Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

Easter Bunny Arrested!

I really, really do not want to make light of the actual human events involved here, but this story is surreal (and –I would speculate–the basis of the Easter Bunny Hates You video):

In what would seem to be nothing more than a holiday prank, a newspaper in Florida reports that the Easter Bunny was arrested for attacking a woman. Unfortunately, however, it turns out that the truth can indeed be stranger than fiction.

Naplesnews.com reports that a 6-foot tall 280 pound Easter Bunny and his assistant were arrested by Fort Myers Police for an altercation Saturday night at the Edison Mall.

According to the victim’s husband Robert Johansson, "It was something like you would see in a movie."

Johansson says the incident started because the Easter Bunny decided to close shop 15 minutes early on Saturday night with a line of children and families still waiting. Robert says his wife, Erin, approached the manager to complain when she was knocked to the ground.

According to Johansson, "The next thing you know my wife is sucker punched by the manager, she is pulled to the ground by her hair and then the Easter Bunny jumps on top and starts punching my wife in the head."

Arthur McLure, who listed his occupation as the Easter Bunny, and 25-year-old Crystal Frechette were charged by the Forth Myers Police with battery and disturbing the peace [SOURCE].

MORE FROM THE SMOKING GUN.

Jewish Gospel Dynamics

Jewish rabbi and New Testament specialist Michael Cook offers an intriguing example of modern Jewish apologetics on the claims of Christianity:

"The New Testament has been the greatest single external determinant of Jewish history, and a deleterious one to say the least. It has caused Jews grievous problems and even innumerable deaths, not to mention generating antisemitism and anti-Jewish stereotyping. Today, it remains the cause of societal pressures during Christian holy day seasons and a source of confusion for Jews targeted by Christian missionaries and millennialists.

"Engaging the New Testament, therefore, can be both therapeutic and empowering for Jews. At the same time, a willingness by Jews to tackle Christian texts may help enlighten Christians about the role the New Testament has played in violating some of their own values. Jews who are able to articulate to Christians the Gospels’ evolution from a Jewish perspective may be in a better position to curb the reckless abandon with which New Testament texts are often so cavalierly cited, bandied about and misconstrued in modern society."

GET THE STORY.

(Nod to Religion & Society for the link.)

I have posted this article not because I intend to interact with it on an apologetics level — that exercise would require far more space than the blogging medium allows
— but because I want to highlight a renaissance in modern Jewish apologetics, which I think can only be positive for Christian/Jewish interreligious dialogue. If such dialogue is to be more than self-affirming chitchat, then both partners in the discussion need to engage in apologetics, which is to say that they need to offer each other with mutual charity and respect the reasons for their hope (1 Pet. 3:15).

For another recent example of Jewish apologetics, see David Klinghoffer’s Why the Jews Rejected Jesus.

GET THE BOOK.

GET THE REVIEW. (Scroll to the second review.)

A Blogger’s Parable

The blogmistress of Once Upon a Time… (aka my sister) offers an instructive parable for bloggers with a sobering moral:

"If a person starts a blog and begins revealing intimate and private details of his life, he will attract attention. No one asked him to put himself out there, but he did. Eventually, the attention and the demands of the public leave him feeling that he has nothing private left to himself. He is conflicted because he enjoyed the audience that would read his posts gratefully. Over time, there are certain readers who demand more and more, or who may judge him for the way he lives his life and write him to say so. The man doesn’t want to lose his audience, but he sees that the price he paid for giving away his privacy is that the public feels that what he has given away is no longer just his. They are entitled to it also. Eventually, he stops blogging altogether…"

GET THE POST. (Read the whole thing.)

If You Build It, They Won’t Come

Charles_krauthammerCharles Krauthammer has a reputation for being one of the smartest political commentators around.

In a recent column, he argued the case that:

Every sensible immigration policy has two objectives: (1) to regain control of our borders so that it is we who decide who enters, and (2) to find a way to normalize and legalize the situation of the 11 million illegals among us.

