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Conscientious Mormons are not bound to any racial hatred by that writing. It is one of those bits and flecks of the past. I think a Mormon in public office is duty bound to make his position on 2nd Nephi explicitly known. If he did that the Q15 might feel inclined to remove such items from the Cano...

I continue to comb through the article looking for any valid and significant criticisms of this book and failing to do so. This next section is interesting, because it really comes across like Dr. Peterson not understanding the plain (and precious?) words of the text. I don’t know how to respond mor...

That's generous. I might have gone an eighth of a point. LOL. What Dr. Peterson said was blatantly false and totally misunderstood the point Hitchens was making, so in that sense he didn't score a point at all. But, this was one of the rare occasions when there was at least a superficial relationsh...

On pages 8 and 9 of the transcript, Dr. Peterson sets out to provide some evidence of his thesis that according to Hitchens, “ anything that’s good is secular, anything that’s bad is a believer, a faithful person. ” Of course that is Dr. Peterson’s straw man, not Christopher Hitchens’s point. But Dr...

Perhaps the longest section of Dr. Peterson’s review is about the historicity of the gospels. Dr. Peterson says: He also describes the Gospels as late. Because they are late, of course, they can’t be trusted as history. Unsurprisingly, this accusation has nothing whatsoever to do with Hitchens’s act...

The New Testament is a hodgepodge, and there are bits like the famous John 8 passage that somehow didn't make it into the oldest manuscripts even though it's one of the best Jesus stories and seems in several ways like the kind of thing Jesus might have said. That cuts both ways. Maybe something li...

As I systematically go through Dr. Peterson's critique, I'm anxious to find something he is right about so that I can demonstrate I'm being fair. Unfortunately, this passage doesn't contain anything like that. Dr. Peterson says: He is also mistaken in his claim that all of Jesus' disciples were illi...

...I argue that what we observe occuring with the birth narratives applies just as equally to the most significant claim about his life - that he rose from the dead. I apologize about being insufficiently clear, but with Mark being silent on both counts we see both Matthew and Luke suddenly take of...

I'm not an expert on New Testament by any means, but my understanding is that there are enough points on which Matthew and Luke agree, yet which are absent from Mark, that the existence of a lost written source "Q" has been inferred. So it's not true that wherever Mark was silent Matthew and Luke m...

This post is rather long and addresses one of the better (or more accurately less terrible) points that Dr. Peterson makes. I debated whether or not I should include it here, because its inclusion could distract from some of the other more poignant observations and make it look like I am nitpicking....