I understand your point, but recently did a little more reading on Pharisees and Sadducees, and while they obviously were criticized for some of their positions, being a Pharisee was not all bad. In fact, Paul still identified as being a Pharisee after becoming a Christian, And Pharisees were most akin to Christian theology, as they accepted oral traditions more as well as the writings and prophets, along with belief in the afterlife and resurrection. The Sadducees in contrast, had a very rigid view of scripture, accepting only the Torah,and believed in no afterlife. Perhaps it was because the Pharisees overlapped more with Christian ideas that they were placed in more conflict, much as more conflict is found within the Christian ranks on this issue here.
Where has he said anything about anyone going to hell? Please quote directly, in his words, not including your own inferences.
(Have I asked you this directly? I don’t recall, but I know the last time or two I’ve asked it, no one has replied.)
@KevinRuiters: Where does truth come from?
Thank you for making that point. Jesus debated with Pharisees because that’s what rabbis do. The intensity of the debates might be reflecting a later point in time when the gospels were written. Pharisees even warned Jesus to leave because Herod was out to kill him.
Yes, that’s something that I’ve been thinking myself.
Over the years, the falsehood of YECism has become more and more obvious. My own YEC days were back in the late 80s and early 90s. Back then it was possible for YECs to sustain a narrative that sounded plausible even to university students. The Internet was in its infancy, the only people who used it were computer scientists and physicists, and even then they only ever did so in the lab. Unless you had access to a university library and a lot of time on your hands, you couldn’t easily fact-check their claims. They could also plausibly claim that they only produced flaky results with tiny samples and huge error bars because they were underfunded compared to “evolutionists.”
Nowadays, we have Google, Wikipedia, and mobile phones, allowing anyone to fact-check YEC claims in real time, as they hear them. We have photos from the Hubble Space Telescope showing galaxy collisions drawn out over hundreds of millions of years. We have open source software allowing us to download sequenced genomes off the Internet and do our own comparisons between human and chimp DNA. The $1.25 million RATE project and the $100 million Ark Encounter mean that they can no longer credibly blame flaky results on underfunding. Additionally, rebuttals to YEC claims are getting more and more evangelical-friendly. The days are over when it was all mockery and derision mixed in with attacks on Christianity in general on sites such as Talk Origins, No Answers in Genesis, Sensuous Curmudgeon and RationalWiki. More and more it’s Christians – and increasingly conservative Christians at that – who are taking the lead in addressing YEC claims. And when you get people such as Pat Robertson saying that you have to be “deaf, dumb and blind” to think that the earth is six thousand years old, or Matt Walsh – who is somewhere between Fox News and Breitbart on the political spectrum – seeing their nonsense for what it really is, their ability to sustain a rational argument really is in free fall.
The result is that they’re having to turn more and more to bullying and intimidation to sustain their position. Back in my YEC days, we maybe viewed OECs or theistic evolutionists as not quite as on-fire-for-God as we were (I must admit that I did get a bit offended when I ended up in a Bible study group which was led by a theistic evolutionist geology student and not me), but nobody questioned their faith or even hinted that they weren’t Christians. By contrast, nowadays many YECs seem to be in a state of all-out war, openly declaring OEC, EC, TE to be heresy, not Christianity, or even atheism in the way that Answers in Genesis does. A few years back, a friend of mine, who is a pastor in South Africa, wrote a blog post saying that anyone who didn’t believe that Noah had dinosaurs on board the Ark was a “faithless so-called Christian.” (Incidentally, it was that blog post that prompted me to start speaking out in the creation and evolution debate, because it made me realise that things were starting to get out of hand. My first post here on the BioLogos forum was a couple of months later.) But the latest salvo from Calvin Smith seems to have upped the stakes even further. He is calling for YECs to break off fellowship from anyone and everyone who associates themselves with BioLogos in any way, shape or form. It’s getting more and more cultish and more and more sinister, and if truth be told it even has a distinctly Orwellian feel to it. “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Yes, so tell everyone you know about our homeschool/Christian school faith and science curriculum because it’s better than theirs 
https://biologos.org/biologos-integrate/biologos-integrate-endorsements/
Is their stuff endorsed by Phillip Yancey? Nope, that would be our stuff.
“This curriculum is an outstanding resource for parents and teachers who seek to teach the next generation to be faithful, informed Christian leaders on questions raised by science.” --Philip Yancey
Just like those Heliocentrists and their agenda.
“First, . . . to want to affirm that in reality the sun is at the center of the world and only turns on itself without moving from east to west, and the earth . . . revolves with great speed about the sun . . . is a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also to harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false.”–Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615
I see that Agent Smith has posted another screed:
Nothing much new to see here. Just the usual lying about science, denouncing facts as heresy, dressing up misinformation to make it look like preaching the Gospel, and weaponising the Bible to bully and intimidate Christians into going along with it.
What a load of gas – just like a bovine with bloat.
“BioLogos’ Critique” Ha!
No, Calvin Smith, it was a comment on the BioLogos discussion forum by a moderator (not even BioLogos staff), responding to a thread somebody else started. I see they still have trouble representing where they get their quotes from. It is news to me and everyone else that I am “BioLogos” now.
It’s time we looked into getting a larger range of ‘‘like’ emojis.
The analogy to Agent Smith from the Matrix movies is brilliant. Both are working hard and ruthlessly to enforce a false version of reality. Unlike the Matrix’s agent Smith, AIG’s doesn’t actually avoid the bullet points made against his false narrative. He is merely invulnerable to any longer recognizing the truth.
I’ve always preferred the Black Knight analogy. No matter how many YEC arguments are shown to be completely wrong they will continue to exclaim, “It’s just a flesh wound!”. Mix in a bit of Don Quixote for good measure.
Just another hamfisted article. Some good comes of it, though, as I suspect it will help direct people with honest questions to this site. It is always good to discuss things openly to come to a better understanding even though we may disagree.
Double entendre intended or no? ; - )
Kendra pointed out to me that AIG published an article responding to that Is Human Wisdom Suspect article I wrote a few years ago, but managed to not mention my name the whole article, so I never noticed.
Bryan Osborne at least gave me some credit.
The author spends quite a bit of time going through 1 Corinthians 1:18–24 and rightly conveying the general idea that God’s wisdom in salvation is backwards to human wisdom. And allow me to state that I rejoice in the truth of the gospel that the author shared that is indeed “backwards” to the thinking of the world.
Always. It is interesting, however, in that in the past Ham’s name and face is plastered all over the AIG Answers homepage, yet when I checked this time, it was not. I wonder if that represents a shift in operations there. In any case, it would be nice if they would allow comments on their site, though am not holding my breath.
It seems that the author of the article is not recognizing that Biologos is not an evangelistic site, nor is it an apologetics site, but is more of a support group for those battered in the culture wars, at least in the forum area, and largely is a support organization overall.
I wonder why. ; - )
How dare we leave the preaching of the gospel to the local church! Unacceptable.
Me and all my scientist friends.