How Can Christ Be the Only Way to God?

William Lane Craig

 

A rigorous attempt to answer the problem of the fate of the unevangelized and the challenge of religious pluralism.

Introduction

 

I recently spoke at a major Canadian university on the existence of God. After my talk, one slightly irate co-ed wrote on her comment card, “I was with you until you got to the stuff about Jesus. God is not the Christian God!”

This attitude is pervasive in Western culture today. Most people are happy to agree that God exists; but in our pluralistic society it has become politically incorrect to claim that God has revealed Himself decisively in Jesus.

And yet this is exactly what the New Testament clearly teaches. Take the letters of the apostle Paul, for example. He invites his Gentile converts to recall their pre-Christian days: "Remember that at that time you were separated from Christ, aliens to the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world" (Eph 2.12). It is the burden of the opening chapters of his letter to the Romans to show that this desolate condition is the general situation of mankind. Paul explains that God’s power and deity are made known through the created order around us, so that men are without excuse (1.20), and that God has written His moral law upon all men's hearts, so that they are morally responsible before Him (2.15). Although God offers eternal life to all who will respond in an appropriate way to God's general revelation in nature and conscience (2.7), the sad fact is that rather than worship and serve their Creator, people ignore God and flout His moral law (1.21-32). The conclusion: All men are under the power of sin (3.9-12). Worse, Paul goes on to explain that no one can redeem himself by means of righteous living (3.19-20). Fortunately, however, God has provided a means of escape: Jesus Christ has died for the sins of mankind, thereby satisfying the demands of God's justice and enabling reconciliation with God (3.21-6). By means of his atoning death salvation is made available as a gift to be received by faith.
The logic of the New Testament is clear: The universality of sin and uniqueness of Christ's atoning death entail that there is no salvation apart from Christ. As the apostles proclaimed, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4.12).

This particularistic doctrine was just as scandalous in the polytheistic world of the Roman Empire as in contemporary Western culture. Early Christians were therefore often subjected to severe persecution, torture, and death because of their refusal to embrace a pluralistic approach to religions. In time, however, as Christianity grew to supplant the religions of Greece and Rome and became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the scandal receded. Indeed, for medieval thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas, one of the marks of the true Church was its catholicity, that is, its universality. To them it seemed incredible that the great edifice of the Christian Church, filling all of civilization, should be founded on a falsehood.

The demise of this doctrine came with the so-called “Expansion of Europe,” which refers to the three centuries of exploration and discovery from about 1450 until 1750. Through the travels and voyages of men like Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, and Ferdinand Magellan, new civilizations and whole new worlds were discovered which knew nothing of the Christian faith. The realization that much of the world lay outside the bounds of Christianity had a two-fold impact upon people's religious thinking. First, it tended to relativize religious beliefs. It was seen that far from being the universal religion of mankind, Christianity was largely confined to Western Europe, a corner of the globe. No particular religion, it seemed, could make a claim to universal validity; each society seemed to have its own religion suited to its peculiar needs. Second, it made Christianity's claim to be the only way of salvation seem narrow and cruel. Enlightenment rationalists like Voltaire taunted the Christians of his day with the prospect of millions of Chinamen doomed to hell for not having believed in Christ, when they had not so much as even heard of Christ. In our own day, the influx into Western nations of immigrants from former colonies and the advances in telecommunications which have served to shrink the world to a global village have heightened our awareness of the religious diversity of mankind. As a result religious pluralism has today become once again the conventional wisdom.

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/how-can-christ-be-the-only-way-to-god#ixzz3PiaWCWxe

The Truth About ISIS, Chris Kyle and the Saudi King

Unbelievable that the death of the Saudi leader is being remembered as the loss of some great heroic peace-keeper and pacifist.  The Saudis fund the growth of the most radical arms of Islam, Wahhabi, around the world, helping to produce suicide bombers from young men who have lost all hope of ever getting a job or mattering in this world.  There's more to this story, but Jay covers it well below...

Image: RT. US and Saudi Arabia – BFFs 4-ever.

By: Jay

In the wake of recent psy ops news (in other words, news in general), an interesting conundrum was apparent to me today, when we consider the hype surrounding Chris Kyle and his legendary sniping skills, and the death of the King of Saudi Arabia.  What a quandary the average American patriot must be in here, as the same establishment lionizing Kyle as a hero is simultaneously lauding one of the chief terror exporters – the Saudi regime.   If Chris Kyle is a hero, why is the establishment he fought for exalting the Saudi King?  If the Saudi King is a nefarious character, then Chris Kyle fought for a corrupt administration, regardless of his personal desires and motivations.

