Jump to content
Goodbye Jesus

Lee Strobel Is A Dumbass


BrotherJosh

Recommended Posts

Lee only interviews Christian "scholars" for that book. Of course they're going to make "a case for christ."

Stretching and molding the evidence to fit the answer they want in the end.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

HolyShit, that's the most appropriately chosen name I've ever come across :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree. Obviously, Strobel's books are not written to convince non-believers to change their mind, but to reassure believers and tell them what they want to hear.

Yes, that was me. I was hoping to use it to convince people but felt embarrassed about it. (Deep down my skeptic self smelled the BS but I convinced myself that it smelled like roses). It kept me in church a couple of years longer than I would have stayed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I sent the fucking book to a friend.

 

Still embarrassed as shit for that one.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As someone who actually went to some of Lee Strobel's seminars on evangelism before I deconverted and has had a strong connection with Willowcreek where he spent his early years, I have two comments.

 

1. His wife was a Christian at the time he "converted" and they were attending the hip mega Willowcreek church with coffee shop and worship-entertainment. When he converted they hired him and now they had a hip former atheist to brag about and put to the podium.

2. He makes his living off his books.

 

I am getting to the point of not accepting any debate with someone who makes their living off the Christian nonsense.

 

All this and about 5 months ago I found a package hand addressed by him to my wife with, I assume, one of his books in it. My wife grabbed it and said they had been writing back and forth and he is a great man. You can guess what the topic has been.

 

Glad others agree on my experience with his craziness.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

HolyShit, that's the most appropriately chosen name I've ever come across smile.png

If I'd come on this board after having encountered some folks on here, I would have chosen HolyFuck.  GONZ9729CustomImage1539775.gif

Link to comment
Share on other sites

http://www.caseagainstfaith.com/ is a great Internet resource for systematically critiquing all of Strobel's garbage.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Even when I was a believer and biblical teacher I used to think that apologetics were for the believer and would have no effect on the unbeliever. This, of course, made me wonder why believers needed such constant reassurances about god, the Bible, creation, etc. Now? It's obvious.

 

When I was a believer I had read The Case for Christ and I found myself shaking my head. While it did not cause me to leave Christianity, it certainly did nothing to affirm the faith. His arguments were weak at best. His sources seemed quite questionable and one-sided. Even in the height of my Christian brain-washing I was wondering why he didn't interview non-Christian experts in the areas he was presenting in his book. As an investigative reporter, you would think you would want more than one side represented ... unless, of course, the goal was not to be fair and impartial, but to stack the odds in one side's favor.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The 1-star reviews on Amazon are pretty entertaining: http://www.amazon.com/Case-Christ-Journalists-Personal-Investigation/product-reviews/0310209307/ref=cm_cr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addOneStar

 

People tearing into how badly-written the book is and how it's basically just the author giving Christians what they want to hear.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm glad this thread was revived. I found this ^^^ Amazon link helpful.

 

My cousin, a campus "missionary", and I have been conversing via email and he was trying to unpack some of my issues with Christianity. He encouraged me to read certain apologetics books and listen to certain apologist podcasts. I listened to a few podcasts, but ended up disappointed--I thought there was something wrong with me because I found the answers to be shallow and only helpful to those with pre-existing belief (which I now lack). The podcasts left me dazed and confused. I finally concluded that I'm either too smart or too dumb to be a believer.

 

We ended the conversation with, "Maybe atheism is the honest choice for me."

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I received The Case for Christ for Christmas. My aunt sent it to me. She's a lovely person, but I don't think she realizes that a typical deconverted atheist knows the Bible better than a typical churchgoer.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As someone who actually went to some of Lee Strobel's seminars on evangelism before I deconverted and has had a strong connection with Willowcreek where he spent his early years, I have two comments.

 

1. His wife was a Christian at the time he "converted" and they were attending the hip mega Willowcreek church with coffee shop and worship-entertainment. When he converted they hired him and now they had a hip former atheist to brag about and put to the podium.

