Does the Bible condemn homosexuality?

This morning, somebody posted on a forum arguing that the Bible doesn't (or may not) condemn homosexuality. Here's a summary of his arguments:

1. The Old Testament is not applicable to Christians.
2. Homosexuality is an orientation, and people in Jesus' day had no concept of it, so they couldn't have forbidden it.
3. Nobody knows what Paul meant by "arsenokoites" in 1 Corinthians 6:9.
4. Romans 1 might be an interpolation.
5. Nobody in the NT but Paul said anything about it.

Here is how I responded.

There are a few things here I disagree about and some I'm not sure about.

First, you say the OT isn't relevant to Christians. I don't think that's true. It is true that some of the Mosaic laws are not applicable to Christians. But the OT is still full of moral principles that are applicable to Christians, and some of those moral principles are codified in the Mosaic law. For example, adultery is still a sin.

We can tell when the Mosaic law is talking about a moral principle that applies universally by looking at how God treats other nations. God never condemns other nations for violating the Sabbath, or for eating pork, or for wearing the wrong clothes or not planting their crops correctly. However, he does condemns other nations for violence and for their sexual practices.

So the real question is whether the condemnations of same sex relations in Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13 are limited to the Mosaic covenant or whether they codify universal moral principles. Leviticus 18:22 says that "You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination." This is one among many sexual prohibitions listed in chapter 18, and it explicitly forbids two males to have sex with each other. What we want to know is whether this prohibition was limited to the Mosaic law, which only applied to Jews living under the Mosaic covenant, or whether it captured a universal moral principle that applied outside of Israel.

The answer is found near the end of chapter 18. After listing all these various sexual prohibitions, it says in verses 24 and 25, "Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled. For the land has become defiled, therefore I have brought its punishment upon it, so the land has spewed out its inhabitants." So clearly, God judged other nations for engaging in these sexual practices, including men having sex with men. That means the prohibition isn't limited to those under the Mosaic covenant. It's a universal moral crime, and that means it applies just as much to Christians as it does to Jews under the Mosaic covenant.

You say there's no mention of homosexuality in the Bible, that homosexuality is an orientation, and that people in Jesus' day had no concept of it. I don't know if all of this is correct. You may be right that homosexuality is never spoken of as an orientation in the Bible, but I don't see why the word, "homosexuality," must be restricted to an orientation. Why can't it also refer to behavior? Is this just a quibbling over semantics? As far as whether people in Jesus' day had any concept of homosexuality as an orientation, I doubt you're correct. We know that people in Jesus' day did form long term homosexual relationships¹, and if homosexuality is just as inevitable a part of the human population then as it is now, we should expect that a certain portion of the population would be gay. It seems doubtful that nobody would notice.

Besides that, any behavior has an underlying desire. You see this theme throughout the Bible. For example, Jesus said, "The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good; and the evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart" (Luke 6:45). So in Jesus' view, your behavior arises out of what is in your heart, i.e. all of your desires and preferences. So if somebody were observed to engage in same sex relationships (especially if done exclusively), then the natural conclusion any Christian would draw was that the person had a preference for same sex relationships. That is essentially how you are defining homosexuality. Maybe they didn't have a word for the preference, but they certainly must've had a concept of the orientation.

You say that nobody knows what arsenokoites means because Paul invented the word. The word is also used in the Sibylline Oracles, which might predate Paul, but you're right at least that Paul was one of the first people to use the word. But I think you're mistaken to say that we have no idea what Paul meant by it. It's easy to see that it's a compound word between arsen (male) and koites (bed, or to lay, or have sex with). Both of these words are used in the two passages that condemn same sex male relations in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. These words are found right beside each other in the Septuagint translation of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. They're used right next to each other in 20:13.

18:22 καὶ μετά ἄρσενος οὐ κοιμηθήσῃ κοίτην γυναικείαν, βέλυγμα γάρ ἐστι.

20:13 καὶ ὃς ἂν κοιμηθῇ μετά ἄρσενος κοίτην γυναικός, βδέλυγμα ἐποίησαν ἀμφότεροι· θανάτῳ θανατούσθωσαν, ἔνοχοί εἰσιν.

Anybody familiar with these passages would've noticed right away that Paul was alluding to these passages, and it would've been clear what he was referring to. Even without these passages, it would've been clear. "Koites" is so commonly understood in Greek to mean "sex," that we even use it in English to refer to sex. So "male sex" is just as good a literal translation as "male bed," and it would refer to somebody who has sex with males.