This is ridiculous contradiction is lost on the public, who are ferocious in their re-energized neo-conservative zeal for mindless, frothing militarism and death worship.  I am no pacifist, and I certainly advocate a strong male image, but you’ll notice the same establishment that promotes destructive feminism and constantly denigrates masculinity, now suddenly allows a sanctioned image of masculinity because it was a trained killer for the corrupt establishment.  In any other case, Kyle would be lambasted as a Neanderthal ape.

The Pan-Arabian Enquirer noticed this laughable dilemma today, pointing out the embarrassment displayed in the glowing similarities in the US and ISIS eulogies for King Abdullah:

“There were red faces in both the corridors of the White House and across the Islamic State last night after it emerged that the US and ISIS tributes sent to the late King Abdullah were noticeably alike.

In both statements, Abdullah was praised for his “vision and leadership”, as someone who “had the courage of his convictions” and “constantly strived for unity across borders in the Middle East.” The US and ISIS also hailed the late monarch as a man who, “in a turbulent region, demonstrated his commitment to law, order and the principle of the pretty barbaric public execution.”

According to sources, to diminish further embarrassment ISIS have requested that its representative at the official state funeral be not placed next to Joe Biden.”

 

This doublethink and doublemind is like some Max Tegmarck equation for the average Joe.  Even more amazing, this amazing hypocrisy follows yesterday’s news dug up from New York Times archives that ISIS is admittedly a fake, western intelligence creation!  I cite again the report because it has tremendous import for this bizarre, Twilight Zone scenario involving the promotion of both Kyle and the Saudi monarch:

“For more than a year, the leader of one the most notorious insurgent groups in Iraq was said to be a mysterious Iraqi named Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi.

As the titular head of the Islamic State in Iraq, an organization publicly backed by Al Qaeda, Baghdadi issued a steady stream of incendiary pronouncements. Despite claims by Iraqi officials that he had been killed in May, Baghdadi appeared to have persevered unscathed.

On Wednesday, a senior American military spokesman provided a new explanation for Baghdadi’s ability to escape attack: He never existed.

Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, the chief American military spokesman, said the elusive Baghdadi was actually a fictional character whose audio-taped declarations were provided by an elderly actor named Abu Adullah al-Naima.”

 

The recent ISIS videos are also being called out as fake in mainstream news, as the videos demonstrate obvious doctoring.  Even Fox is reporting that experts are saying what is obvious to anyone with basic critical thinking.

Read the rest of this article at - http://jaysanalysis.com/2015/01/23/the-truth-about-isis-chris-kyle-and-the-saudi-king/

Harvard Prof: Government Mosquito Drones Will Extract Your DNA

"Privacy is dead," academic tells Davos elite        

by Paul Joseph Watson

 

Harvard Professor Margo Seltzer warned that miniature mosquito drones will one day forcibly extract your DNA on behalf of the government and insurance companies as she told elitists at the World Economic Forum in Davos that privacy was dead.

Seltzer, a professor in computer science at Harvard University, told attendees, “Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible… How we conventionally think of privacy is dead.”

Seltzer went on to predict that in the near future, mosquito-sized robots would perpetually monitor individuals as well as collecting DNA and biometric information for governments and corporations.

“It’s not whether this is going to happen, it’s already happening,” said Seltzer on the issue of pervasive surveillance. “We live in a surveillance state today.”

The professor added that miniaturized drone technology should be used for benevolent purposes, such as sending the same device into an Ebola ward to “zap the germs”.

Fellow Harvard academic Sophia Roosth also warned that an era of “genetic McCarthyism” was on the way as a result of people’s personal genetic information being available to governments via the Internet.

However, another speaker, tech entrepreneur Anthony Goldbloom, told the panel that young people no longer cared about surveillance issues and were perfectly willing to trade privacy for convenience.

 

Read the rest of this article at - http://www.infowars.com/harvard-prof-government-mosquito-drones-will-extract-your-dna/

'Three suns' appear over Mongolia in rare anthelion phenomenon

The Guardian
 

Three suns appear in the horizon over Mongolia, in an a rare optical illusion known as anthelion. The middle sun is the actual star which appears daily in the sky, while the other two are smaller reflections. The phenomenon occurs in extremely cold temperatures when the sun's light reflects off snow crystals in the air         
Read this article at - http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2015/jan/22/three-suns-mongolia-anthelion-video

Fur and Feathers Flew over Jansenism

How wrong we were! I only had my eyes opened yesterday." With those words opens one of Christianity's best-known religious satires--the Provincial Letters. The first of the letters appeared on this day in Paris on this day, January 23, 1656. But who wrote it? No one was saying.
And with good reason. There was danger in speaking up. You could be labeled as a heretic and excommunicated. Imprisonment and torture were distinct possibilities. Years later, the author became known. It was the brilliant French mathematician, Blaise Pascal.

