was rebuked by God. He gives Job those things as a free gift, not because he owed Job that. The lesson Job and the reader is meant to learn is that God’s ways are inscrutable to us

@@morgancook8729 Yes, but it is still an example of someone else dying to teach someone else a lesson. Job's family, possessions, and everything, are destroyed and killed as a test. NT Wright says he doesn't like the concept in Christianity of people dying so that other people learn something, yet the Book of Job is exactly that. Other people die for Job's narrative.

Fair enough for the first half-hour or so. Not so much thereafter.

That just takes my opinion of Hitchens down further.

I think, possibly, it's a matter of ears open or not, for this line of thinking, at this time (for Hitchens and Hodge) . . . for who knows what reasons. (I'm assuming most who listen to this conversation and Hitchens are thoughtful, in a seeking the truth way.) For me, hearing this conversation, between these well-informed and good men, brings a depth of appreciation which surpasses my ability to explain in words. I think also it's a somewhat specialized field that's being discussed. And like with medical subject matter, if a good bit of the information has relatively unfamiliar terms or narratives, then the line of thinking presented, might be in a way where the dots can't be readily connected in a cohesive way by many.

Probably the same as Hegel. Since both are fictitious.

Ask Dawkins or Penrose or Harris, seeetheart

I don’t believe in unicorns, but l don’t spend my hours hating them.

6 days in Nature corresponds to 6 000 years. Thats not too much, but Creation was only the first step. Another step is post-Creation wich is the extension of the original into everything that exists and its quadrilions of times more than what you migjt think.... Let me just tell you that there are 7 material Universes....and we can just sense a tiny litle piece of one (ours)

But then how do you know there are 7?

Free will has been given, because anything else would lead to no choice. God wants us to come to him out of love, even though some decide incorrectly to come to him out of fear and feel compelled to control their behavior rather than a real desire to try to become a better person. If we had even just selective areas of no free will we would have realised this and know we are being controlled. Any real proof of a power beyond us would force many people to come to God out of fear or compulsion and because of no free will few would come to God out of love.

@@iain5615 fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and if you lack the beginning you also do not have a middle or end

@@jacobfrost2229 only fear of your own evil God is love but hates sin. If you cower out of fear of wrath that is not because of God being wrathful but because of your own sins. We will be judged compassionately. I hope I am forgiven for my sins and I take comfort in the Lord's grace and hope my actions for good and my repentance of my sins will suffice. God does not want people to live this life in fear and cowering but to come to him in love and to take heed of his words of truth.

Armandito.....You are wrong, sir. HE made all perfect for us. Not a choice. All the capacities intrinsic to humans, but lucifer started a way (unpredictable) in wich, instead of helping Humanity as he should, he started laying traps to check if its pupils would cope.... But that is not the way of Heaven. We didn't have to fall on these traps (as we have free will) but we did (most of us) and now the situation is at a turning point. Final exam...... Major problems ahead in a litle while....😢

@@jplacido9999od did indeed give us the will to choose in Christ OR indeed to choose a life of personal satisfaction and selfish ease in this world. God gave us some of the magic dust of His own magnificence of imagination and creativity (in our humble way) with which to do His will. He wants us to lose pride and selfish conceits - and by our own free will to choose selflessness as far as possible in order to help others - and to try to help Him by becoming our True Perfect selves … Though we will likely fail as we are far from perfect we must CHOOSE to try, try and try again to deserve His love - repaying in kind. Of course free will has been gifted us for His purpose. Thanks be to God!

He's an academic, not a soundbite evangelist. I think he's not into giving convenient, simplistic answers. He tries to explore stuff. This makes him very unpopular with people who don't like nuance or uncertainty, and want everything black and white, but I like hearing him thinking it out and his burbling style.

You have to want a true answer before you can receive an answer you can understand and that will help bring you closer to the Father of the church. Humble yourself warlock359 and the Holy Spirit will give you what you need and not what you want. His love will make you happy you chose Jesus and not yourself. God bless you.

Almost as if there also exist questions which aren’t suited for a simple yet definitive yes or no answer.

@@tommarshall7247 Certainly more complicated answers to questions that are themselves complicated.

I've played this video many times and I absolutely love it. I was afraid of not finding the answer I wanted but at the end I got them

Ah, yes, the simple alternative: divide by zero. Makes much more sense than to divide by one. Especially when considering the the infinite prime. The lack of self-awareness in your comment is astounding. Tell me: are you emotionally _discomforted_ by the prospect that God does not exist? Or relieved? Which is more difficult: to wrestle with the difficult questions, or to dismiss them as irrelevant? Reality does not cease to exist when an ostrich plants its head in the sand, or when a rhino places its head behind a large rock, or when a child closes her eyes. Did Richard Dawkins abandon the Theory of Evolution at the first challenge, because it was hard?