Some scholars think the malekoi and arsenokoitai refer to the active and passive members of a same sex union between two males. The malekoi was the passive partner, and the arsenokoitai was the active partner. We just don't have an English word for malekoi, which is why you get so many differences in English translations.

You say that Romans 1:26-27 may have been an interpolation. I've never heard that. Is this speculation, or is there a textual variant involved? We have lots of old copies of Romans. Do any of them lack this passage? Romans is one of the undisputed letters of Paul, and it is typically the standard by which other letters attributed to Paul are judged to be authentic or inauthentic. So I would think you'd need a pretty good argument to dismiss this passage.

You say that nobody but Paul talked about same sex relationships. You might be right that they didn't talk about it explicitly the way Paul did, but there are at least three passages where Jesus talked about it implicitly. One passage is in Matthew 5 where Jesus said he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. The law includes Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, so Jesus was implicitly affirming these prohibitions against same sex relationships.

In Matthew 19, Jesus is confronted by some Pharisees about Moses allowing divorce. Jesus made an argument that God's original intention for marriage was for it to be permanent. His argument was based on how God originally made Adam and Eve. He said, "Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?" Since Jesus grounded his argument in Adam and Eve being made male and female and becoming one flesh, this would not only rule out divorce, but it would also rule out same sex unions because God originally made them male and female to form a complimentary pair. That was God's original intention for marriage. So Jesus was implicitly condemning same sex unions in this passage, too.

There's a third passage, but I can't remember it.

NOTES

1. Robert Gagnon lists a few examples in this book review.

A quick and dirty argument for moral realism

Somebody on the internet challenged Christians to explain why they know morality but atheists don't. His question was based on a misunderstanding about the moral argument for God. Whereas the moral argument for God makes an ontological statement about morality and its grounding, the questioner took it to be an epistemological statement. In my response, I briefly explained the distinction between the ontological and epistemological questions of morality. Then I explained that concerning the epistemological question, atheists and Christians are mostly in the same boat. Here's my response:

I think that moral ontology and moral epistemology are distinct things. What makes something true and how we know that something is true are two different things.

What Christianity provides that atheism doesn't is an ontological foundation for objective morals. But epistemologically, we are all on the same footing.

Most of what we know to be right or wrong are conclusion we draw from broader moral principles. We deduce what we should do in specific circumstances given certain virtues, values, and principles that we accept. These deductions require the use of the same laws of logic that atheists and Christians all know about.

But our reasoning can only go so far. If I say that such and such is wrong, then you ask me, "Why is it wrong?" I'll give you an argument. One of the premises in my argument will be another moral principle. So you can ask me again why I think that moral principle is true, and I may give you another argument with yet another moral premise, etc. But we can't keep doing this forever or else we'll have an infinite regress and no real moral principles. So there must be a foundation of moral principles that can't be reduced any further. The question then becomes how we know those moral principles since it isn't on the basis of deducing them from prior principles.

In this case, I think we know morality in the same way that we know the external world, the uniformity of nature, and the past. The external world could be an illusion since all perception happens solely in the mind. But we all have this natural instinct to affirm that what we perceive is real, and we hold on to this natural inclination to trust our senses until we have good reason to think we're mistaken. There are times when our senses deceive us, like when we have dreams and hallucinations or when we see illusions or mirages. But these misfires do not prevent us from believing, fairly strongly, that in general, our senses are giving us true information about an external world that actually exists. People who deny this are just kidding themselves.

The same sort of things is true about the past. It's possible we were all created five minutes ago complete with memories of things that never happened. But just because it's possible doesn't mean it's reasonable to believe. And sometimes our memories fail us. We remember things wrong, we forget things altogether, and sometimes we "remember" things that didn't even happen. But none of these mistakes we make undermine the general reliability of our memories, so we all believe that there was a past that actually happened in spite of the fact that our intuitive knowledge of the past is fallible.