Until then, it had seemed that Pascal's genius lay in science. At sixteen he published a groundbreaking work on the geometry of cones; at nineteen he invented a primitive calculator. Next he proved that, since atmosphere has weight, its pressure varies according to altitude and he showed that vacuum is possible. He proved that pressure on the surface of a fluid is transmitted equally to every point in a fluid. Thanks to Pascal, we have syringes and the hydraulic lift. He also helped create probability theory.

But Pascal was also a Christian. While he rode in his carriage in 1654, his horses broke their traces and plunged off a bridge to their deaths. Pascal was shaken up by this narrow escape and interpreted it as a warning from God to set his mind on spiritual things.

His interest in probability theory led him to invent an argument that is known as Pascal's Wager. The stakes are so high, he said, that we should gamble on God's existence. We have nothing to lose if it turns out that God does not exist, but everything to gain or lose if he does exist. Pascal would have preferred certainty over probability in matters of faith, but came to the conclusion that it can't be had. We can know truths that we can't prove-- or, in Pascal's words, "The heart has its reasons which reason does not know at all."

Attracted to the Jansenists because he loved the ones he knew (his own sister was a Jansenist) and because he admired their puritanical lifestyle, Pascal became their defender. The Provincial Letters were the result. What was the fuss about?

With the coming of the Protestant Reformation, many Frenchmen became Calvinists. Their theology emphasized man's corruption, his inability to save himself from sin, and his need of God's grace at every stage of conversion. In opposing the Calvinists, the Jesuits took a more cheerful view of man's interaction with God, and put heavy emphasis on human works and free will. They used a system called casuistry to decide right from wrong.

Cornelius Jansen, the Catholic Bishop of Ypres, Belgium (then part of France) felt that the Jesuits went too easy on sin while neglecting grace. He made his point in a book about St. Augustine of Hippo, the church's top authority on grace. The pope condemned Jansen's book. After Jansen's death, one of his admirers, Antoine Arnauld, defended the Jansenists but was tactless and made enemies. He argued that, while the pope could not err in matters of faith, he could err in matters of fact. The Sorbonne, France's top theological school, took up the issue. Fur and feathers flew as the theologians fought.

It was soon clear that Arnauld would be disgraced. At that point, Pascal's Provincial Letters appeared, taking sides with the embattled Jansenists. Pascal invented a character who wrote as if he were a perplexed bystander searching for truth in the quarrel. To make this character seem real, Pascal wrote French the way common people spoke it. No French writer had done this so well before and the letters gave French prose new power. Pascal's imaginary letter-writer exposed the double standards and clever word play of many theologians. By digging up absurd examples of Jesuit casuistry he unfairly made it appear that all Jesuits winked at sin. Pascal was not able to save Arnauld from disgrace, but his letters won sympathy for the Jansenists and changed French literature.

Bibliography

1. Bell, Eric Temple. Men of Mathematics. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1937.
2. Cailliet, John A. The Clue to Pascal. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1943.
3. Coleman, Robert E. "Blaise Pascal." In Chosen Vessels: Portraits of Outstanding Christian Men. Ann Arbor, Mich. : Vine Books, 1985.
4. D'Souza, Dinesh. The Catholic Classics. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 1986.
5. Jameson, Anna. Legends of the Monastic Orders. London: Longman, Green and Co., 1872. Source of the image.
6. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets 1670 (The Pensees; many English versions).
7. Pascal, Blaise. Provincial Letters. Various editions.
8. "Pascal, Blaise." Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Editor Charles Coulston Gillispie. New York: Scribner's, 1970.
9. Rosenberg, Jerry M. The Computer Prophets. London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969.
10. "Pascal, Blaise." Edwards, Paul, editor. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York, Macmillan, 1967.
11. Runes, Dagobert D. A Treasury of Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1945.
12. Wolff. Breakthroughs in Physics, p. 130.

