The other bits...

Friday morning I attended the @TulsaChamber ’s legislative breakfast. Several Oklahoma state legislators were in attendance to report on “how things went” this past session. Everybody reports that this was the toughest, worst legislative session they’ve ever been in. Of course the budget that passed is fairly terrible on the education front and perhaps not even legal. The bright spot was that a lot of my fellow Republicans seem to be waking up that we have a real Revenue problem, and it’s no longer taboo to say that. But the darkest moment for me was when a certain representative in the crowd in his comments said “You cannot tax your way to prosperity.” This is cute quip, quoting Winston Churchill, one of my favorite fellows to quote, and this is a quote I agree with up to a point. But the troubling part is that you could tell this particular legislator was completely black and white on this issue, such that even as his state’s education system is in financial flames, he is un...

Dr. Bart Ehrman and Dr. Michael Licona had an interesting debate in 2009 on the topic "Can Historians Prove Jesus Rose from the Dead?" Here's a link to the video and some comments. Dr. Ehrman's channel  /  Dr. Licona's channel Since they called each other "Bart" and "Mike", I'll take liberties and do the same. In this debate, Mike presented 3 Historical "Facts", and then used 4 accepted methods of Historical Analysis to propose that the most reasonable, historical conclusion to draw from these facts is that Jesus, in fact, was Resurrected. From there, Bart counters that the Resurrection can not be established as a "historical fact" by definition, because such an event would never produce the kind of criteria required for a historian to make any definite claims one way or another. And the debate goes back and forth from there, with many interesting twists and turns that I really enjoyed actually, but naturally n...