Defending The Faith

 Christopher Hitchens titles this chapter "A Short Digression On The Pig; or Why Heaven Hates Ham"and its not quite clear why this chapter was written. It seems random. Since this chapter is really short, my response will be brief. He starts the chapter by complaining about how Islam and Judaism doesn't eat pork, as if that effects him in any way, and then on page 38, he says:                           "I hope that you have guessed by now what we know in any case---that this fine beast is one of our fairly close cousins. It shares a great deal of our DNA, and there have lately been welcome transplants of skin, heart valves, and kidneys from pigs to humans--- If--which I heartily trust does not happen-- a new Dr. Moreau could corrupt recent advances in cloning and create a hybrid, a 'pig-man' is widely feared as the most probable outcome"  I would like to note that there is absolutely zero evidence that we are related to pigs in any such way. The fact tha

 Christopher Hitchens begins this chapter with a quote pretty much sums up what the reader is to expect from this chapter. The quote is by someone named Lucretius and it says:                               "To such heights of evil are men driven by religion."  As some of you may already tell, the rest of this chapter is going to be one monumental emotional appeal fallacy. What is an emotional appeal fallacy? Well, according to lumenlearning.com, an emotional appeal fallacy is "a logical fallacy, whereby a debater attempts to win an argument by trying to get an emotional reaction out of the opponent and audience". Reading this chapter has reminded me of something Dr. William Lane Craig has said before:                              "The span of books by the New Atheists are not sophisticated philosophical books, but instead are merely angry diatribes against religion".  I happen to agree with Dr. Craig's assessment. Hitchens starts off by giving us a tho

 Christopher Hitchens opens up the chapter by guilt-tripping his audience by telling them that if they are going to try to "identify the sins and deformities" that caused him to write this book, then they will be "defiling the memory of a good, sincere, simple  woman of stable and decent faith named Mrs. Jean Watts". Well, no offense to Mrs. Watts, but I honestly do not care about her memory. However, for the sake of honoring my Lord I will refrain from trying to point out Mr. Hitchens' "sins and deformities". I will just stick to critiquing his arguments that he makes in this chapter. Now, before I continue I do want to say that I am not neutral nor do I pretend to be neutral. I have a specific perspective (which you would know if you read my first blog). There is no such thing as neutrality anyway. No one is truly neutral and if someone tells you they are then they are either ignorant or intentionally being dishonest.  Anyways, so Hitchens goes on to

 Welcome to Defending The Faith Apologetics Blog.  My name is David Lee Chu Sarchet and I am thankful to the Lord that you are reading this right now. I hope and pray that you find this edifying to you and glorifying to God. For my first blog post I will be explaining what my doctrinal beliefs are and then in later posts I will be starting a blog series where I critique Christopher Hitchens' book "God is not great: How religion poisons everything". This post will be split up into seven parts: Doctrines of Grace, Apologetics, Cessationism, Creation, Mental Illness, the Fall, and Marriage. I sincerely hope you enjoy reading this and thank you very much for giving me your time,  Part 1: Doctrines of Grace  ______________________ The doctrines of grace also go by the names of Calvinism and Reformed Theology. Although, I do prefer to use the name doctrines of grace because Calvinism comes with certain expectations that non-reformed Christians pin on you when you tell them you