• Main Articles
    • Critique Of Lee Strobel's *The Case for Faith* >
      • Response to God_and_Science.com
    • Another Case Not Made: A Critique of Lee Strobel's The Case for a Creator
    • Lee Strobel's "The Case for the Real Jesus"
    • Taylor Carr's Review of The Case for Christ
    • Earl Doherty on *The Case for Christ* >
      • Part One - Is the Gospel Record Reliable?
      • Part Two - What Was the Nature of Jesus?
      • Part Three - Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?
    • Atheism, Agnosticism, & Pascal's Wager
    • Historical Methods: A Primer
    • Paul Copan's Untenable Interpretations
  • Additional Articles
    • Why Historical Apologetics is Useless
    • Extraordinary Events -- Extraordinary Evidence?
    • The Implausability of Satan
    • The History Of Satan
    • Freewill: Is it Possible?
    • Death
    • Reply to TrinityRadio's 10 Questions for Atheists
  • Debates
    • A Polite Response to YouTube's TheFunkyTheist
    • Dennis Jensen Debate
    • Gene Cook of "Unchained Radio"
    • J.P. Holding: Tektonics Apologetics Ministries >
      • Response to Tektonics - Part 1 (Response to Holding's "Refutation")
      • Response to Tektonics - Part 2 (Continuing the debate with Mr. Holding via the TheologyWeb.)
      • Response to Tektonics - Part 3
      • Response to Tektonics - Part 4
      • Response to Tektonics - Part 5
      • Response to Tektonics - Part 6
      • Response to Tektonics - Part 7
      • Response to Tektonics - Part 8
      • Response to Tektonics - Part 9
      • Response to Tektonics - Part 10
      • Response to Tektonics - Part 11
      • Response to Tektonics - Part 12
    • Skepticism Examined - Wes Janssen Debate >
      • "Skepticism Examined," by Wes Janssen. Rebuttal by Paul Jacobsen
      • Janssen/Jacobsen Discussion, Round 2
      • Janssen/Jacobsen Discussion, Round 3
      • Janssen/Jacobsen Discussion, Round 4
      • Janssen/Jacobsen Discussion, Round 5
      • On Wes Janssen - C. R. Drost
      • Jansen Responds to Drost
      • A Counter-response to Wes Janssen by C. R. Drost
    • Extraordinary Events: G. Brady Lenardos Debate >
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Round 1
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Round 2
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Round 3
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Round 4
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Round 5
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Round 6
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Round 7
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Round 8
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Round 9
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Round 10
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Round 11
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Round 12
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Round 13 (conclusion of formal debate)
      • Lenardos/Jacobsen Debate - Informal Round 14 (post-debate comments)
      • Lenardo's Rebuttal
  • Faith & Diet
    • Paul Copan's Errors On Diet & Vegetarianism
  • Submissions
    • Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Lie
    • The Eternal Return
    • Berating Brad Stine
    • Why Christians Steal from Secular Morality
    • Response to Smith
    • Choose Your Ancestors: God or Monkeys!
    • Response to "Hitler Wasn't an Athiest"
    • Hitler Really Wasn't an Athiest
    • Response To Phipps: Yet More About Hitler
    • Response to "The Implausability of Satan"
    • Defense of Cosmological Argument
  • Other Stuff
    • Guestbook
    • Admin
    • Contact Paul Jacobsen
    • What's New (Archive)
    • Interesting Links
    • Delphi & C++ Builder Programming Page
    • TabMaster -- Free Tab Utility
    • WB Hotkeys -- Freeware Keyboard Macros
    • Rebuttal on Cosmological Argument
  • Sitemap
  • Using Raize Components
Case Against Faith
.
Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Lie

Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Lie

by John MacDonald

      No, the title is not missing a letter.  Rick Warren is lying to you.  Does Rick Warren know whether there is a God or not?  I don’t know, but he’s convinced over thirty million people that not only does he know there is a God, he can delineate the essence of His message into a neat little book – simultaneously giving you the meaning of life.  A massively boring read, Warren’s central thesis is easily deconstructed by pointing out that there are contradictory tendencies in the bible toward asserting mutually exclusive accounts of God’s faculty of understanding in relation to human existence.

      But how could there be no purpose?  After all, Jeremiah 1:5 says "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations."  Doesn’t this mean that God knows your life before you were born, and has a purpose for it?  No, it means nothing of the sort.  God set the character in the book of Jeremiah aside for this knowledge, not you.  We see, for instance, a counter-example in the book of Job, where God had no prior knowledge of Job’s life, to the extent that Satan moved God to give Job a life that God had never even considered before Satan had caused him to do it: Job 2:3 “And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause.” 

      What does this mean?  Assuming there is a God, and it is a Judeau-Christian type of God and not, say, a God of war that rewards people for gaining power, you could even be as good a man as Job, and God probably didn’t look into your future before you were born and foresee the events in which you fulfilled your purpose.  Believing anything else is pure arrogance, or even psychosis, because it is not in the text (unless you want to hold one part of the bible is inconsistent with another based on disparate account of whether God is all-knowing or not).  It’s like a Muslim man believing his wife should be veiled, when the only thing the Koran teaches is that that the wives of the Prophet should be veiled – because you are believing God set you apart like the character in Jeremiah. 


Home     Yet More About Hitler
Log In
Picture
January 29, 2011 Site design upgraded by Leafolia Web Design
​www.leafolia.com