Hi Cordalis MIB, I feel the same about atheistic naturalism- the way, to avoid the perplexing fine-tuning of the universe, we have to choose the, (apparently untestable) multiverse theory to explain this appearance of design without allowing a designer of sorts into it. It seems the antithesis of Occam's razor. On many occasions, God seems a far more straightforward choice. But I don't think Christians think- I have this great bunch of unsolved questions, so I'll posit God to cover them. It's more like a wealth of evidence that you draw conclusions from ovrr time, and put to the test in life- if God is personal, rather than just a theory. And if you encounter a person, you look to interpret their world in the light of what you know of them. You'd ask yourself why are things as they are, and that's what I do. So a whole mass of stuff has combined, subtly, to convincing me of not an out-of-the-way deity, but a living, active, personal God, and that gives me a particular worldview, like evolutionary naturalism does: a lens with which I interpret life.

Neither do I. That's why I believe in Jesus.

Aristo Telian Lmao, alright

OlavHaraldsonDenHellige ! Uh-huh. Have a nice day.

You too, kind sir.

That's a very vague comment, can you give an examples?

Richard Kinczel Hi Richard, I've not watched this video since i last commented on it, so I've just played it again, and fast forwarded it at random, I noticed at about 28 minutes, he says that we know comparatively quite a lot about Jesus, I would dispute this. outside of the bible itself, we know *comparatively little* about Jesus, virtually nothing about his childhood and teenage years. Why didn't Jesus interact with local scholars and historians, or set his ministry in Jerusalem where his miracles would have reached a wider audience.. to me, Jesus's life story, has all the hallmarks of a made up event. Obviously I'm going to be in the minority here, commenting on a Veritas video. Maybe my "vague" comment was wrong, perhaps I should have said he has his own perspective on the bible which may differ from someone else's view. That is the problem with the bible, everyone has their own take on it, things can and do get misinterpreted, how can we even know what the original authors meant when they wrote it down roughly 2000 years ago. Their life was so different from ours.

bonnie43uk Hi Bonnie. I think the crucial point here becomes clear when you say "outside of the bible itself, we know comparatively little about Jesus". If one begins with the assumption that the New Testament isn't really history (a position which seems to me to wane with each passing scholarly publication), it is no surprise that one comes to that conclusion. One could as well say just as easily that we know comparatively little of the true Julius Cesar, since his "War Commentaries" are utterly propagandic, and Virgil's writings are unreliable on account of the mythological assertions. I am, however, delighted to see someone speak with humility on such a public forum - vitriol is profoundly unattractive!

swiggsoclock Hi Swiggsoclock ( unusual name), thanks for your reply. Yes, I have heard people say that we know less about Julius Caesar than we do about the life of Jesus, I'm not sure this is true though, just doing a little google search reveals a fair bit of information about him, including the exact date of his death 15th March 44 BC, and many other dates of important events in his life, we also have coinage and busts of his head which are all pretty similar. As regards to his War commentaries being propagandic, I think that is pretty much par for the course regarding war memoirs, each side will see it from their own perspective and have their own slant on it. I had an interesting online chat with a Japanese person a while back who was quite offended when i suggested the Japanese soldiers were extremely cruel to the allies in WWII. Their history books give a totally different account.

Hey again Bonnie (you're right, it is the relic of a long forgotten decision to name my profile thus!), To elucidate my point, I'm not saying that we know more about Jesus than Cesaer, but rather my point is about the classification of the Gospel accounts as historical sources. If you feel up to it, a widely acclaimed book on this subject is "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses" by Richard Bauckham - it is a most eye opening and challenging read, but I seem to remember Time magazine saying that any serious Scholarly work on this subject in the future must interact with this book. Here's an interesting question which occurs to me (and i pose this as a point of interest, not as a rhetorical tool) - what constitutes "knowing more" about one historical person than another? Dates and places? What they looked like? What their character is? What they said? I'll be thinking about this for a couple of days I'm sure.

William Lan me Craig offers a good philosophical and emotional explanation for suffering. It’s on RU-vid

Well, I’ll take this “idiocy” over the growing idiocy I see coming out of the secular, irreligious Left.

Your claim is in itself a theological argument. Your own.

And to think it was such “nonsense” which sparked the development of the Western centers of higher education..the university.

That assertion is not proved.

He didn’t cause the suffering we did

@@Redbeardedbadass that of course is utter nonsense! Because death, suffering and injustice exist since life began here on earth millions of years before the Homosapiens came into existence some two hundred thousand years ago! So, the Homosapiens can not possible be the cause of that! Moreover, death and suffering are essential for species to evolve so that they can adapt to the changing environmental conditions and so that they can survive! Pain is also necessary so that we feel when our body is in danger! And think of the massive overpopulation if nothing and nobody would die! Life here on earth would virtually no longer be possible! There is not a shred of evidence for the existence of ANY god or Allah or whatever name they gave to their non-existing celestial dictator! It's time to grow up!