The Shroud of Turin is a cloth approximately 14 feet long by 3 ½ feet wide, and bears an image of a man who seemed to have suffered the exact violence that was done to Jesus Christ at His crucifixion. The most intense scientific investigation of the Shroud was undertaken by the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) in 1978. These investigators found that the Shroud is unlike any other artifact the world has ever seen.

In his recent book, Christopher Hitchens makes the bold claim that “God is not great”, and claims that “religion poisons everything”. He is a skilled creative writer, and bends all of his creative ability into a long, slanderous, and emotionally charged mischaracterization of the Bible and Christianity. His misunderstandings of the Bible and Christian doctrines would be too many to list here, but I’d like to instead address the claim that “religion poisons everything”, and see whether or not the facts support it.

In his recent book "The God Delusion", Richard Dawkins asserts that God does not exist. Although Dawkins never actually makes anything resembling a cogent argument against the traditional reasons for believing in God in the book, somehow it spent some time on the bestseller list. If one is inclined to not believe in God, maybe this sort of material is attractive, but this intellectually lazy polemic is NOT logically sound, as philosopher William Lane Craig points out in the following article.

We’ve all had it happen; we pray for something, and it doesn’t come to pass. How can this be if Jesus promised that “whatever you ask in my name, I will do it” (John 14:13a)? Well, rather simply put, we must first determine if this verse was meant to be viewed in isolation, or rather to be viewed in conjunction with the entire counsel of God. The authors of the Bible were not 21st century philosophers or lawyers, parsing, mincing and condensing each statement until it reached stand-alone, existentialist perfection. On the contrary, Biblical authors did not necessarily consider each of their statements to be taken as thoroughly-developed and complete doctrines in and of themselves, but rather as key parts of a complete doctrine. Many of their statements are essentially partial, and need to be qualified with other Biblical statements on the same subject in order for us to properly discern God’s full counsel on the topic.

The literary technique used to describe both wisdom and folly in the book of Proverbs is called “personification” or “anthropomorphism”. Unfortunately, some occultists and others have tried to claim that the wisdom personification in this book is a description of 1) the Holy Spirit, or 2) a “goddess” (Sophia, Mary, Lilith, Eve, etc.). Are these good explanations? Let's take a look...