The uniformity of nature is a necessary assumption for us to learn anything from experience. An infant can learn that "fire is hot" just by experiencing it. He only has to stick his finger in the candle one or two times before he's convinced that he'll burn his finger if he does it again. Even from an early age, we have this built in assumption that the future will resemble the past or that what we experience can be extrapolated to what we do not experience. Science would not be possible without this principle because without the principle, nothing that happens in the lab would have any relevance to the world outside the lab. Nothing that was observed yesterday would have any bearing on what we should expect tomorrow. Even animals learn by experience. This principle can't be proved. The only way you might try to prove it is by reasoning that since it has always yielded true information in the past, it will probably continue to do so in the future. But that is to assume the very thing under question, so it's a circular argument and doesn't prove anything. We sometimes make mistakes when we apply the uniformity of nature. This happens when we make hasty generalizations. But the fact that we can make mistakes when applying the principle doesn't undermine our belief in the principle.

I could go on to mention other things we know in a similar manner. There are some items of knowledge that are just hardwired into us. We were designed to have this knowledge. None of these things can be proved, and we do sometimes make mistakes regarding these things. We see things that aren't there, remember things wrongly, and make hasty generalizations. But we are still justified in believing in the past, the external world, and the uniformity of nature.

I think morality is known in the same way. We all know that there's a difference between right and wrong. We may disagree on the content of those moral principles because we make mistakes when reasoning from broad principles to specific circumstances. Or we may make mistakes in the same way we make mistakes when trusting our senses, our memories, or our ability to make generalizations, but this doesn't undermine our knowledge that there is a difference between right and wrong or that our ability to identify instances of rights and wrongs in a generally reliable way.

Since morality is hardwired into atheists just as much as Christians, we are on the same epistemological footing. If we weren't, then Christians and atheist would never be able to have meaningful debates with each other on moral issues. But we have debates all the time.

Each of us struggles sometimes with moral issues. We're struggling to figure out the right course of actions. Well, moral decision making would not be difficult if we didn't have an innate sense of morality. It is because we know innately that there are correct answers to moral questions that we struggle so much to find them. Sometimes moral decision making is difficult because there are moral dilemmas in which more than one moral value comes into play. The value of courage might run against the value of life in some scenarios, and we have to decide which one is more important. Two people can agree that two character traits are both virtues but disagree on which one is the greater virtue. And as a consequence, they'll solve the moral dilemma differently.

The only advantage Christians have over atheists when it comes to solving difficult moral problems is that Christians have an additional source of guidance--the Bible. If the Bible is God's revelation to man, then however difficult it may be to understand, it gives us at least something else to go on.

Further reading

Here's another quick and dirty style post I made on moral realism: "Are moral realists delusional?"

Here's my opening statement in a debate I had on moral relativism in which I defended moral realism using a similar argument as above: "All morality is relative"

Here's my opening in another debate on morality where I defended moral realism. I modify my presentation almost every time I make this argument just to keep it fresh or emphasize a particular point or to make clear what wasn't clear in a different presentation, but this was one of my earliest attempts: "Morality debate, part 1"

This is an excerpt from a dialogue I had with a guy in the comment section of another blog in which I defended moral realism: "My moral epistemology"

I think; therefore, I am

I see it sometimes said on the internet that the only thing we can know is that we exist, and this is based on the cogito. But if you think about it, one would have to know a handful of things in order to justify belief in one's own existence. The cogito, after all, is an argument. The conclusion is that "I am," but that conclusion is drawn from premises. The argument goes something like this:

1. If I think, then I exist.
2. I think.
3. Therefore, I exist.

Or, one could begin with the premise that, "If I did not exist, then I would not think," which is logically equivalent to the first premise. One could just as well begin with the premise that "All thinking things exist" or "Whatever thinks, exists." These variations amount to the same thing.

Since that is basically the line of reasoning, there are three things one must first know before drawing the conclusion that they exist. They would have to know the truth of the first premise, the truth of the second premise, and that the conclusion follows from the two premises.

If one knows that they exist based on the cogito, then they ought to admit that their existence isn't the only thing they know. They also know three other things.

The Healthywage app and losing weight

I was a skinny kid all the way up to my mid-30's when my metabolism slowed down. Whenever people would ask me what my secret was for being so skinny, I would say, "I eat as much as I can as often as I can," and that was the truth. When my metabolism slowed down, I kept up this habit. Whenever I sat down to a meal, especially if it was a good meal, I didn't feel satisfied until I was about to pop. If I didn't feel like I needed to be rolled out of there, it would make me feel like I was wasting food or wasting the opportunity to enjoy good food. Consequently, I got fat.

