Sooooo true

TommyMertonHead from the Boar's Head Tavern:

I’m trying to find a metaphor to measure the difference between Wright and Mclaren.

If Wright had entered a meeting of the Jesus Seminar, he would emerge, covered in blood, carrying the heads of his adversaries in a sack.

If Mclaren had entered a meeting of the Jesus seminar, he would have emerged in lingerie, giggling.

Pot Calling the Kettle Black?

Here is James White making light of a debate between two Islamic college professors over whether or not the earth is flat, one of them making his arguments for its non-sphericity on the basis of verses from the Qur'an.

He's trying to make a valid point about the question of corrective mechanisms within the Islamic faith regarding interpretations of the Qur'an, and how under strict Sharia law a healthy process of correcting faulty interpretations that were held by early generations of Muslims probably would not exist.

However, it is quite funny, as I would chalk up his young-earth creationism to the same kind of misinterpretation of biblical passages, namely that a proper evangelical interpretation of the creation accounts of the Old and New Testaments requires us to hold to the "calendar-day" view and thus assert that the earth and the universe in its entirety must be on the order of several thousands of years old.

What's really funny here though is that his basic argument is that science shows us the earth is round, and as such either the Qur'an has been misinterpreted, or the Qur'an does teach this and it is just plain wrong. He says that many "Muslims are fully aware of the modern world" and would only laugh at the idea that the earth is flat. However, try to make the same argument regarding the age of the earth, and most young-earth creationists will immediately accuse you of putting "man's fallible methods" over the Word of God (completely forgetting the fact that there are such things as "man's fallible interpretations" of the Bible). One cannot have it both ways where one says in one place that a faulty interpretation is illuminated by a well-established scientific result and in another place you claim the opposite (though out of necessity it must also be shown that a variant interpretation is possible and proper on the basis of the text itself).

It's also quite ironic that he makes a reference to GPS systems as being part of the proof of the sphericity of the earth, because those same systems depend on the correctness of general relativity to work, and it is general relativity that lays the foundation for Big Bang cosmology, which is extremely well-supported by the evidence of science, including the measured expansion of the universe, measurements of the cosmic microwave background both in the nearby and far-away cosmos, and the abundances of the light elements, to name a few.

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann once said that it was "easier to believe in a flat earth than a young earth." While this was doubtlessly hyperbolic, I would chalk up both beliefs to the same kind of problem. Thankfully the Word of God teaches neither of these things.