My Time in New Orleans at the SBL
I want to thank everyone who donated to help my wife and I go to New Orleans. We received about $630. Others sent me some nice books from my wish list at Amazon. Let me briefly tell you about our trip.
It was our first time in New Orleans and we did some sightseeing. This is a city with a history and I recommend others to visit it someday.
I was able to meet and talk with some very noteworthy people. I talked with Bill Craig (no, I didn't challenge him to debate me), Frank Zindler (who as the former president of American Atheists has a near encyclopedic mind), Mike Licona, James McGrath, Jim Linville, Ken Pulliam, Rob Dalrymple, and others. I'm going to be debating David Wood in March a second time at an Apologetics conference in Virginia, but in talking with Licona I told him I'd rather debate him (since he'll also be at that conference). Mike rhetorically asked me, "Do you want to lose this time?" I replied, "That presupposes two things." ;-) Later he said he didn't mean to suggest I won my first debate with Wood--the first presupposition.
Hector Avalos and his wife treated us to dinner. They are kind and generous people. I thank Hector for taking me under his wings, so to speak. His friendship means a great deal to me personally. Let me warn Christians everywhere, if you didn't already know, that Dr. Avalos is coming to get you. While in New Orleans Hector did some research into the manumission documents for why Christians released slaves for a new book he's writing on how abolitionists twisted scripture in order to argue against slavery. This book will be a tour de force! I can't wait to read it.
We had lunch with Paul Copan, the president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Paul is my friend. We must have talked for about two hours, mostly about the issues that separated us. He's in the process of completing a new book on justifying God's behavior in the Bible, but I forget the title right now. Since he has my book and has visited DC he knows my reasons for rejecting Christianity. So he decided instead to tell me story after story of how God supposedly answered some amazing prayer requests, some of them coming from J.P. Moreland at a talk he just gave for the EPS that weekend which are probably to be found in his book The Kingdom Triangle. The claim is that these stories are best explained on the supposition that God exists. This strategy has been used on me before. I have a couple of wonderful Christian lady friends who also have read my book but rather than deal with my intellectual arguments would rather talk about their experiences and invite me regularly to their pentecostal churches to let God touch me with his power. But this won't do. I think I rebuffed Paul more than sufficiently. In one story some missionaries showed the movie Jesus to some Muslim communities and afterward several of the people said they had seen this person walking in their village the day before. I told Paul how interesting it was that Jesus looks just like the actor in the movie!
Bill Maher himself was first asked to be the respondent to his movie Religulous but when he turned it down Dr. Randy Reed invited me instead. The introduction he wrote for me was quite glowing about my work. I was described as "a rising star" in the atheist community and that my book was a devastating critique of Christianity (or something to that effect). To read my response to the panel click here. One Jewish scholar told me afterward how she appreciated the fact that I didn't back down and argued my case regardless of who I was responding to. Another person thought I did a great job. There were probably 25 people there, not bad.
It was a very rewarding experience for us. I've only touched on some of the details.
It was our first time in New Orleans and we did some sightseeing. This is a city with a history and I recommend others to visit it someday.
I was able to meet and talk with some very noteworthy people. I talked with Bill Craig (no, I didn't challenge him to debate me), Frank Zindler (who as the former president of American Atheists has a near encyclopedic mind), Mike Licona, James McGrath, Jim Linville, Ken Pulliam, Rob Dalrymple, and others. I'm going to be debating David Wood in March a second time at an Apologetics conference in Virginia, but in talking with Licona I told him I'd rather debate him (since he'll also be at that conference). Mike rhetorically asked me, "Do you want to lose this time?" I replied, "That presupposes two things." ;-) Later he said he didn't mean to suggest I won my first debate with Wood--the first presupposition.
Hector Avalos and his wife treated us to dinner. They are kind and generous people. I thank Hector for taking me under his wings, so to speak. His friendship means a great deal to me personally. Let me warn Christians everywhere, if you didn't already know, that Dr. Avalos is coming to get you. While in New Orleans Hector did some research into the manumission documents for why Christians released slaves for a new book he's writing on how abolitionists twisted scripture in order to argue against slavery. This book will be a tour de force! I can't wait to read it.
We had lunch with Paul Copan, the president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Paul is my friend. We must have talked for about two hours, mostly about the issues that separated us. He's in the process of completing a new book on justifying God's behavior in the Bible, but I forget the title right now. Since he has my book and has visited DC he knows my reasons for rejecting Christianity. So he decided instead to tell me story after story of how God supposedly answered some amazing prayer requests, some of them coming from J.P. Moreland at a talk he just gave for the EPS that weekend which are probably to be found in his book The Kingdom Triangle. The claim is that these stories are best explained on the supposition that God exists. This strategy has been used on me before. I have a couple of wonderful Christian lady friends who also have read my book but rather than deal with my intellectual arguments would rather talk about their experiences and invite me regularly to their pentecostal churches to let God touch me with his power. But this won't do. I think I rebuffed Paul more than sufficiently. In one story some missionaries showed the movie Jesus to some Muslim communities and afterward several of the people said they had seen this person walking in their village the day before. I told Paul how interesting it was that Jesus looks just like the actor in the movie!
Bill Maher himself was first asked to be the respondent to his movie Religulous but when he turned it down Dr. Randy Reed invited me instead. The introduction he wrote for me was quite glowing about my work. I was described as "a rising star" in the atheist community and that my book was a devastating critique of Christianity (or something to that effect). To read my response to the panel click here. One Jewish scholar told me afterward how she appreciated the fact that I didn't back down and argued my case regardless of who I was responding to. Another person thought I did a great job. There were probably 25 people there, not bad.
It was a very rewarding experience for us. I've only touched on some of the details.