Through most of my 20's and early 30's, I weighed somewhere around 155 lbs. Then in my late thirties, when I got tired of being fat and out of shape, I decided to start losing weight and eating healthy. I bought a scale and was shocked to find that I weighed 186 lbs. A few months after I started lifting weights and eating healthy, I started doing triathlons. My weight got down to 170 lbs before I quit due to knee problems and frustration, and my weight gradually creeped back up.

Over the last two years (I'm 45 now), things got out of hand. I got fat, and my health started getting worse (see, for example, my post on GERD). I tried intermittent fasting, and cutting out soft drinks, and I lost weight pretty effortlessly, but it would taper off, and I'd start drinking soft drinks again.

One day, I was in the car with my daughter, and I said, "You know, losing weight would be so much easier if I had some incentive, like if somebody gave me a dare or something." Then she told me about this app you can get for your iPhone called Healthywage. With Healthywage, you can make a bet to lose a certain amount of weight in a given time. The incentive is that if you don't lose the weight, you lose your money, but if you do lose the weight, you get your money back with some extra. I don't know how my skinny daughter knew about such a thing, but I was glad she did because that was exactly the sort of incentive I needed.

I downloaded Healthywage and did one of their challenges for three months for a one time payment of $60. I did my first weigh in, and I was at 208 lbs. I'm pretty sure that's the fattest I've ever been. I had to lose 6% of my weight within 3 months. When I succeeded, I got about $80 back. That extra $20 was enough to get a pizza, but instead, I decided to do another challenge. This time, I did a challenge for $100 to lose another 6% in three months. This one didn't go as smoothly in the beginning. The first one was so easy, I didn't really put in any effort into the second one until the time started getting short and I began to worry I wouldn't pull it off. But I buckled down, and now it looks like I'm going to be able to meet my goal. My goal this time around is 184.6 lbs. You're probably thinking the math doesn't work out, but that's only because after my first challenge, I gained a few pound before starting the second challenge. Anyway, I'm now down to 183 lbs with a week and a half left to go. I'm going to do my final weigh in this Wednesday, though, so I can start eating the candy I've been socking away for Halloween.

That's my story. Now, I want to tell you specifically how I've been losing weight and why I think it's been pretty easy. I also want to tell you more about how Healthywage works.

First, let's talk about Healthywage. Healthywage will give you mutltiple challenges you can sign up for. Most of them involve paying $60 to lose 6% of your weight within three months, but there are other challenges. When you join one of these challenges, other people join it, too. All of their money is pooled together into a pot. At the end of the challenge, that pot is divided between everybody who met the challenge. Any extra you get is due to those who did not meet the challenge. Of course Healthwage also gets their cut from the pot. I don't remember the percentage, but if you meet the challenge, you are guaranteed to at least get your money back. If everybody meets the challenge (which they never do), then Healthywage will refund everybody's money and take no profit for themselves.

You can also do personalized challenges where you're not in a pool with other people. You agree to pay a certain amount of money every month, and you decide how many months you want the challenge to last and how much weight you want to lose. They calculate what your reward will be at the end of it if you meet your challenge.

I should warn you that Healthywage is not entirely honest. They're very misleading in their ads. They'll say that so and so won $10,000. What that actually means is that they contributed $950 a month for ten to twelves months, and they got anywhere from $0 to $500 back. There's a calculator where you can play with the numbers, and it'll estimate how much you'll get if you meet your goal. So just be aware. From what I've seen, the most profit you can make per challenge is around $50. Still, that's enough for a pizza party.

You can maximize your winnings by joining more than one challenge at a time. I think you can do as many as ten challenges at a time.

There are two official weigh-ins you have to do--one at the beginning and one at the end. To do the weigh in, you have to record a video clip of yourself doing the weigh-in and showing the scale and everything. There are instructions on the app and the web page explaining how to do the video. It's not hard. During the challenge, you can do unofficial weigh-ins if you want. I always do mine once a week. This helps you keep track of your progress and determine whether you're on schedule or not. You can also compare your standing with other people.

