Author of Why Does God Allow Evil? and Immortal: How the Fear of Death Drives Us and What We Dan Do About It. Former Talbot apologetics professor.
Joined July 2011
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Clay Jones retweeted
Reminder,
Bethel Church gave the church a fake Bible.
When I exposed it as a terrible work (with tons of evidence) Kris Vallotton went on stage and said people who criticized The Passion Translation were "Stupid."
Then they made a video ignoring almost every good criticism against it, lulling their people back to sleep and furthering the deceptions of Brian Simmons.
Recently even MORE evidence against The Passion Translation has come out. It's actually shocking how much proof we have that this thing is a fake translation, a deceptive work, and a copy-pasted, reckless, delusion.
Yes, in response to this Bethel finally paused sales of the TPT. But it's not when THEY know it's bad that they responded. It's when YOU knew it was bad. Exposure, not truth, is what they respond to. They are not safe. They are NOT safe.
Don't let them pretend they are being persecuted.
I truly wish I had better news. I don't.
Clay Jones retweeted
“I support the rights of trans women because I’m a girl’s girl.” - AOC
Does she realize to be a “girl’s girl,” you actually have to know what a girl is?
It’s not a mentally ill man in a dress who says he’s a woman because he feels like one. It’s not the confused boy competing in girls’ sports and taking away titles and trophies from real girls who have worked their whole lives to compete. And it’s not the grown man who thinks he is a woman walking into the women’s bathroom while your daughter is washing her hands.
A real girl’s girl actually protects girls. AOC and her entire party have made it clear they never will.
It is his symbolic immortality project. link.amazon/B0iEcp2aQ
Everyone should read this: link.amazon/B0dqJJBLJ
“Women should remain silent.” What are Christians supposed to do with that passage? @askcliffe and Stuart Knechtle join me to unpack the context of 1 Timothy 2 and challenge feminism's critique of the Bible.
Well put!
In fact, placing the word "toxic" before masculinity or femininity is an oxymoron. A truly masculine man acts within the role God created him for. When he acts poorly, he is not fulfilling what God intended him to be. Thus, he is not acting within his true masculine nature, but rather a perversion of it. And vice versa for women.
Clay Jones retweeted
In fact, placing the word "toxic" before masculinity or femininity is an oxymoron. A truly masculine man acts within the role God created him for. When he acts poorly, he is not fulfilling what God intended him to be. Thus, he is not acting within his true masculine nature, but rather a perversion of it. And vice versa for women.
I read an article on "toxic" masculinity this morning so I'm going to set the record straight: there is no such thing as toxic masculinity any more than there is toxic femininity. It's about sin.
Here's a major problem. equip.org/articles/is-divine…
Yesterday I saw my Christian PA. Sometime ago I gave her a copy of our book on suffering. She said, "I just couldn't get through it." I asked her what she meant and she said that she didn't know all the horrible things that Christians had gone through and that it was very upsetting to her.
When I got home, I told Jean what she said. Jean replied: "She's not suffering right now." I agree, but one of the seven points in our book is "Others have suffered more then we have and they have honored God through it." Honestly, as someone who is being treated for cancer and heart disease, etc., one of my greatest encouragments, and something I have reminded my self of many times, is to remember all the exteme hardships that many Christians have endured yet honored God through it.
Every Christian is going to endure severe suffering at some point in their lives, and I encourage you to ready yourself for suffering right now, whether you are suffering now or not, so you will be prepared to honor God through suffering when it strikes.
Remember: the only thing that will prevent you for watching everyone you know die from murder, accident or disease will be your own death from murder, accident or disease. Prepare now so you can honor God through suffering!
link.amazon/B098rfEeE
Turn every book of the Bible into individual MS Word documents. You can insert photos, maps, quotes, etc.
I wrote a blog on the topic years ago: clayjones.net/2013/01/how-i-…
Every person is born Auschwitz enabled. Here's from my book Why Does God Allow Evil?:
Humans have an amazing capacity for evil, and for each person who pulled the trigger or scalded the unborn, there are family, friends, and even majority parties who knew of the slaughter and did nothing to stop it. We cannot argue that unusually depraved individuals perpetrate these evils. Difficulties may encourage some of them, but most of them weren’t raped or abused as children. They’re just ordinary folk—sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. Most of these murderers also did many nice things: petted the family dog, baked cookies, gave gifts, helped a friend in need, or played with their children just before or after they committed atrocities.
Hannah Arendt, in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, reported on the trial of Auschwitz administrator Adolf Eichmann. Arendt concluded that the trouble with Eichmann was that “so many were like him, neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
Psychologist, professor, and Holocaust researcher Israel Charny wrote:
"Sometimes sitting in a staff meeting of a modern psychiatric hospital, I could see how it [genocide] could happen. The ingredients were all there: the bitter, hating factions among the staff disguising themselves in the pomp and circumstance of a mental health conference; the barely disguised superiority and disdain for the hapless patient; the patronizing professional sympathy and righteousness that barely concealed the brutality of the so-called modern therapies of electric shock and brain surgery; the dehumanizing everyday herding of anonymous patients into anonymous routines. Everywhere. In lovely families that persecuted one or more of their members. In the universities I loved, where faculty intrigues and hatred knew no bounds. In the ruthless coups de grace of business killings. In the pompous coldness of exalted physicians turning away from the death fears of their patients."
Hatred often erupts over very little. When it comes to university infighting, I’m reminded of the old joke, “University politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.”
We would think that the natural bias of the victims would be toward thinking their victimizers inhuman, but that’s not true. It has been fascinating to me that absolutely every genocide researcher I have ever read (and I’ve read a lot of them) and absolutely every genocide victim I’ve ever read—to a person—concludes that genocide is what the average person does.
