Smorgasbord Debating

by Farrell Till

A reply to
OH-SIGH-RIS
The Pagan Origins of Resurrection Refuted!

by Mark McFall

Till's comment:

I can't help wondering about the title of McFall's response to my article. Is he claiming that the concept of resurrection from the dead did not originate prior to the advent of Christianity? Is it his position that prior to the resurrection of Jesus, there were no concepts of returning from the dead in any of the religions that had preceded Christianity? He needs to clarify his position.

New Testament Family Values (5 of 5)

From *The Skeptical Review*, 1997 / May-June:

by Farrell Till

By request, the series on biblical family values is being extended another issue so that we can look at what the New Testament teaches us on the subject by both example and decree. For some reason, Christians seem to believe that Old Testament accounts of atrocious conduct on the part of God and famous biblical characters are unimportant, because, after all, those things were written in the Old Testament and not the New, as if the two testaments are not inextricably bound together in the traditional Christian claim that everything in the Old Testament happened to lead the way to God's plan of salvation in Jesus Christ. Christianity, then, must be held accountable for the god and biblical heroes in whom their own religion is firmly rooted. Christians can't just wave aside matters like those noted in previous articles in this series by saying, "Oh, well, that was in the Old Testament."

Family Values (4 of 5)

From *The Skeptical Review*, 1997 / March-April:

by Farrell Till

The Christian Right touts the need for biblical family values in modern society, but when the lives of famous biblical characters are examined, as was done in previous articles in this series, we quickly see that they were not the kind of role models that most parents today would like for their children to emulate. Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob were all listed in Hebrews 11 as great "heroes of faith," but their individual stories in the Old Testament depict them as people who lied and practiced various other types of deception, who granted sexual favors for personal gain and sometimes engaged in polygamous relationships, who showed favoritism to their children, and did many other things that no decent family today would consider morality worthy of emulation.

Family Values (3 of 5)

From *The Skeptical Review*, 1997 / January-February:

by Farrell Till

Our last quest for biblical family values left us contemplating the public promiscuity, deception, sibling rivalry, parental favoritism, and ethnic prejudice of the family of Isaac and Rebekah. When we left them, Rebekah, fearing that her favorite son Jacob might be killed by his twin brother Esau for having cheated him out of his birthright, had convinced her husband Isaac to send Jacob to live with her brother Laban in Paddanaram, ostensibly to look for a wife among the daughters of Laban but actually to protect him from Esau, who had threatened to kill him.

Yahweh's Failed Land Promise

From *The Skeptical Review*, 1991 / January-February:

by Farrell Till

In their desperate efforts to prove that the Bible was verbally inspired of God, inerrancy believers often point to prophecy fulfillment. In my debate with Bill Jackson, he referred to "multiplied dozens of Old Testament prophetic utterances, fulfilled in minute detail in the New Testament, and in such a manner that there could be no contrivance at all," (Jackson-Till Debate, p. 3). As is true of all who use the prophecy-fulfillment argument, Jackson could only claim "multiplied dozens" of prophecy fulfillments; he could not cite a single verifiable example of a fulfilled OT prophecy.

Family Values (2 of 5)

From *The Skeptical Review* 1996/ November-December:

by Farrell Till

In our first article on family values, we left Abraham and Sarah in Gerar collecting the proceeds from Abraham's second attempt to pass Sarah off as his sister. Each time, she caught the eye of a king, and each time Abraham was given sheep and oxen and servants, both male and female, but the second time King Abimelech gave him a thousand pieces of silver as a "covering of the eyes to all that are with you" (Gen. 20:16). Hmmm, it sounds a lot like hush money, doesn't it? But such was the way of "family values" in those days.

Jacob an Old Geezer?

From *The Skeptical Review* 1996 / November-December:

by Farrell Till

There is no scarcity of fanciful tales in the Bible. An especially quaint one tells about the duel of the handmaids when Jacob, the grand patriarch of Israel, was siring his sons who subsequently became heads of the twelve Israelite tribes. It is a story that simply cannot pass the how-likely-is-it? test that was discussed in the Autumn 1993 issue and applied to the Israelite Exodus.