Now, let me tell you how I've been losing weight. I started intermittent fasting a little over a year and a half ago. For me, intermittent fasting has involved skipping breakfast and sometimes delaying lunch until 1 or 2 pm. This was kind of hard in the beginning, but I've discovered that being hungry is sometimes a matter of what your body is used to and what it expects than merely a lack of food. Your body can be trained to expect food at certain times and to complain when it doesn't get it. Skipping breakfast was difficult in the beginning, but now I don't even think about it. I never get hungry in the mornings. Sometimes, I'll have a donut or a waffle if I'm hanging out with somebody else, though. One delicious breakfast snack once a blue moon doesn't throw me off.

If you find it difficult to skip breakfast, there's another strategy you can use. If instead of having a cinnamon roll, French toast, or bagel for breakfast, you instead have an egg or two, it will fill you up quicker, with less calories, and prevent you from getting hungry longer. So have eggs if you must have breakfast. Another strategy is to delay breakfast for an hour or two for a while. Then delay it longer. Keep doing this until you're not eating until noon or later.

There's a ton of information about intermittent fasting on the internet, so I won't go into the technical details about why it works. It has to do with insulin, though.

I have cut out soft drinks off and on over the years. Soft drinks--especially Dr. Pepper--are highly addictive. They're hard to quit, but if you can muscle your way through it for about two weeks, the craving will go away. I always get caffein withdrawal headaches when I quit Dr. Crack, but BC Powder is the most effective way to make that go away. Just pour a little packet of BC Powder into half a glass of water, swirl it around, and drink it. It isn't pleasant to drink, but the headache will go away within 30 minutes. That's usually all it takes for me to get over with the withdrawal.

In fact, sugar is highly addictive in any food, but if you can go a certain amount of time without sugar, the craving goes away. I've heard anything from ten days to twenty days. But it's hard to cut out sugar because it's in everything. I never knew how much sugar was in my food until I tried to cut it out. Even eating too much fruit can feed the addiction. But it's in pretty much all processed food. If you buy your food in a box, it almost certainly has sugar in it. If you limit your grocery shopping to the outer walls of the grocery store, that's where most of the healthy food is located.

Some people think if they drink a smoothy every morning that they are eating healthy because smoothies have so many fruits and vitamins. But the truth is, smoothies are very fattening and full of sugar. You should make it your policy to not drink your calories at all. Drink only water and eat your calories. If you're an athlete, you'll need to get your electrolytes somehow, so I'll cut you some slack, but for the rest of us, drink only water. If you want to have fruit, then eat solid fruit. Don't drink it. I do recommend eating apples from time to time. They're great for your digestion.

In the beginning, I lost weight quickly, but then it plateaued. My next steps was to cut out almost all sugar from my diet. This was very hard for the first few days, but then it got easy. This also helped me lose a lot of weight. At one point, I seriously cut down on my carbs. That was very hard. I've discovered through reading and experience that when you eat a lot of bread, it just makes you crave food all the more. But when you cut it out, the cravings go away.

Things got difficult when I started a new hobby of making home made pizza a few months ago. So, I just switched strategies. I gave up the habit of over eating at every meal. What I do now is eat two slices of pizza, then wait. I'll always crave a third slice, but if I wait ten or twenty minutes, I'll start feeling like I've had a full meal, and I don't need that third slice.

Ideally, I wouldn't eat pizza, but since I love making it about as much as I love eating it, I haven't cut it out. I also make baguettes sometimes. :-(

Losing weight isn't all about a life of deprivation, though. There are delicious foods you can eat and still lose weight. One strategy is to eat a diet of chicken and watermelon. Watermelon fills you up without a lot of calories. Some people even do the "watermelon diet" where watermelon is all you eat. But you need protein, so you should eat chicken, too. Protein helps you feel full and satisfied. Plus, it's necessary to live. You can eat all the vegetables you want and not worry about anything.

Let me share a few recipes that are delicious, healthy, and easy to make. First, there's pan roasted chicken. Here's a video showing three ways to cook a chicken breast, including pan roasted. Of these, pan roasting is my favourite because it creates this nice crust on the outside. Oven roasting is easier, but it doesn't produce that crust, so I prefer pan roasting. You can season it with only salt and pepper, and it'll be delicious. I usually pan roast three chicken breasts at a time. First, I'll flatten them with a mallet, which makes them cook more evenly. Then I'll season one with salt and pepper, then next with salt, pepper, garlic, and oregano, and the third with fajita seasoning. I'll eat one that day and put the rest in Tupperware for later.

