Ravi Zacharias, Another Liar for Jesus Exposed

I've commented on the growing evidence against Ravi Zacharias before (see tag "Liars for Jesus"--which now has 24 posts). Now Steve Baughman, who was trained as a lawyer, presents his case in his book, Cover-Up in the Kingdom: Phone Sex, Lies, And God's Great Apologist, Ravi Zacharias. It's a self-published book. Prometheus Books didn't want it. Neither did the board of Secular Nation want an article on it. Lots of Christian media outlets and magazines rejected a story on it as well. Apparently Zacharias became too rich and powerful to expose, for fear of reprisals and lawsuits. 

So Baughman published the story himself. The book reads like what you'd expect from a legal mind, complete with all the tweets, legal documents, emails (from Zacharias) along with several appendices. All of this evidence provides a solid case against the well-known influential apologist Ravi Zacharias. He's a habitual liar and deceiver. He has lied about his credentials and accomplishments for decades. He had carried on an illicit relationship with a married woman named Lori Anne Thompson. He also tried to bully her into not coming clean about their relationship to her husband by threatening suicide if she did. There's more. If you wish to read a more detailed primer to the book, Randal Rauser wrote one up, called, The Lying Apologist: A Review of Cover-Up in the Kingdom.

Rauser explains why he wrote the story when others didn't:

Baughman notes that Zacharias’ defenders have tended to dismiss his allegations, chalking them up to Baughman’s own hatred of God (4). While this is unfortunate, it is hardly surprising given the tribalistic nature of many Christians....

Over the last few weeks, several Christians have asked me why I want to review Cover-Up in the Kingdom. The question seems to be based on that same tribalism that I referenced above. In other words, don’t criticize our guys.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but a habitual liar and fabulist is not my guy. And it doesn’t stop with Zacharias. Perhaps the most disturbing lesson of Cover-Up in the Kingdom is that Zacharias has been enabled by the silence and complicity of many other Christians including apologists like John Lennox and Os Guinness, megachurch pastor Mac Brunson, professor Jeremy Begbie, and countless functionaries at institutions like RZIM and the CMA denomination.

I like to say that in Christian apologetics, good arguments are important but a winsome presentation is even more important. I’d now like to add that one’s moral integrity is most important of all. And moral integrity requires Christians to speak out and denounce Ravi Zacharias and his enablers. If we claim to follow He who is the Truth (John 14:6), how could we do anything less?

Good on Rauser! When it comes to this issue I'm in his tribe.

However, Rauser has his own faults here.

--He too has a problem in telling the truth, by writing a post where he falsely claimed Loftus admits Boghossian doesn’t care about truth. I did no such a thing. That post got me banned from commenting on his site.

--He too is a tribalist, in that he just has a different tribe, that's all (depending on the issue). He's not the conservative Zacharias is. Conservatives like Zacharias have largely ignored Rauser. So sometimes Rauser lashes out at them, down to such petty stuff as objecting how William Lane Craig treated his sidekick Kevin Harris in one podcast.

--He's also a hypocrite, in that he calls Zacharias out for lying but refuses to call out Jeff Lowder. That's because Lowder is in his tribe of people who take his empty rhetorical philosophical obfuscations seriously. Granted, Lowder's deceptions are not as many nor as flagrant, but they deserve to be exposed.

Patheos

Twitter

Let's paraphrase Rauser: "Lowder’s defenders have tended to dismiss Loftus's allegations" too, for which see these posts: An Open Letter to Jeffery Jay Lowder, followed later by a post exposing his dishonesty and hypocricy, then later defending my claim that Lowder has no right to claim higher credentials than he really has by calling himself a philosopher, when all he has is a BS in computer science. Of course, Lowder has banned me as well. Needless to say Lowder's silence about these accusations is just as effective, and smart, as his previous campaign to come across to the atheist/agnostic community as more informed and more important and credentialed than he really is.