Friday in the wild - June 17, 2005

It's time for the end-of-the-week roundup of the things, I, Ransom, found so interesting and entertaining about the blogosphere in the last 7 days.

I've just discovered Pedantic Protestant this week, and amidst all the speculation as to who this "nobody relative to the Christian Church" is, I found his three-part critique of Romanist apologetics interesting:

There are various ways of defending Roman Catholicism. Here's a brief outline, that if not exhaustive, should be close enough to being exhaustive to do the trick:

(1) RCism is completely supportable from the OT and NT.

(2) RCism is not completely supportable from the OT and NT:

(a) RCism is not inconsistent with the Bible, being found in "seed" form, but needs extra-Biblical evidence
(b) RCism is not inconsistent with the Bible, not being found in "seed" form, but extra-Biblical evidence supports the Roman superstructure added to the Bible.

(3) Independently of scripture, Romanism is true because of certain philosophical a priori assumptions, which assumptions in the end make Romanism the only thing consistent with said assumptions.

(4) RCism is true by an experiential argument or some sort of mystical experience.

In tackling these four prongs of attack, which are mixed-n-matched by Roman apologists, I'll give my own opinion on their strengths and weaknesses.

[Read Defending Romanism --- Part 1]

Don't forget to check out parts 2 and 3.

The Pedantic Protestant also notes the 25th birthday of Pac-Man.

Doug TenNapel posts an excellent editorial cartoon.

Tim at Challies.com commemorates the 50th anniversary of L'Abri Fellowship with a guest article by Rick Pearcey:

[Francis Schaeffer] realized that people need to see an exhibition that God actually exists, and that's why he felt led to live a life, and begin a ministry, based on principles that emphasized verifiably answerable prayer, so that atheists, agnostics, and doubting Christians (sometimes hobbled by other Christians), could observe "living evidence," to borrow a phrase from author Udo Middelmann, of God at work in the modern world. Schaeffer's vision was that when "people come to L'Abri they are faced with these two aspects simultaneously" - honest answers to honest questions and the practical demonstration of the existence of God - "as the two sides of a single coin."

[Read Francis Schaeffer: A Student's Appreciation of a Distinct Voice]

The Phil Johnson greatest-post-ever-of-the-week shreds thin-skinned group blogs:

Virtual drinking guilds and smoking-fraternity group blogs are all the rage these days—especially those devoted to picking fights about theology and religion. Here's a step-by-step guide to everything you need to start your own similar frat-house-cum-religious-debate blog. Follow my advice, and you and your coterie of compadres can soon be starting your own theological food-fights in the virtual realm, just like the Big Boys. . . .

[Read The Do-It-Yourself Group Blogging Kit for Emerging Religious Types]

My RSS aggregator has an entire subfolder filled with pretentious emerging Latin-named "reformed this-or-that" blogs that obviously got a hold of an advance copy of this post. I'd take issue with lumping the Thinklings in with Bore's Head Tavern, though.

Was there a full moon or something? The regular crowd of Google users seem to have had an unusual week of sanity. Apart from one search from the Emma Watson pedophile crowd, which was so crude I won't repeat it here, searches bringing people to the Curmdugeon were basically mundane. Let me qualify that. There were weird searches, but I often talk about weird things, so none of them specifically struck me as odd.

Until next week, enjoy.