The next is oven roasted broccoli and/or asparagus. I put the broccoli or asparagus in a bowl, pour some olive oil in there, then some salt and pepper. I mix that up, then put it on a cookie sheet and bake it in the oven at 350 or 400ºF for around ten minutes. You could also just lay it on the cookie sheet and drizzle the olive oil over it, then sprinkle salt and pepper. You don't have to mix it up in the bowl. I do it that way because it makes it easier to get the olive oil evenly coated all over everything. When it's done cooking, you can squeeze some lemon juice over it, and it adds some flavor. This is so much easier and more delicious than steaming your vegetables, which I used to do all the time. I'm ashamed to admit that I steamed vegetables for a girlfriend, and as you can probably guess, we are no longer together.

Sometimes, I make salads instead of broccoli or asparagus. My salads are simple. I buy one of the 50/50 mix blends of greens (e.g. spinach and arugula or spring mix and baby spinach). I put a handful in a salad bowl, add some sliced cucumber, tomato, and avocado, and sometimes a little bit of sunflower seeds, shelled of course. I add a balsamic vinaigrette, mix it up, and eat it. It's delicious and easy to make.

I think that's it. Let me summarize my weight loss strategy. I only eat between the hours of noon and 8 pm. Sometimes I'll delay eating until 2 pm or later. Sometimes I'll eat a little later than 8 pm. If I snack, it'll be raw carrots. I eat (or aim to eat) roasted chicken, roasted broccoli or asparagus, salad, and watermelon (at least when I'm being good). Of course, I eat pizza, too, but I don't recommend it for weight loss. Don't over eat. Eat a small meal, and just wait ten or twenty minutes. Chances are, you'll stop being hungry. Apparently, it takes a little time for your stomach to tell your brain that you've had enough. If you don't give it that time, you'll end up eating more than you needed to be satisfied.

Some strategies for avoiding hunger include drinking black coffee, drinking lots of water, or eating eggs. Boiled eggs are best, but I frequently scramble eggs or even make omelets.

If you eat like I eat, you'll rarely get hungry. Cutting out bread, pasta, soft drinks, and candy will go a long way toward suppressing your appetite. Eating a lot of bread and pasta just makes you crave food all the time. If you can cut those things out, you'll find weight loss to be almost effortless. Again, it's hard to cut them out in the beginning, but if you just muscle your way through it for a week or two, the cravings will go away, and you'll be fine.

If you drastically change your diet in the ways I suggested, the weight will just fall off of you in the beginning, but it will slow down after a while. If you plateau at some point, and you're still fat, then you'll just have to do something more drastic. There's a ton of information on the internet, and it's hard to tell what's credible and what isn't. But let me share an article with you that is a meta-study. It's a survey of other studies on the health benefits of fasting--particularly intermittent fasting. It's called Impact of Intermittent Fasting On Health and Disease Processes by Mark P. Mattsona, Valter D. Longoc, and Michelle Harvie. I'm linking to this article because it links to multiple other articles.

I also recommend going to YouTube and searching, "insulin," "insulin resistance," "insulin fasting," "fat insulin" "glucose insulin," and related things. There's a lot of videos that explain the mechanisms of fat storage, fat burning, weight gain, weight loss, etc. It's interesting stuff.

Oh yeah, one more thing. If you're a sedentary person, all you really need to do is walk 30 minutes a day. You don't have to join a gym or do anything too hard. Here's a video of a woman explaining why walking is even better than running for weight loss. It seems counter-intuitive, but she's pretty, so she must be right. Just walking 30 minute a day will do wonders for your health. It's not just your physical health either. It's great for your emotions and your mental clarity, too.

Between cardio and weight lifting, I think weight lifting is better for weight loss. The reason is because when you lift weights, you continue to burn calories from the work out for as long as your muscles are repairing themselves. Plus, the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism will be because you need extra energy to maintain that muscle mass. If you don't want to go to a gym, and you're not a work out nut, then just do push ups. Push ups are one of the best all purpose work outs you can do. I recommend doing as many push ups as you can, resting a minute or two, then doing as many as you can again, resting a minute or two, then doing as many as you can a third time. Do that every other day or so. Burpees might be even better, but I hate doing burpees, so screw that.

Disclaimer: I have no expertise in health, fitness, biology, or anything related. This is all based on personal experience and internet browsing. Also, there's no guarantee you'll get the same results as me using the same methods. Everybody is physically and psychologically different.