Professor and Holocaust survivor Fred E. Katz sums up exactly what kind of person participated in the Holocaust. He wrote that “only a tiny proportion” of the “massive killings are attributable to the actions of those people we call criminals, or crazy people, or socially alienated people, or even, people we identify as evil people.” Rather, they were actually “carried out by plain folk in the population—ordinary people, like you and me.”
Katz asks, Who carried out the plans of the “Hitlers and Stalins”? His conclusion: “Ordinary people, like you and me.” Then he asks, “Who provides the intelligence, the brain power, the orderly thinking to translate crazy philosophies into a practical course of action? Ordinary people, like you and me.” Finally, “Who provides the quiet sustained effort, the plain hard work it takes to carry our huge programs of murderous action? Ordinary people, like you and me.” Even though Katz’s family was killed in the Holocaust, he considers the perpetrators to be ordinary people.
Every semester, I assign the book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning. As you probably guessed from the title, Browning concluded, “I could have been the killer or the evader—both were humans.” One of Browning’s conclusions, by the way, is that those committing heinous crimes were not afraid that dire consequences would result from their refusal. The book is hard to read, but those who are willing to face its lessons find themselves better off for having done so.
Theologian Langdon Gilkey believed humans were basically good until he was put into an internment camp by the Japanese with 2000 other men, women, and children during World War II. As a result of that experience he concluded, “Nothing indicates so clearly the fixed belief in the innate goodness of humans as does this confidence that when the chips are down, and we are revealed for what we ‘really are,’ we will all be good to each other. Nothing could be so totally in error.” Langdon Gilkey called our niceness “the thin polish of easy morality.”
Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel observed of Auschwitz administrator Adolf Eichmann that he “was an ordinary man. He slept well, he ate well. He was an exemplary father, a considerate husband.” Wiesel wrote “Naïvely I was looking for the mark on his forehead” which would reveal that he had dug “a grave within himself. I was shaken by his normal appearance and behavior.” Wiesel said he was expecting to see a madman, “yet he was a man like any other.” Elsewhere Wiesel concluded, “Deep down…man is not only executioner, not only victim, not only spectator; he is all three at once.”
Likewise, Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi wrote, “We must remember that these faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of human orders, were not born torturers, were not (with few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men.”
Consider as well the conclusion of sociologist Harald Welzer: “We are left then with the most discomforting of all realities—ordinary, ‘normal’ people committing acts of extraordinary evil. This reality is difficult to admit, to understand, to absorb…As we look at the perpetrators of genocide and mass killing, we need no longer ask who these people are. We know who they are. They are you and I.”
It’s important to point out that one of the reasons so many Holocaust victims and researchers conclude that the perpetrators were ordinary people is because so many Jews assisted the Nazis in the killings. Jews often administrated the ghettos and manned the gas chambers and crematoria.
Likewise, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered eight years in a Soviet gulag, asks:
"Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our people? Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood?
It is our own.
And just so we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?”
It is a dreadful question if one answers it honestly.
So we need to ask ourselves Solzhenitsyn’s question: If our lives turned had out differently, if we had never become Christians, if we had been born in a different society or at a different time, could we have been a guard in Auschwitz or in a Soviet gulag? If we answer yes to this question, then it shows that there really is something wrong with humankind.
But for those who answer no to this question, I have two things to say. First, I would ask them on what logical or evidential basis could they possibly could conclude that they were somehow born innately better than the millions of those who committed these atrocities or who at the very least condoned those who committed them. Then I would also remind them that belief in one’s innate superiority is almost always the father of genocide. Like it or not, we were all born Auschwitz-enabled.
But still, some resist this conclusion. In a smiling, closed-eyed denial, some will say that those who perpetrated genocide must have been abused as children, or raised by severe parents, or something—anything These people simply do not want to believe, cannot allow themselves to believe, that they and their children were born Auschwitz-enabled. They are desperate to escape the conclusion that we could all do genocide.
❓️❓️❓️
On the wall of a concentration camp cell, an unknown prisoner wrote, “If there is a God, he will have to beg for my forgiveness”.
I often think about this.
Why does God allow evil?
It's of the toughest questions any human being can ever ponder.
At the same time, every single one of us has asked it at some point.
So what do you think?
Why?
Clay Jones retweeted
Please stop using outdated phrases like: "Flasher", "Voyeur", and "Woman Beater" and instead use the more progressive umbrella term: "Trans Woman Athlete".
Check this article out: equip.org/articles/is-divine…
Check this out, @DineshDSouza. equip.org/articles/is-divine…
Hey, @realJennaEllis, you might want to check out my article against Calvinist determinism. equip.org/articles/is-divine…
The Calvinist circular argument goes like this:
Man cannot choose God because his nature makes it impossible (total depravity).
Who sovereignly determined that nature and ordained every event? God.
Then how can man be morally responsible for doing what he was created—and irresistibly determined—to do?
Because God holds him responsible.
And how is that just?
Because whatever God decrees is just.
That isn’t an explanation of moral responsibility. It simply assumes the conclusion, then labels every objection “rebellion.”
If man has no genuine capacity to choose the free gift of salvation or reject it, “responsibility” has been stripped of its ordinary moral meaning. You cannot deny meaningful human agency and then smuggle it back in solely to assign blame.
Under a Calvinist theology, man is no more competent than an inanimate object. This conclusion rejects all evidence (Imago Dei) and scripture (“whosoever will”) to the contrary.
I know you already know this, Frank, but 1 Cor. 7:2 To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her.
