Ben Joiner's Blog

The Left's Dialogue with Socrates (If you've never read Socratic dialogues, they go like this.) The Left:  Trans People are oppressed because they don't fit into male or female athletics.  If a trans person identifies as female, then zhe should be accepted into female athletics. Socrates:  Many women have dedicated their lives to sports.  It is well known that they haven't achieved the same feats as men in strength and speed.  Wouldn't this be unfair to them to include former men in their competitions? The Left:  Women are just as strong as men, they are just brainwashed by society into not training as hard. Socrates:  Isn't that disrespectful to all of these hardworking female athletes? The Left:  No, because the brainwashing is so effective. Socrates:  Is it accidental? The Left:  No.  It's a rich capitalist white male dominated society.  That's who dominates our world. Socrates:  Do you have any evide...

1 Corinthians 14: 34 -35 NASB 34 The women are to keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says. 35 If they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church. It appears there is good reason to doubt this passage should even be in the Bible. To discuss why this is, we must also discuss larger questions of how we would even begin to know what Paul, Peter or John or whoever else even wrote. Furthermore, it's reasonable to touch on the question of how we can know the Bible is the word of God or simply the word of man. Let's do the big questions first. Let's ask the question about God's word first. Is the Bible God's word? Furthermore, even if it wasn't the word of God, can we still trust it as a reliable human book? If the authors are humans only, that doesn't mean they are sim...

More than once I have had people ask me if Paul should be removed from the Bible because he tells women to be silent at church. This does seem unreasonable and just plain odd, especially when most of us grew up with women as school teachers. But many defend this position rather loudly as a conservative doctrine. Anyone who opposes it is apparently just part of some liberal movement that will soon be teaching Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, homosexuality isn’t condemned in the Bible, or something like that. First, ask yourself this question. Should Paul be casually discarded? Is Paul someone we want to throw out? Doesn’t Paul argue very effectively from the Old Testament that Jesus is really the promised Messiah of the Jews? Some respond to this by just throwing out the few passages where Paul tells women to be silent.   They claim that those were added later.  But that’s unreasonable, but we will have to discuss whether the New Testament has ...

What has changed since the 90's? For younger people out there, older ones like me have noticed lots of changes in the past few decades.  I was born in 1981.  For me, the 80's were my first decade and I graduated from high school in 1999.  My 20's were the 00's and I turned 30 in 2011.  Being a teenager in the late 90's as well as a young twenty something in the 00's, I saw lots of changes in how people live life.  This article is my attempt at chronicling some of that. Cell Phones. I first saw one of these in the late 80's.  The second was in the early 90's.  Both were mounted to the car itself and called a car phone.  I was told not to touch it because it was a hundred dollars to pick it up.  In the mid 90's I remember my mother getting a large hand held phone, but it was more of a fashion accessory than it is today.  She only used it when her cool friends were around on the weekend, but it was clear they were getting cheaper....

A fundamental error of socialism. Be sure to use the subtitles, they help with following the video. Socialism is not the answer to an oppressive oligarchy of rich capitalists. To see this, let’s examine the central idea of Marxism first. This is the basic premise of Marxism. As time goes on and people use their property and resources to gain more, some people will have more than others. These resources will then be reinvested to gain more and more wealth until eventually a small group of people will own everything. This small group of people will be the employers for the rest of the population. Also, everyone else will have to purchase whatever they need from this small group. This wealthy elite provide nothing of value to society. They simply own the factories, money needed for investments, etc. Marx said that eventually the laborers will rise up and take over the means of production, and create a socialist utopia. While this hasn’t happened in the wel...