He went on to argue that the way to achieve objective (1) is to build a wall, and the grounds on which he argued it–or part of the grounds–were interesting: It’s the compassionate solution.

GET THE STORY.

There are other ways to stop illegal immigrants from coming to this country, such as making their lives in this country so difficult that they won’t want to come here anymore, or slapping American citizens who employ them with harsh penalties that actually get enforced, but these would cause human suffering needlessly.

The most human solution, to this line of thought, is to simply build a barrier. No barrier is perfect, but if you make it hard enough to get past then most people won’t try and the tidal wave of illegal aliens coming into this country now will be slowed to a trickle.

And walls don’t hurt people. They don’t cause suffering.

Certainly, if people bang their heads against walls, that’ll hurt, and if the wall is too short and they try climbing it or knocking part of it down or burrowing under it they may hurt themselves, but that is dwarfed by the suffering that would be caused by the alternative ways of diminishing the flood of illegal aliens.

Unless one is committed to the idea that America should willingly absorb an unlimited number of illegal aliens (something Catholic teaching does not require) then it looks like the most merciful way to stem the tide is to simply build a wall (or series of walls, augmented by patrols).

At least it’s the most merciful means that America has within its power to do.

An even more merciful thing would be for the Mexican government to reform itself, end its corruption, stop encouraging illegal immigration to the United States, and open up its economy so that people in Mexico will have economic opportunities at home and won’t feel the need to flee their country.

Those are things that the American government can encourage the Mexican government to do, but they’re not within the American government’s power. It takes two to tango, as they say.

What is within the American government’s power is building a wall, and that is looking like the most merciful thing that we know we will be able to do.

A while back I read a statement issued by some Mexican bishops (not sure if it was the whole conference or not) that patronizingly said America should not build such a wall because, they said, such a wall would not work.

This, of course, was completely disingenuous.

They know that a wall would work, which is why they were advocating against it being built. It wouldn’t stop every single illegal alien from coming into the country, but it doesn’t have to. It only has to hold back the tsunami we’re currently experiencing.

If someone has a better proposal–that can be realistically achieved and isn’t just a pipe dream–for how to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, I’d love to hear it, but for now a wall is looking like the most practical, most merciful thing that I can think of.

If you’d like to make a proposal to address this problem, please do so. It needs to have three qualities:

1. It is more compassionate than building a wall (including more compassionate for Americans, meaning that it doesn’t required them to bear huge costs that are far larger than the cost of building and patrolling a wall).
2. It will actually work.
3. It is something that the U.S. has in its power to do (i.e., it doesn’t depend on what Mexico does, since their government has shown itself to be a bad faith partner in solving this problem).

Please argue why your proposal fits each of these criteria.

Whatever turns out to be the best way stop illegal immigration, we’ve go to do something that is effective. Regardless of what happens to the illegal aliens already in this country–whether they’re given amnesty or not (and I’m virtually certain that they will be)–we simply cannot continue taking ineffective measures at securing our borders, for it will only encourage more illegal immigration.

Frog At The Pump

Gasprices_3   

In case you’ve just crawled out from under a rock — or in case you’ve been walking to work — gas prices have been soaring.  I just filled my tank for $3.18/gallon.  My theory for the rise in gas prices is that we’re being seeing the urban legend about cooking frogs played out at the gas pump:  If you dump a frog in a pot of boiling water, he’ll jump right out.  But if you put him in cool water and gradually raise the heat, you’ll have frog legs for dinner.  In other words, at the gas pumps we’re being acclimated to being boiled.

GET THE STORY.

Hammer Into Nail

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a freaky scary dude. He’s a true religious zealot who’s theology is likely to lead to world war if he gets his way.

I mean, liberals back in the 1980s often tried to portray Ronald Reagan–a mild Presbyterian–as if he were an apocalyptic visionary, but Ahmadinejad is the real deal!

