New In 2010: Noumenal Society of Apologetics

This entry is part 5 of 14 in the series New in 2010
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I’m featuring some selected new Christian blogs from 2010, proceeding in random order with precedence given to ones that were submitted earlier.

I was fascinated by Adrian’s account of a meeting with pagans at Long Beach Community College on the Noumenal Society of Apologetics blog. He (I assume Adrian is a he) said, “Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction,” and yet this is California. I lived in southern California for thirteen years and experienced some of that strange truth. My wife and I were hiking in the Anaheim Hills and heard what we thought might be a troop of boy scouts with drums in the woods ahead of us. As we drew closer we realized it was instead a band of pagans, thirteen of them, beating drums and chanting praises to earth, air, fire, and water. It’s not just California; we ran into something similar in Sedona, Arizona, a town known for such things. Anyway, Adrian’s story brought back memories.

We didn’t get involved in conversation with these pagans, but Adrian did, and ran into that most baffling of all experiences: person who denies the law of non-contradiction. What do you do when faced with that kind of illogic. Adrian’s analysis of the problem is sound (very reminiscent of Ravi Zacharias in the final paragraph). Getting that across to this particular pagan was another matter. I appreciate Adrian’s initiative to listen and to share the truth, not only in this but in other encounters he describes in other posts.

I wonder about the Noumenal Society of Apologetics. It’s an intriguing name. If only I still lived nearby, I’d like to drop in on them.

Adrian pointed to a blog post on Inception as one of the better ones of the year. Alas, I have not seen the film and I couldn’t sort out all the references he was making to it. It made sense as far as I could make it out, but I didn’t try to dive too deep into it.

Pre-published on January 5, in advance of shoulder surgery.

Series NavigationNew in 2010: The Poached EggNew in 2010: Answering Mormons
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Possibly related posts (automatically generated):

  1. New in 2010: Theology and Apologetics Roundtable
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  3. “Dead Pilgrims Society”
  4. New in 2010: Logos and Love
  5. More New Christian Blogs in 2010
January 13, 2011 – 6:00 am | By Tom Gilson | Posted in The Faith | Post Comments (4) Recent Blog Comments For primary navigation click "Show Menu" above. For sidebar material (About, Links, Subscriptions, Blogroll, Copyright, ...) scroll down and click "Further Information."
  1. Adrian Urias wrote:
    January 13, 2011 at 12:12 pm   Link

    Yes, I’m a he.

    Yeah, we’re a group that just provide apologetic training for our church. We’re trying to convert it to a reasonable faith chapter.

    The name I kind of got from reading Dinesh D’Souza’s book Whats So Great About Christianity. Apparently, it (noumena) was an idea coined by Kant in response to a purely materialistic worldview. Its supposed to contrast with phenomena.

    And its also kind of supposed to be a pun. Our initials is NSA. NSA is the governments National Security Agency. So like they defend the country from shady stuff, we protect the church from shady stuff as well. Kind of lame, but yeah. We thought it was kind of funny at the time.

  2. Adrian Urias wrote:
    January 13, 2011 at 12:17 pm   Link

    and yeah, i learned that trick from Ravi Zacharias from reading I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist.

  3. Sam wrote:
    January 13, 2011 at 12:24 pm   Link

    I had a philosophy teacher who denied the law of non-contradiction. After much frustration in class, I submitted this parody to our email discussion group:

    http://philochristos.blogspot.com/2005/02/parody-addressing-those-who-deny-logic.html

  4. Brian wrote:
    January 13, 2011 at 12:25 pm   Link

    Yea its a pretty cool group. I did a talk there on Monday on the Resurrection of Jesus. Here is the video (Q&A will be uploaded later):

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