False Dilemmas and Religious Thinking

Last week I was hit by a huge surprise. Suddenly, my brother – like my aunt before him – starting placing loads of posts on his Facebook timeline (the new designation for the social medium’s “wall”) containing prayers and references to his faith in Jesus and his newly-discovered attention to religious conviction. The newest post in the series featured a picture of Romans 1:16 highlighted in a King James Bible: “I am not ashamed of the gospel....” It was probably the first time my brother had ever come across this verse, given that he doesn't read or understand the Bible.

It turns out that he recently attended a Promise Keepers convention, which reminded him of his bad life decisions, convinced him of his need for a savior and swindled him into committing his life to Jesus – the obvious choice for a savior that one hasn’t investigated. Since then he’s been attending church regularly, tithing, praying, blah, blah, blah.

I was simply stunned, and my reaction (“Why?! No! Don't be hoodwinked!”) may have been a bit strong, but among the replies to my response was a girl who attempted to insinuate that I was “persecuting” my own brother (whom I love dearly) and to lay before me a lame version of Pascal’s Wager. This post is intending to lay out the assumptions involved in that famous wager and also C.S. Lewis’s famous “liar, lunatic or Lord” dilemma.

Posting in Hebrew

I thought I might quickly mention why I’ve decided to use two different styles of Hebrew on this blog and what these two styles are.

א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת
The first style of Hebrew that I’m using on the site is the “regular” alphabet, as presented just here. This is the alphabet that is familiar to all Hebrew speakers in Israel, and it appears in published Hebrew Bibles and all Hebrew literature. I'll use it when quoting from the Massoretic Text (the received text of the Hebrew Scriptures) and when referring to Hebrew generally. This is generally called the “square script” or the “Assyrian script.”

א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת
The second style of Hebrew that I’m using is the alphabet as it appears in the Mesha Stele (Moabite Stone). This is an older version of the alphabet, one with which most Hebrew speakers are unfamiliar today. It was used when the Bible was first written, and it has made appearances throughout the history of the Hebrew language. At some points we find texts that use the Assyrian script used in a text but the name of Yahweh (יהוה) written in this second style (as יהוה), which we call the “Paleo-Hebrew Alphabet.” There are actually a few variations of the letter shapes, but the form found in the Mesha Stele is very representative of the style and easily readable. (If you cannot see the specific letters because of embedding problems, you may want to download the font for free. This link contains several ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, Canaanite and Phoenician fonts. If you want only the Mesha font, then chose it from the ZIP file and install it on your system.)

The Trinity and “Echad”

[A post I wrote for an old blog of mine.]

In his The Defense of an Essential: A Believer’s Handbook for Defending the Trinity, Nick Norelli took up the argument common among missionaries that echad (אֶחָד – the Hebrew word used in Deuteronomy 6:4 to say that HaShem is “one”) “is a word that allows for plurality within one and diversity within unity” (page 3). This is the most common argument when the subject of the Trinity comes up in the face of the declared unity of G-d in the text of the Hebrew Bible.