2. He makes his living off his books.

 

I am getting to the point of not accepting any debate with someone who makes their living off the Christian nonsense.

 

All this and about 5 months ago I found a package hand addressed by him to my wife with, I assume, one of his books in it. My wife grabbed it and said they had been writing back and forth and he is a great man. You can guess what the topic has been.

 

Glad others agree on my experience with his craziness.

I would be soo.... pissed off if I saw that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

These people are idiots indeed. Lucado, Strobel , etc. I have his book in my car trunk now ready to throw away. It's been there a long, long time. I hope no one sees it 

 

I find it interesting that he uses false info. My sister dated a Classics major. Never try to bring up this drivel to a Classics major. He, in about a minute, showed where Strobel is in blatant error and ignorant of history.  

 

They always act like they are reading to three year olds, trying to explain the idea of toilet paper to a kid,

 

"See, Jesus LOVE you! YES! EVEN YOU!!!"

 

Many of the early Classical writers mention how stupid the Xers were. I guess that never changes. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Lee Strobel seems like a guy who found out that he could make a good living selling nonsense to incredulous Christians, so he plays the "I used to be an atheist" thing, and dumbs down apologist arguments for the dumb masses, and I'm sure his bank account is doing just fine.

 

My mom also gave me A Case For Christ a long time ago when I was still a Christian, and I have to admit it may me feel good about my beliefs for a bit, but I think it also started me on the road to questioning my beliefs further once I started seeing the refutations of apologists, so unknowingly, giving me that book ended up being a bad idea.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

As someone who actually went to some of Lee Strobel's seminars on evangelism before I deconverted and has had a strong connection with Willowcreek where he spent his early years, I have two comments.

 

1. His wife was a Christian at the time he "converted" and they were attending the hip mega Willowcreek church with coffee shop and worship-entertainment. When he converted they hired him and now they had a hip former atheist to brag about and put to the podium.

2. He makes his living off his books.

 

I am getting to the point of not accepting any debate with someone who makes their living off the Christian nonsense.

 

All this and about 5 months ago I found a package hand addressed by him to my wife with, I assume, one of his books in it. My wife grabbed it and said they had been writing back and forth and he is a great man. You can guess what the topic has been.

 

Glad others agree on my experience with his craziness.

I would be soo.... pissed off if I saw that.

 

Such are the experiences of the Unequally Yoked Club!   If I had a nickel for every time someone suggested I read the wrong stuff and didn't read enough Strobel, Lewis, etc. etc.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I read The Case for Christ when I was still a Christian apologist in the hopes that it would help me in arguments with unbelievers. I was sorely disappointed. I always like it when a Christian tells me that Lee Strobel was an atheist when he started his research for writing The Case for Christ. Strobel converted to Christianity in 1981. He conducted all of his interviews in The Case for Christ in 1998, with the possible exception of the first interview (with Dr. Craig Blomberg). That's 17 years between his conversion and his interviews. Also, to quote his bio at leestrobel.com, "He joined the staff of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, IL, in 1987, and later became a teaching pastor there."

 

Respectfully,

Franciscan Monkey

 

 

I also read it when I was still a believer, and I was also disappointed by the weak approach. I had wanted something solid to be convincing to a true skeptic, but what I got was dumbed down apologetics that even I, as a firm believer, could see wouldn't be persuasive to them. At least now I recognize that there's a good reason for why there's not much substance to it: he didn't have much to go on, because the evidence is extremely flimsy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Re-started The Case for Faith today. Might actually try to get through it.

 

I'm on the first chapter, and this stuff is ridiculous.

He says that evil exists because Gawd might be allowing it for a higher purpose--a means to an end that our limited understanding can't comprehend. We just have to trust God.

 

I hate this escape hatch. It's what Xians desperately tell themselves whenever they are in trouble. It is the same stupid thing the SS teacher repeats when he encounters a bible question he can't answer. It works only for those who already trust biblegod. He has not given anyone else

one single reason to trust him, so why would they?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I fished this out of my trunk in honour of this board. yellow.gif  Man, it is worse than i thought. He is dead wrong on historical facts. He states that we know as little about Alexander the Great as Jesus and thus, we should be happy with less data. OK, then I can assume the grass is blue because data is not important? Further, we have more info on Alex. Great than Jesus. What planet is he on and where did he get his degree in ancient literature? Oh, he DIDN"T???

