Did California Really Ban the Sale of the Bible?

Recently there has been some online chatter about a bill in California which would supposedly ban the sale of Christian books and possibly the Bible itself.  Various websites, including Factcheck.org and Snopes.com have said it’s a bunch of nonsense and hysteria.

Today I wanted to take a look myself.

Christian Morality and the "Euthyphro Dilemma"

Conversations between Christians and Atheists often gravitate toward the nature of morality.  Most people intuitively believe in what’s called “objective moral values and duties”.  By that, I mean:

“A standard of right and wrong – good and evil – which superintends human actions.  Moral facts which exist independently of human minds, to which we have a duty to conform our lives.”

Believers have an intuition that something critical gets lost when you subtract God from a moral framework.  And yet today it is becoming more common for Atheists to say this intuition is false – that a fully functioning moral framework is just as possible without God.

Today I want to begin taking a closer look.  What is the Christian intuition pointing to?  How do Christians explain (and defend) their foundations of morality?

Resurrection Contradiction: The Women's Testimony

It's fairly common for people to allege that the New Testament contains contradictions.  This is particularly the case with the resurrection accounts.

Previously we discussed an apparent contradiction involving Luke's usage of giant timeskips.  Today I want to look at the other major one:

When did the women see the angels and Jesus?

Resurrection Contradiction: Luke's Timewarps

Sometimes it seems like things would be simpler if there was only one Gospel.  But the Holy Spirit saw fit to inspire four of them, and Christians have been puzzling over how they fit together ever since.  Particularly in the resurrection narratives.

Today I want to highlight a feature of Luke’s Gospel which explains one of the major apparent discrepancies in the resurrection accounts.  I call it… the LUKAN TIME WARP!!!

Here’s how the Lukan Time Warp works.

• Luke takes a couple related events which have a large gap between them.  
• Wanting to save space, Luke omits everything between those two events.  
• He presents the events as if they occur immediately in sequence.  

In the end, the reader has no idea he did this.  Now let’s look at some examples…

The Pope, Hell, and the Nonagenarian Journalist

I'm probably a bit late to the game here, but I thought I'd do my bit answering a question on the mind of many Catholics....

Dear Apologist, I heard the Pope changed the Catholic teaching on Hell.  Is that true?