Read this article at - http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1601-1700/fur-and-feathers-flew-over-jansenism-11630128.html

Amazing images reveal a glowing blue sea in Hong Kong

Daily Mail, UK       

This Thursday, Jan. 22, 2015 photo made with a long exposure shows the glow from a Noctiluca scintillans algal bloom along the seashore in Hong Kong.

    

Eerie fluorescent blue patches of water glimmering off Hong Kong's seashore are magnificent, but disturbing and potentially toxic, marine biologists say.

The glow is an indicator of a harmful algal bloom created by something called Noctiluca scintillans, nicknamed Sea Sparkle.

It looks like algae and can act like algae, but is in fact a single-celled organism that technically can function as both animal and plant.

 

 

Read the rest of this article at - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2922420/Magnificent-blue-glow-Hong-Kong-seas-disturbing.html

Amiel Approaches Death

 

Introduction

Henri-Frédéric Amiel was a descendent of Huguenots. He became an educator, once remarking, “The test of every religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious. If it injures the conscience it is criminal.” Although he frequently referred to Christianity and noted Christ’s centrality, his faith seemed to take the form of feeling rather than belief in objective facts. He wrote a journal that became famous after his death. On January 23, 1881, he acknowledged that he must soon die (which he did four months later). Reflecting on his coming death, he wrote the following.

Quote

“At this moment I feel well, and it seems strange to me that my doom should be so near. Life has no sense of kinship with death. This is why, no doubt, a sort of mechanical instinctive hope is forever springing up afresh in us, troubling our reason, and casting doubt on the verdict of science…It occurred to me this morning how little we know of each other’s physical troubles; even those nearest and dearest to us know nothing of our conversations with the King of Terrors. There are thoughts which brook no confidant: there are griefs which cannot be shared. Consideration for others even bids us conceal them. We dream alone, we suffer alone, we die alone, we inhabit the last resting-place alone. But there is nothing to prevent us from opening our solitude to God. And so what was an austere monologue becomes dialogue, reluctance becomes docility, renunciation passes into peace, and the sense of painful defeat is lost in the sense of recovered liberty.”

Source

Amiel, Henri-Frédéric. Journal.

Spiritual Warfare -The Five A's-Russ Dizdar & Sheila Zilinsky

Good info from Russ Dizdar on spiritual warfare and it's various aspects and impacts on the daily lives of God's people. 

Weekend Report with Weekend Vigilante Sheila Zilinsky joins Doug Hagmann and Russ Dizdar for a powerful show on Spiritual Warfare -THE 5 A's
www.weekendvigilante.com
shatterthedarkness.net

The Shinar Directive -- Part 11 - Did Nimrod Build More Than Just A "Tower"?

Many have hypothesized, and I presume someone will in this forthcoming book, put forward the idea that the tower was a portal/gateway, a connection between this world and something else.  A place of coming and going of "gods".  Gods who we might also imagine will be returning soon...

by Dr. Michael Lake

---

Is it possible that the Tower of Babel was more than just a tower? Was the tower built in a place where there was a dimensional portal to allow “the gods” to enter earth? Dr. Tom Horn shares this possibility in his book, Nephilim Stargates:

Scientist Stan Deyo has done analysis of a Tower of Babel Stele with speculation about whether the original Tower of Babel was actually designed to facilitate reaching “the heavens” as indicated in the comments above. Was it a building whose top was high enough to allow higher-dimensional beings to descend slowly while discharging voltage directly into the lower energy density universe? Deyo notes the uppermost portion of the stele may show a ‘bright’ or burning circular area, while the edges of the tower layers themselves are smooth like a high voltage insulator, as if for dissipating electricity. Stan emphasizes the analysis is inconclusive at this time, but it is interesting, given that beings who descended from heaven were typically accompanied by fire or lightning (electrical discharge ?), while beings that ASCEND from lower energy densities (regions) tend to cool the atmosphere, such as in the classic ‘ghost’ entering a room. Ancient artwork that may support this theory is widespread throughout ancient times including depictions of gods accompanied by fire.[i]

Perhaps Nimrod was diligently laboring to create more than just an interdimensional landing pad; it is quite possible that he was building an ancient interdimensional portal generator. It is quite possible that the wrath of God fell upon the tower because mankind was “of one mind” to create a mechanism to storm Heaven itself! Now, mind you, they had no better chance of winning than did Lucifer with one-third of the angels. However, their very audacity required an answer from Heaven.

