pious eye site archive ⁽¹⁸¹⁾

Image: Aliens hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil, courtesy Aaron Logan (Creative Commons license). Heard of distributed computing? If you have, you’ve most likely heard about it in relation to the search for space aliens. Why people who believe life originated by chance are so exited about searching for extraterrestrial intelligence has never been entirely clear to me. Especially was it unclear to me when my professed agnosticism-sometimes-atheism…

Chester, Tim. Titus for You. The Good Book Company, 2014. Hardcover, 121 pages. ISBN 978-1-90991-961-7. Mostly, this book is very good. It is doctrinally reformed (“The Spirit gives the desire and the ability to respond to the gospel. Because God has made us alive, we hear the gospel and respond with faith” [15]; “God has done the choosing, so God will do the persuading” [17]) and does not try to evade widely…

In matters of formatting and citation, the Pious Eye site will generally follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, and Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 7th edition. Adherence will not be slavish, however, and readers may note consistent divergence from these standards in certain matters. For instance, the “15 November 2016” date format will be preferred over the “November 15, 2016” date format even when…

Shapira, Itzhak. The Return of the Kosher Pig: The Divine Messiah In Jewish Thought. Clarksville, MD: Lederer Books, 2013. xii+318 Pages. ISBN 978-1-936716-45-6. The author of The Return of the Kosher Pig (hereafter, Kosher Pig), Itzhak Shapira, is a Messianic [Jesus-accepting] Rabbi “born and raised in a traditional Sephardic Jewish home in Israel” who says that “he found the Messiah [Jesus] within the Hebrew writings,” meaning not just the Hebrew Bible but…

 Berding, Kenneth. Bible Revival: Recommitting Ourselves To One Book. Wooster, OH: Weaver Book Company, 2013. 121 pages, paperback. ISBN 978-0-9891671-3-0. Correcting deficiencies of the contemporary church has been the focus of a number of recent texts. Deficiencies found in need of correction have included a “gospel” that fails to properly emphasize repentance and tangible obedience as evidences of genuine conversion and failure of professors of the faith to commit themselves to a…

Washer, Paul. Gospel Assurance & Warnings. Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2014. ISBN 978-1-60178-294-6. Some years ago, perhaps, a man asked you, “If you died tonight, are you sure you'd go to heaven?” You couldn't answer “yes” but did indeed want to go to heaven, so you accepted the man's offer to tell you how you could be sure. You were told you needed to admit you were a sinner, needed to…

Gilson, Tom, and Carson Weitnauer, editors. True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8254-4338-1. Abridged versions of this review may be found on Amazon and Goodreads. Associated with such high-profile names in Christian apologetics as the Christian Apologetics Alliance and Ratio Christi, True Reason originated as an e-book response to the New Atheists' 24 March 2012 Reason Rally and is now reissued (with modifications)…

Not long ago, lack of reliable funding for automobile fuel had me visiting some churches a little closer to home than the one of which I'm officially a member. It also had me wishing that active involvement in a local church were not required by Scripture—but, then, my preference for solitude (or at least social anxiety) has always made “forsaking the assembling” (Hebrews 10:25) an especially appealing sin. One church I visited,…

Maoz, Baruch. Prophet on the Run: A Devotional Commentary on the Book of Jonah. Wapwallopen, PA: Shepherd Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1936908-844. If you're like me, you tend to avoid books labeled “devotional” because you've usually found that they lack gravitas, are comforting but not convicting, encouraging but not very instructive. Prophet on the Run is not that kind of book. Nontechnical, practical, and written in common language for “Mr. and Mrs. Anybody”…

No sooner had I recovered sufficiently from an illness to watch some news than I was greeted by a story highlighting once again the sorry state of our dieing culture. Members of the homosexual lobby (known in corrupt contemporary English as “gays”) apparently read GQ, since their (as always) loud and emotional condemnation of public statements unfriendly to their irrational and unbiblical worldview has gotten Phil Robertson, patriarch of the hugely popular…

About the Image: “The Wager” by David M. Hodges, created late 1990s, updated 2013. The version of this image I recovered recently from some old Zip disks dated to 11 September 1998. The late 1990s were the time when my skeptical agnosticism was consuming itself (as self-referentially incoherent thought systems always must if one refuses to stop analyzing and reflecting upon them; I once quipped during this time that, though Socrates had…

Re: abitwiser, “how the [expletive deleted] could Noah know with any” (posted 27 November 2013, accessed 28 November 2013), which rejects the Bible's flood narrative based on the belief that other persons than Noah should have been able to survive, since surely there must have been other people with boats. Although the remarks that follow are addressed to Craigslist (CL) user abitwiser (as “you”), I have posted them here rather than on…