 

He also mentions ancient authors quite a bit without knowing what he is reading. I would like to see him go head to head with a true historian. SLAM DUNK. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Strobel said anyone will find God if s/he looks hard enough, because God gave us clues. If he simply revealed himself, he would be forcing us to believe, which is not free will. When did God give anyone a reason to go on a spiritual journey? Most are too busy or they just don't care. If he wants to save souls, he has to try harder than leading us on a scavenger hunt.

 

Showing someone the truth is not forcing her or him to believe anything--that is impossible. People can take truth when it's given to them, or they can refuse to believe it. That's why some still believe the earth is flat, or the Holocaust is a myth.

 

Another thing TCFF says is that by talking about evil, one assumes that its opposite--the ideal state--exists. Strobel automatically assumes this concept of ideal circumstances came from God, because God is the Supreme Good. He thinks this because Xianity says God is the ultimate good, forgetting that his intended audience is people who don't buy Xianity.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

Obviously, Strobel's books are not written to convince non-believers to change their mind, but to reassure believers and tell them what they want to hear.

That's basically what all apologecs books do. They worked for us when we were Christian, and now they sound the equivalent to a child's bedtime story!

 

On a side note, I was going to start a new topic, but then I came across this thread...does anyone else think that Strobel was never really an atheist? I mean, a really seriously thinking atheist. How can one such person go from actively not believeing to hardcore fundy? It seems an unlikely transformation? I've heard of people who were well educated atheists who later became liberal Christians, but never a fundy! Fundy to atheist seems the more natural way to go.

 

He was the rebelling-against-God type of person, wasn't he? That isn't atheist; that's just rebellion. They call it atheist and then when they settle down and accept the beliefs they were taught they think they can preach the rest of their lives what it's like being an atheist. But all they've got is a strawman.

 

I get Lee Strobel and C. S. Lewis mixed up all the time. Mere Christianity was recommended to me when I was in the last throes of struggle to hold onto Christianity. I couldn't read the book. It was like old warmed-over soup--old stuff I'd heard so often before that didn't begin to address my burning lifelong questions.

 

I read perhaps the first chapter of Case for Christ. There's so MUCH that he doesn't say, just presumes, that there isn't even a case. He wants to come off like a lawyer but he's only a journalist. And he's not much good at even that, given that the stuff he's supposedly reporting happened thousands of years ago and he cannot find a single eye-witness to interview. He relies on pretend witnesses, taken from passages of ancient texts long proved unreliable as historical documents.

 

As a Christian, this kind of stuff is very comforting and consoling because it "proves" that Christianity is true. Except when it doesn't. It's been a while but I'd say both books were nothing but appeals to the emotions. I need logic to hook facts on in order to know emotions are justified.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Moderator

That book and video series just sucks ass!  Don't bother!  If somebody wants to expose you to it, require that they read something from John Loftus FIRST!  Gagh!!!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In The Case for Faith, Peter Kreeft says it's possible that because god knows all, he is using evil to create a greater good. Ex: X's death created salvation for everyone.

 

Using an example from the point he is trying to prove is like using a word in its own definition.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Out of respect for my aunt who gave me The Case for Christ, I've gotten about 100 pages into it and made some notes. I'm exhasperated. It reads like a cheap novel, and I've got better things to read. It's all self-referential, like arguing the existence for Harry Potter through the works of JK Rowling. In case anyone is interested, I'll share the notes I've made. Feel free to add your own. I'll cite you in my response to my aunt.

 

Eye witness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Maybe you’ve seen the basketball video with the gorilla; if not, go to the library and have a librarian show it to you on the Internet.