Enter the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

There has been both excitement and dread among the scientific community regarding the experiments at the CERN Hadron Collider in Switzerland. While parts of the scientific community are wanting to find the “god particle,” others are fearful of either creating a tear in the very fabric of space-time or a black hole that could destroy the planet.^[ii]

Since the news report above, CERN has powered up its collider several times and has conducted experiments. The scientific community has been both fascinated with the data gathered and has collectively exhaled with a sigh of relief. However, there is more to the story. These experiments were conducted with only a small fraction of the power the collider can generate and in 2015 the titanic machine will be fired up to generate a magnetic field that is 100,000 times more powerful than Earth's! At that time, “The Large Hadron Collider could open a doorway to an extra dimension and ‘out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it,” has said Sergio Bertolucci, Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN. And Aurelien Barrau, French particle physicist at the CERN adds: “The idea of multiple universes is more than a fantastic invention and deserves to be taken seriously.” So were past experiments merely a “knocking on the door” of creating a dimensional portal? Perhaps we have several clues at CERN itself. The first is its logo.

The CERN Hadron Collider has encoded within it the Illuminati signature of “666.” In the minds of many biblical researchers, the logo itself connects the collider with the coming Beast system. Some have speculated that the logo was only meant to resemble synchrotron particle accelerators.[iii] Yet it is concerning to me that synchrotron particle accelerators create a 666 pattern. It is a common practice within esoteric societies to hide the truth in plain sight and to misinform the uninitiated as to the symbolism’s true meaning.

Then, there is the idol of Shiva outside of CERN. Here is a description of Shiva from Wikipedia:

The main iconographical attributes of Shiva are the third eye on his forehead, the snake Vasuki around his neck, the crescent moon adorning, the holy river Ganga flowing from his matted hair, the trishula as his weapon and the damaru as his instrument.[iv]

Shiva is the god of the yogis, self-controlled and celibate, while at the same time a lover of his spouse (shakti). Lord Shiva is the destroyer of the world, following Brahma the creator and Vishnu the preserver, after which Brahma again creates the world and so on. Shiva is responsible for change both in the form of death and destruction and in the positive sense of destroying the ego, the false identification with the form. This also includes the shedding of old habits and attachments.[v] (Emphasis added)

Isn’t it a little unnerving that the scientists at CERN, who have essentially declared that they do not believe in the God of the Bible as Creator, chose to place an idol outside of their facility that represents a being that follows after Brahma the creator and destroy worlds? Shiva, according to Hindu belief, can dismantle all matter and reality itself.

I have come to believe that CERN is only one of many such colliders around the globe that the Elite are using in experiments to find a way of creating a stable portal into other dimensions. Such technology could assist in completing Nimrod’s war on Heaven itself.

The Final Piece: Reviving Watcher / Nimrod Transhuman Tech

Wikipedia provides the following definition of “transhumanism”:

Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international cultural and intellectual movement with an eventual goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the ethics of developing and using such technologies. They speculate that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label “posthuman.”[vi]

The Lifeboat Foundation adds how "Transhumanists advocate the improvement of human capacities through advanced technology. Not just technology as in gadgets you get from Best Buy, but technology in the grander sense of strategies for eliminating disease, providing cheap but high-quality products to the world’s poorest, improving quality of life and social interconnectedness, and so on. Technology we don’t notice because it’s blended in with the fabric of the world, but would immediately take note of its absence if it became unavailable. (Ever tried to travel to another country on foot?) Technology needn’t be expensive—indeed, if a technology is truly effective it will pay for itself many times over.

"Transhumanists tend to take a longer-than-average view of technological progress, looking not just five or ten years into the future but twenty years, thirty years, and beyond. We realize that the longer you look forward, the more uncertain the predictions get, but one thing is quite certain: if a technology is physically possible and obviously useful, human (or transhuman!) ingenuity will see to it that it gets built eventually.

"As we gain ever greater control over the atomic structure of matter, our technological goals become increasingly ambitious, and their payoffs more and more generous. Sometimes new technologies even make us happier in a long-lasting way: the Internet would be a prime example. In the following list, I take a look at what I consider the top ten transhumanist technologies."[vii]

Transhumanists paint themselves as futurists and, possibly, the ultimate benefactors for all humankind. They seek to cure all diseases, greatly improve our intelligence, and prolong our lives. Yet, when you peel back the carefully crafted public relations hype, you discover so much more.

One of the terms circulating to accurately describe the work of transhumanism is what Dr. Tom Horn defines as GRINS. Here is what his acronym stands for:

 

Read the rest of this article at - http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/Shinar11.htm