Sample clip of my debate with an
atheist on the issue of morality.
Find the whole debate at this link

Sam Harris, Bart Ehrman, Cliff Walker, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, Beechbum on stoning your own little children to death

Indeed, these are the go to guys if you want to learn how to manipulate your audience’s emotions by misusing, misinterpreting, misapplying, mishandling and misunderstanding the Bible’s contents, concepts and contexts and thereby take texts out of context to make pretexts for prooftexts.

Sam Harris, Bart Ehrman, Cliff Walker, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, Beechbum and many, many, many other atheists are quite pleased to loudly and proudly admit—unbeknownst to them—that they are ignorant (literally, lacking knowledge—and I am being kind in referring to them as ignorant as the alternative is that they are not ignorant but are manipulators) in repeatedly repeating an ubiquitously promulgated well-within-the-box-atheist-group-think-talking-point:

Bart Ehrman, “If you disobey your parents you’re supposed to be stoned to death.”

Beechbum notes, “smarting off to ones parents is a capital crime in the ten commandments, punishable by death.”1

Richard Dawkins refers to “disobedient children.”2

Sam Harris refers to children who “talk back to us.”3

Michael Shermer, “disobedient children are supposed to be stoned to death.”4

Cliff Walker states “Execute stubborn kids” 5 and manipulates the text via an ellipses points filled conveniently selective quotation.

Considering the immediate and greater context we note that the Bible refers to stubborn, rebellious, disobedient, gluttonous, drunkards who “smiteth” and curse their parents and have already been chastened (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9 and Deuteronomy 21:18)—in fact, none of these texts makes any reference to a “child” or to “children.”

Thus, we are not dealing with little Timmy who refuses to put his toys away or says, “No!” to mommy and daddy. Rather, the references are not to a little child but to someone who is stubborn in their rebellious, disobedience and is violently drunk to the point that they beat up their very own parents, lives off of their hard work in a gluttonous manner, then curses them, and has already been chastened. Also, in order to carry out a stoning there had to be at least two eyewitnesses. Lastly, this law applies to the Hebrews / Israelites / Jews who lived millennia ago under God’s theocratic Kingdom; this is the sort of law according to which they agreed to live.

1. 2. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006), pp. 249-250
3. Sam Harris, The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos also Sam Harris, Sam Harris Takes On the Muslim Cartoon Controversy and His Critics
4. at t=50:33 into his debate with Ken Hovind
5. Positive Atheism - Cliff Walker : Weak Bible Week Poster

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Bart Ehrman is not an atheist

Anonymous — Mon, 05/23/2011 - 2:19am

I am fighting the urge to accuse you of intentionally misrepresenting facts to mislead or manipulate your audience. I don't know you at all, so I will refrain from doing to you what you have done to Dr. Ehrman (a renowned Biblical scholar who I assume you've never had the pleasure of meeting), but I must take issue with your decision to lump him in with Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and others. Bart Ehrman no longer self-identifies as an evangelical Christian, but to my knowledge he has never claimed to be an atheist, and he has for many years referred to himself as "agnostic." As an example:

"On the far left of that are the new atheists, people like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, who are really embracing atheism and are attacking religion," Ehrman says. "I'm not in that camp, because I'm not opposed to religion and I'm not trying to convert people to atheism. I'm not an atheist myself."
http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/bart-ehrman-discusses-faith-and-revisio...

Did you label Ehrman an atheist because you have a unique and divine ability to see what is truly in a man's heart, or because you reject the plain meaning of the word "atheist?" Did you use that word carelessly? Otherwise, it would appear that you owe your readers and Dr. Ehrman an apology for intentionally misrepresenting facts to manipulate and mislead your audience.

I too consider myself ignorant (and an agnostic, though definitely not an atheist), yet I seem to remember reading somewhere that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Is that in the New Testament? Or am I confusing that with Jesus's words to the crowd gathered to condemn a woman accused of adultery, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?" That was always one of my favorite Bible stories, and it still is, but Bart Ehrman has made a very compelling, well-documented case that this story is a fabrication, inserted by a transcriber in the 3rd Century, a moment in human history when most Christians were illiterate and nobody had access to a printing press.

The lesson I take from Ehrman's scholarship and from the many desperate attempts to discredit him or distort his work is this: our understanding of the divine and of the word of God is imperfect, because humans are by nature imperfect. A measure of humility should accompany any attempt to declare what "the Bible says."

@JohnLasater