 

In an assault case where I served as a juror, the eye witness testimonies conflicted with each other. One of the witnesses contradicted his own affidavit and statement to the police. I don’t think he was lying; I think he really did believe what he was saying.

 

On page 24, scholar Craig Blomberg says that two people wrote, in 125 AD and 180 AD, that Mark “accurately recorded Peter’s observations.” These are third-hand accounts written over 90 years after events purportedly took place.

 

Page 27-30: writers copying one another or the Old Testament doesn’t make their work factual.

 

Page 33: According to TCFC, books of the New Testament were written, at the earliest, 30 years after events purportedly took place. That’s a long time to forget, embroider, etc. Even if it’s only two years, someone coming back from the dead after three days is an extraordinary claim. The entire chapter is just a lot of claims.

 

Page 40: “You won’t find the outlandish flourishes and blatant mythologizing [in the gospels] that you see in a lot of other ancient writings.” Actually, virgin births, miracles, prophesies and resurrection are common themes in mythology. See Osiris and Dionysus. The story of Jesus follows a Hero Mythic Archetype common in that time and place.

 

Pages 39-42. People writing things down, debating them and memorizing them suggests that those people take those things seriously. It doesn’t mean they’re factual.

 

Chapter 3: consistency (or some lack of it) doesn’t make it factual.

 

Page 76: “Because of my interview, with Blomberg, I didn’t want to suggest that we needed to go beyond the gospels in order to find reliable evidence concerning Jesus.” Then the author isn’t much of a hard-nosed skeptic or investigative reporter. Wouldn’t he want to look beyond an authorized biography study someone? Beyond the works of JK Rowling to investigate the existence of Harry Potter?

 

Pages 83-84: Rapid spread of something doesn’t make it true—it’s appeal to popularity.

 

Page 85: Eclipse. “So there is, as Paul Maier points out, non-biblical attestation of the darkness that occurred at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. Apparently, some found the need to try to give it a natural explanation by saying that it was an eclipse.” According to NASA’s web site (http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEhistory/SEhistory.html), there were total eclipses on November 24, 29 AD and March 19, 33 AD. The site also lists an annular eclipse on January 27, 632 AD, coinciding with the time of the death of Mohammed’s son Ibrahim.

 

The rest of the chapter: church leaders writing something down doesn’t make it true.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've decided not to read any more of TCFC because the rest of the book probably isn't going to be any better than the first hundred pages. I do have books about economics, metabolism and behavioral science that I want to read.

 

The rest of the book seems to cover the character of Jesus and how well the New Testament fits together. None of this makes the gospels true, any more than a well-written work of fiction with a sympathetic hero is true.

 

I don't have the background in ancient history or theology to know whether the specific arguments made in the book are true. I'm not inclined to study up on it any more than I'd research Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam. But I do know some logical principles, and TCFC violates them left and right.

 

I looked for some criticisms of TCFC. Something about ancient coins with microletters didn't sit well with me--it just seemed too pat. Indeed, Richard Carrier writes about the microletters at length. To quote:

 

First, it is extremely rare to find any specimen of ancient coin that is not heavily worn from use and the passage of literally thousands of years, in which time the loss of surface from oxidation is inevitable and significant. Even if such microscopic lettering were added to these coins as Vardaman says, hardly any of it could have survived or remained legible, yet Vardaman has no trouble finding hundreds of perfectly legible words on every coin he examines. Second, to prove his thesis, Vardaman would at the very least be expected to publish enlarged photographs of the reputed microscopic etchings. Yet he has never done this. Instead, all he offers are his own drawings.

 

and

 

all the Latin letters for "J" appear, as Vardaman reproduces them, as modern J's, yet that letter was not even invented until the Middle Ages! If his J's were genuine, they should be the letter I.

 

Any book involving research is bound to have some niggling errors, but this is outright fraud.

 

This is the reason I stopped going to church long ago. The preacher or guest speaker would say something I knew to be untrue. They weren't minor errors, but either whoppers or things that no thinking person would have taken seriously. I finally realized that religion isn't about following the truth wherever it leads, but promoting a doctrine.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Guidelines.