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Is Your Church a Personality Cult? Part 1

celebrity culture, church growth movement, Culture CrossExamined, exploitation, idolatry, intelligentchristianfaith.com, John Ferrer, leadership, narcissism, personality cult, practical theology, theology
Sometimes cults are easy to spot. Most everyone knows about the Jim Jones cult (People’s Temple), or David Koresh’s group in Waco, Texas (Branch Davidians). Those cults are easy to spot because doomsday theology and mass killing tend to make headlines. But some cults aren’t so easy to see. Personality cults can be hard to spot. When people call a religious group a “cult” it usually means one of two things. TWO TYPES OF CULTSType 1: Theological Cult – heretical theology deviating from core orthodox teachings of that religion. These cults spring from a parent-religion. Ex., Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses are cult offshoots of Christianity. Type 2: Sociological Cult – socially and psychologically dangerous practices like authoritarian and manipulative leadership, social isolation, abuse, threats, blackmail, “mind-control” etc. These may or may…
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Science Sunday: Is Scientific Materialism the Best Framework for Understanding Reality?

assumptions, Bill Nye, Carl Sagan, Charles Darwin, cosmos, Daniel Dennett, earth, Faith & Science, Intelligent Design, Jay Richards, material universe, materialism, Neil deGrasse Tyson, pop science, purposelessness, science, Science Uprising, scientific materialism
The voices of pop science teach us and our children that "everything, if Darwin is right, is mechanical and blind and purposeless at the bottom." Source
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Company Names “Nature” to Board of Directors

Board of Directors, Brontie Ansell, Business Green, Culture, Culture & Ethics, ethics, fauna, flora, Frieda Gormley, geological features, House of Hackney, interior design, lawyers, Lawyers for Nature, Life Sciences, Mother Nature, nature rights, neo-nature religion, Pachamama, personhood, portfolio, private sector, radicalism, virtue signaling
Look what a frivolous culture we are becoming, with the private sector increasingly fueling our intellectual and moral decline. Source
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Must AI Inevitably Degenerate into Nonsense, through “Model Collapse”?

Artificial Intelligence, Arxiv.org, Baylor University, cats, ChatGPT, computer science, COSM 23, Creativity, Culture & Ethics, Denyse O'Leary, Dogs, gene pool, George Montañez, Harvey Mudd College, humans, inbreeding, jackrabbits, large language models, model collapse, Neuroscience & Mind, nonsense, Popular Mechanics, Pornography, recursion, Robert J. Marks, Walter Myers, William Dembski
AI works because humans are real creative beings, and AIs are built using gigantic amounts of diverse and creative datasets made by humans. Source
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Are Christian Politicians Trying to Set Up a Theocracy?

AFR, Apologetics, app, CIA, cross examined, cross examined official podcast, Dan Hodges, faith, God, google play, iTunes, Jesus Christ, Joel Kramer, Podcast, Politics and Religion, Radio, Spotify, stitcher, truth, Weekly Podcast
Podcast: Play in new window Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | Email | TuneIn | RSS Are Christian politicians plotting to turn America into a theocracy? That’s precisely what the woke media outlets want you to think, often accusing Christians of trying to violate the “separation of church and state”. They also accuse Christians of trying to legislate morality. But if Christians and conservatives don’t have the “right” to legislate morality, who does? House Speaker, Mike Johnson, was recently accused of being a theocrat in an article published by The Guardian titled ‘Mike Johnson, Theocrat: The House Speaker and a Plot Against America.’ In this week’s podcast episode, Frank reviews the scathing article that was written by attorney Marci A. Hamilton who…
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Ahead of New Book Edition, Geoglyphs and Natural Features Test Dembski’s Design Inference

Amazonia, beavers, Crazy Horse Memorial, earthworks, Emilio Guirado, Face on Mars, fairy circles, forests, Garamantes, Gutzon Borglum, Harvard University, Henry Standing Bear, Intelligent Design, Jackson Pollock, Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, Korczak Ziolkowski, LIDAR, Life Sciences, Man in the Moon, Mount Rushmore, New Scientist, New York University, North Africa, Orion the Hunter, PNAS, Pre-Columbian era, Rube Goldberg, Science (journal), The Design Inference, Tom Metcalfe, University of Portsmouth, V. Peripato, William Dembski, Winston Ewert, Xiaoli Dong
Designed features can hide in plain sight. A closer look can sometimes reveal the intentional acts of a mind. Source
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Ray Kurzweil Predicts: The “Singularity” by 2045

Academy Award, AI enlightenment myth, Artificial Intelligence, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bible, computer scientists, COSM 2023, cultoftheai.com, Culture & Ethics, Discovery Institute, ethics, futurists, Google, Hamas, hellscape, Isaiah, Judeo-Christian tradition, kidnapping, killing, Michael Keas, morality, Neuroscience & Mind, Ray Kurzweil, Seattle, Singularity, Skynet, The Imitation Game, The Matrix, transhumanism, Turing test
Under Kurzweil’s transhumanist vision of the future, AI promises us superhuman capabilities complete with heaven on earth and eternal life Source
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Ossuaries, Tombs, and Archaeological Evidence for the New Testament | with Joel Kramer

AFR, Apologetics, app, archaeological evidence from the Bible, CIA, cross examined, cross examined official podcast, Dan Hodges, faith, God, google play, iTunes, Jesus Christ, Joel Kramer, Podcast, Radio, Spotify, stitcher, truth, Weekly Podcast
Podcast: Play in new window Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | Email | TuneIn | RSS How much does archaeology actually reveal about the claims made in the New Testament? The four Gospels give us key details into the life and ministry of Jesus, the disciples, and the culture of Jerusalem at that time. But can a solid case for the truth of Christianity be made based on archaeological discoveries alone? Furthermore, can the secular worldview of most archaeologists account for these discoveries? In this exciting follow-up podcast episode, best-selling author and leading archaeologist, Joel P. Kramer, returns to share several convincing pieces of evidence that support the historical reliability of the New Testament. How do we know the location…
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Couldn’t Life’s Information Have Accumulated Gradually? No, and New Long Story Explains Why Not

accuracy, biological information, chemical evolution, code, DNA, Evolution, genome, information, Intelligent Design, James Tour, Long Story Short, Lynn Helena Caporale, origin of life, researchers, self-replication, The Implicit Genome, YouTube videos
It turns out there are five separate qualities to life and its information that make this comforting rationalization impossible to uphold. Source
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The Superior Programming that Makes Plants Look Smart

animals, anthropomorphism, bacteria, behavior, biology, Chapman University, Curiosity rover, Darwinians, Duke University, ethylene, flowers, herbivores, Ian T. Baldwin, intelligence, Intelligent Design, ivy, leaf senescence, leaves, Life Sciences, memory, Michael Pollan, Nature (journal), nitrogen, programming, Richard Karban, self-awareness, strigolactone, synthetic organic chemistry, tendrils, tentacles, The New Yorker, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, trees, Wesley Smith
Two signaling molecules — strigolactone and ethylene — can work independently to begin the process of leaf senescence. Source
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