The conflict between belief and unbelief is the major conflict of every generation. It may even be said that the vast majority of the other conflicts of this world are related, directly or indirectly, to the battle between belief and unbelief. A lack of faith in God, or a false conception of God, leads man to have the wrong conception both of himself and of his fellowman. It is quite easy for those who do not regard God to take one more step and fail to respect man. On the other hand, the Scriptures teach that we cannot actually hold to the right attitude toward God and hate our fellowman. Scriptural love for God is incompatible with hatred for mankind. Thus, the effort to lead men to God as revealed in Christ is also an effort to lead man to peace within himself and to peace with his fellow creatures.
Read MoreJames D. Bales
James David Bales (1915-1995) was born in Tacoma, Washington, the fifth of eight children. In 1930 he enrolled in the Georgia Military Academy (now Woodward Academy) in College Park, Georgia. He graduated from Harding College with a BA in 1937 and received a master’s degree at George Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1938. Bales received his PhD in 1944 from the University of California at Berkeley. From 1944 to 1980, James David Bales was a professor of Bible and theology at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas.
Both in public and in print, Bales earned a national reputation as a fearsome debater of theological issues and political ideologies, becoming especially well known for his anti-communism stance. Bales wrote and published more than seventy books and many more articles for religious periodicals. While Bales’ style was at times unabashedly confrontational, bold, aggressive, and often tinged with biting sarcasm when he felt he had the facts on his side, he was also committed to fair play and giving his opponent an honest hearing.
J. D. Bales served as moderator for Dr. Thomas B. Warren during his monumental 1976 debate on the existence of God with Dr. Antony G. N. Flew.
Dr. Herberg is graduate Professor of Philosophy and Culture at Drew University. In answer to the question: “What keeps modern man from religion?” he replied. First, although not indicting technology, he replied that the triumph of the technological spirit in less than two centuries “has engendered in modern Western man a monstrous sense of technological arrogance. Man, collective man, has come to see himself replacing God as ‘Maker and Master of all’, and, most ironically, he has come to see himself not only as Creator and Maker, but also as his own destroyer! The same technological spirit has promoted in Western culture a pervasive technological climate, with a mechanistic bias toward depersonalization and ‘thingification.’ Everything about man—body, mind, and spirit—tends to be mechanized.”
Read MoreThe understanding of the Communist code of conduct is essential to the understanding of communism and the nature of the threat which faces civilization. As Congressman Dies said long ago: “It is impossible to understand the tactics and the statements of Communists and their fellow travelers unless their very special code of ethics be kept constantly in mind.” 1 To this also agrees a liberal, Alexander Miller, when he wrote: “It is very important to see that this view of things produces its own heroism and its own heroes. But what is so difficult for non-Marxists to grasp is that the code of Marxist behaviour is utterly different from that in which Europeans
Read MoreOne should study the Bible because it contains all the moral and religious truth for man on Earth. If a book contained all the truth on some secular subject there would be people who would be very eager to possess and to study that book. If a book contained all the truth concerning health, how eagerly it would be sought for and studied. Have we forgotten that the Bible contains all the religious and moral truth for man on Earth?
Read MoreThe Old Testament and Jesus both foretold Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. He said: “I speak not of you all: I know whom I have chosen: but that the scripture may be fulfilled, He that eateth my bread lifted up his heel against me. From henceforth I tell you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye may believe that I am he.” (John 13:18-19). Christ had just said: “If ye know these things blessed are ye if you do them.” (John 13:17). However, He knew that Judas’ “knowledge would not issue in the happiness of doing.” Christ knew those whom he had chosen; therefore, he knew the nature of Judas (John 6:70), and that he would lift up his heel against him (13:18). “There was no surprise to Christ in the faithlessness of Judas, though there was to others.” Christ now told his apostles that one of this inner circle of disciples would oppose him. He told them about it, before it came to pass, that when it came to pass they would have additional evidence of his foreknowledge and reliability. He did this “in order that what might have seemed to be a fatal miscarriage, should be shown to have been within the range of the Master’s foresight. Thus the disciples would be enabled to trust in him absolutely. His knowledge was not only of the main fact but of the details.” (Westcott).
Read MorePercy B. Shelly, the English poet, once wrote a pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism, which, however, A. M. D. Hughes said should be called The Uncertainty of Deism (66). Shelley was not an atheist. After he was expelled from Oxford for writing this pamphlet "he wrote to someone . . . complaining bitterly of the excessive penalty for what he had written as 'amusement on a rainy day' [he had published and scattered the pamphlet], and 'carried perhaps a little too far some of the arguments of Locke.' He had been classed with 'wretches, the bane of society' whose openly professed atheism was the last effusion of depravity' and a menace to all virtue and happiness"
Read MoreThere are those who maintain that the sense of guilt is terrible and useless, and that at all cost it must be abolished. It is true, of course, that the sense of guilt does demoralize a man if he continues to feel it keenly and over a long period of time. He should not continue in this condition, but should get rid of it through seeking and finding forgiveness. The sense of guilt should lead one to repentance and to a change of life. And one of the wonderful things about the Christian religion is that it offers to man cleansing from sin and thus releasing from the accusing cry of a guilty conscience.
Read MoreIf the Genesis account is true, there was never a time when nothing existed. The atheist and the theist both agree that we cannot begin with nothing.
Read More"The roots of our convictions concerning the dignity of the individual are religious, whether we recognize it or not. There are non-religious individuals who have been so influenced by religion that they continue to cling to certain of its values long after they have denied the validity of all religion.
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