Two approaches to making a case for Christianity

There are two ways that one might make a full case for the truth of Christianity. There are more, but I'm only concerned with two in this post. One way is a gradualist approach where you inch your way to the final conclusion in small increments. You start off making broad claims, but as you go along, you narrow things down to the specific claims of Christianity. For example, you might start off by making the case that the natural world isn't all that exists. Then you argue for the existence of the god of the philosophers or some general theism. Then you argue that Jesus was the messiah and that he rose from the dead. You could go on to make theological arguments about how salvation works.

Another way is to jump to the end. You could just make an historical argument that Jesus claimed to be the messiah, then rose from the dead. That would prove Christianity with all of its baggage. You'd get God, supernaturalism, morality, etc. thrown in.

That second method might be quicker and more to the point, but I think the gradualist approach is better. The reason is because of how noetic structures work and how people grapple with new information.

A noetic structure is the sum total of all of your beliefs. Everything you think is true is part of your noetic structure. Beliefs are logically connected to each other. For example, the belief that "immaterial souls exist" is logically connected to the belief that "the natural world is not all that exists." It would be a contradiction to claim to believe in immaterial souls while, at the same time, believing that the natural world is all that exists.

Since beliefs are connected in this way, it's nearly impossible to change your belief about one thing without having to also change your beliefs about a number of other things. If you hold all those other beliefs for what seem to you to be good reasons, then it's going to be very hard for you to change your belief about the one thing. The fewer adjustments you have to make in your noetic structure in order to accommodate some new piece of information, the easier it will be for you to accept the new information as true.

This also depends on how strongly you hold those other beliefs. The more strongly you hold the beliefs that require adjustment, the harder it will be for you to change your mind about anything that requires adjusting those strongly held beliefs.

All of us filter our experiences through our noetic structure. We assess new information in light of what we already know and believe. When we are exposed to information that is inconsistent with what we already believe, we resist. We have some initial skepticism about it. If our current beliefs are strong enough, that may result in us rejecting the new information as false. If the new information is sufficiently compelling, then we make the necessary adjustments in our noetic structure to accommodate it, and we end up changing our minds.

This is why two people can look at the same information or evidence and come to different conclusions. It isn't necessarily because one is being reasonable and the other is being stubborn. It's because each of them is trying to be consistent. We have a natural tendency to want our entire noetic structure to be coherent.

We aren't always successful, though. Probably each of us has beliefs that are inconsistent with each other. We often don't notice it because we aren't thinking about everything at once. Every now and then, we'll notice an inconsistency in our noetic structure, and this will lead to internal intellectual wrestling match, trying to smooth it all out and make it consistent. If the problem is too difficult to reconcile, we'll put it on the back burner and go make a knife. Sometimes we'll come up with a resolution resulting in a change of mind.

We aren't perfect rational machines, though. Our desires, emotions, and biases also influence how strongly we hold on to our beliefs and resist change. If there's something we don't want to be true, we'll look for reasons to think it isn't in order to satisfy our desire for it to be false by convincing ourselves that it isn't. All we have to do is gather together as many teachers as we can who will tell us what our itching ears want to hear. If we so much as surround ourselves with people who hold the desired belief and avoid those who don't, it becomes easier for us to keep that desired belief.

With all of that in mind, the gradualist approach to making a case for Christianity should work better. If you jump straight to the case for the resurrection of Jesus, you are making a lot of demands on your listener's noetic structure. To accept that Jesus rose from the dead, they've got to make a lot of adjustments to their noetic structure to accommodate that belief. That may be very difficult for them to do.

But if you can convince them that there's at least a god of the philosophers first, or that Judaism is reasonable first, then it will be much easier for them to accommodate the resurrection of Jesus into their noetic structure. It would require fewer adjustments. And belief in God would come easier to a person who already believes in a supernatural realm than if they think the natural world is all that exists.

There are more steps in a gradual case for Christianity, but each step is smaller and easier to make. It's similar to the frog in boiling water analogy.

You might wonder how I reconcile all of this with my Calvinism, particularly with the doctrines of total depravity and irresistible grace. I addressed this issue in my posts, "Calvinism and Evangelism," "Does Calvinism render apologetics superfluous?," and "The persuasive power of arguments in a presuppositional apologetic."