He’s said and done things that suggest that he is a divine messenger who is preparing the way for the return of the Hidden Imam–Shi’ite Islam’s semi-Messianic child figure, who is believed to have been in hiding for the last thousand years but who will return in connection with an apocalyptic conflict.

The former executive editor of Iran’s largest daily newspaper (who now lives in Europe) has an interesting article spelling out Ahmadinejad’s religious vision and how it plays into the current Iranian nuclear situation.

EXCERPTS:

Last Monday [now the Monday before last], just before he announced that Iran had gatecrashed "the nuclear club", President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disappeared for several hours. He was having a khalvat (tête-à-tête) with the Hidden Imam, the 12th and last of the imams of Shiism who went into "grand occultation" in 941.

According to Shia lore, the Imam is a messianic figure who, although in hiding, remains the true Sovereign of the World. In every generation, the Imam chooses 36 men, (and, for obvious reasons, no women) naming them the owtad or "nails", whose presence, hammered into mankind’s existence, prevents the universe from "falling off". Although the "nails" are not known to common mortals, it is, at times, possible to identify one thanks to his deeds. It is on that basis that some of Ahmad-inejad’s more passionate admirers insist that he is a "nail", a claim he has not discouraged. For example, he has claimed that last September, as he addressed the United Nations’ General Assembly in New York, the "Hidden Imam drenched the place in a sweet light".

Last year, it was after another khalvat that Ahmadinejad announced his intention to stand for president. Now, he boasts that the Imam gave him the presidency for a single task: provoking a "clash of civilisations" in which the Muslim world, led by Iran, takes on the "infidel" West, led by the United States, and defeats it in a slow but prolonged contest that, in military jargon, sounds like a low intensity, asymmetrical war.

According to this analysis, spelled out in commentaries by Ahmadinejad’s strategic guru, Hassan Abassi, known as the "Dr Kissinger of Islam", President George W Bush is an aberration, an exception to a rule under which all American presidents since Truman, when faced with serious setbacks abroad, have "run away". Iran’s current strategy, therefore, is to wait Bush out. And that, by "divine coincidence", corresponds to the time Iran needs to develop its nuclear arsenal, thus matching the only advantage that the infidel enjoys.

The author goes on to predict that Iran will feign just enough compliance with the U.N. to stave off a military attack for the next two years, so they can run out Bush’s term in office. Then, with a new, weaker-willed president in office, it’ll be full speed ahead.

We’ll have to see whether they pursue that strategy or whether they really are hell-bent-for-leather crazy on their nuclear program.

What the author doesn’t go into is something that we’ve brought up before here on the blog: Bush knows (or should know) that no matter what happens in Afghanistan and Iraq, if he leaves office without stopping Iran from getting the Bomb then his presidency will be viewed as a dismal failure. It doesn’t matter whether they get the Bomb after he leaves office or not. He will be viewed as someone who (like Clinton) allowed a horrible external threat to fester and grow due to his indecisive action. He’ll even be viewed as someone who hamstrung himself with a foolish venture into Iraq when the real threat was Iran.

It doesn’t matter whether that’s fair or not, that’s how it’ll be perceived.

So the question is: What will Bush do if the Iranian government tries a play-for-time strategy?

Will he drive the hammer into the nail?

Only time will tell. In the meanwhile,

GET THE STORY.

MORE ON THE HIDDEN IMAM.

The Devil’s Advocate

Satan_1

If you thought the recent efforts to rehabilitate Judas with a so-called "Gospel of Judas" were strange, then take a look at this:

"A former Jesuit turned university professor has set himself an ambitious project: rehabilitating the devil.

"Henry Ansgar Kelly says Satan is the most maligned figure in history and has endured 17 centuries of unjustified character assassination.

"’For 1700 years Satan has been the enemy of God, whereas in the Bible he works for God, he’s his prime minister or attorney-general, in charge of policing the world,’ Professor Kelly said.

GET THE STORY.

God himself didn’t seem all that appreciative of his alleged "prime minister’s" efforts, as I recall:

"[The devil] was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44).