Nota Bene: Death Penalty and the Fundamentals – two great posts

I ran across Karen Geffert‘s excellent blog, Nota Bene, this morning. She’s got some great (and challenging!) posts.

Two of my favorites were:

Christians and the Death Penalty

Gave me a lot to think about. I’ve always been pretty ambivalent toward capital punishment; partly due to the bits in the Bible about God exacting vengeance and so on, and (even moreso) partly due to the growing number of people who are being exonerated because of DNA evidence. However, Karen’s post definitely gave me some things to think about based on the biblical/legal end of things.

and

God and Religion: Wrong on the Fundamentals

At a dinner party, some friends posit that God created other religions so that people could respond to Him through their own viewpoints. Karen responds with four excellent points: that her friends call Jesus a liar (John 14:6) and they degrade His sacrifice on the cross and say His resurrection served no purpose. They have no way of addressing exclusivity and contradiction. Finally, they misunderstand the reasons for God creating man, and man creating religions.

Karen uses a few short sentences to demolish arguments that entire books set out to conquer.