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I tweeted on November 1, 2020:

Anne often pronounces moral statements such as:  “We’re not just here for us, we’re here for others.”…But is there a moral basis for an atheist like Anne to base these assertions? https://thedailyhatch.org/2020/07/14/open-letter-88-to-ricky-gervais-on-comparison-of-the-tony-of-after-life-to-the-solomon-of-ecclesiastes-anne-in-after-life-were-not-just-here-for-us-were-here-for-othe/

Ricky Gervais tweeted his response:

Well, I guess our collective, agreed morality comes from a sense of treating others in the same fair way that we ourselves would wish to be treated. The Bible and other Holy books, written by primitive men, doesn’t quite cut the mustard.

I tweeted the response:

Check out Woody Allen’s movie CRIMES & MISDEMEANORS then answer: CAN A HUMANIST THAT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN AN AFTERLIFE GIVE JUDAH ONE REASON WHY HE SHOULDN’T HAVE HIS MISTRESS KILLED? https://thedailyhatch.org/2020/04/12/ricky-gervais-show-afterlife-in-light-of-the-book-of-ecclesiastes-part-1-why-have-integrity-in-godless-darwinian-universe-where-might-makes-right/

After Life #1 Trailer

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After Life 2 Trailer

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On Saturday April 18, 2020 at 6pm in London and noon in Arkansas, I had a chance to ask Ricky Gervais a question on his Twitter Live broadcast which was  “Is Tony a Nihilist?” At the 20:51 mark Ricky answers my question. Below is the video:

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If Death is the end then what is the point Kath asks below:

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Kath: You are an atheist?

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(Above) Tony and Anne on the bench at the graveyard where their spouses are buried.

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July 14, 2020 
Ricky Gervais 

Dear Ricky,  

This is the 88th day in a row that I have written another open letter to you to comment on some of your episodes of AFTER LIFE, and then I wanted to pass along some evidence that indicates the Bible is historically accurate from Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop Book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?

As you know I am writing you a series of letters on Solomon’s efforts to find a meaning and purpose to life. Solomon tried to find a meaning and purpose to life UNDER THE SUN in the Book of Ecclesiastes in all of the 6 “L” words and looked into  learning(1:16-18),laughter, ladies, luxuries,  and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). 

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On the bench in the graveyard Anne sits everyday with Tony and she often pronounces moral statements such as:  “We’re not just here for us, we’re here for others.”...“Happiness is amazing. It’s so amazing it doesn’t matter if it’s yours or not… A society grows great when old men plant trees the shade of which they know they will never sit in….Good people do things for other people. That’s it. The end.” But is there a moral basis for an atheist like Anne to base these assertions?

Atheist Colin McGinn Comments:

Suppose you take, as a moral principle, it’s wrong to steal.  People say, “Why is that wrong?  Why is it wrong to steal?”  Answer – because God says it’s wrong to steal.  God commanded that you should not steal.  The point that Socrates makes in that dialogue is to say – how can God give this moral rule a foundation?  Either the moral rule is, itself, intrinsically a sound moral rule or it can’t be given soundness and legitimacy from an external command.

Suppose for example we had the rule, “It’s right to murder.”  Somebody said, “That’s not right!  Murder is wrong!”  And somebody replied, “But God SAYS it’s right to murder.”  That doesn’t convince you that it’s right to murder.  If God says that something is right which isn’t right, God’s wrong.

I got this quote from the You Tube series “Renowned Academics talk about God,” and I noticed that this is not the first time that Dr. McGinn had chosen to speak on morality in a large TV platform like this.  Wikipedia noted, “In 2004, Jonathan Miller wrote and presented a TV series on atheism entitled Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (more commonly referred to as Jonathan Miller’s Brief History of Disbelief) for BBC Four. I watched that complete series and did not see any reference to Antony Flew (atheist turned theist)  which I thought was strange. But more striking was this statement by McGinn:

There was disappointment. I would like for religion to be true. I would like for it to be true because I would like there to be immortality. I would like there to be rewards for those who have been virtuous, and punishments for those who have not been virtuous, especially those punishments to be good. There is no justice in this world and it would be good if there was some cosmic force that distributed justice in the proper way that it should be. It still is for me a constant source of irritation and pain that wicked people prosper and virtuous people don’t.

Francis Schaffer in his book THE GOD WHO IS THERE addresses these same issues:

“[in Christianity] there is a sufficient basis for morals. Nobody has ever discovered a way of having real “morals” without a moral absolute. If there is no moral absolute, we are left with hedonism (doing what I like) or some form of the social contract theory (what is best for society as a a hole is right). However, neither of these alternative corresponds to the moral motions that men have. Talk to people long enough and deeply enough, and you will find that they consider some things are really right and something are really wrong. Without absolutes, morals as morals cease to exist, and humanistic mean starting from himself is unable to find the absolute he needs. But because the God of the Bible is there, real morals exist. Within this framework I can say one action is right and another wrong, without talking nonsense.” 117

The secular humanist Richard Taylor concludes, “Contemporary writers in ethics, who blithely discourse upon moral right and wrong and moral obligation without any reference to religion, are really just weaving intellectual webs from thin air; which amounts to saying that they discourse without meaning.”3

I got this quote from this thought-provoking debate between William Lane Craig and Richard Taylor.

Is the Basis of Morality Natural or Supernatural?

William Lane Craig vs. Richard Taylor

Union College, Schenectady, New York, United States – October 8, 1993

William Lane Craig – Opening Statement

Over the years I have had many occasions to quote and comment on Prof. Taylor’s work in my own writing, and it’s a distinct honor to be sharing the platform tonight with him.

Now I want to say at the outset that I agree thoroughly with him that the question is not whether we can be good without God. I don’t think that’s a disputed issue tonight. Rather, the important question is the subissue: Is the basis for morality natural or supernatural? And I’m going to defend two basic contentions in tonight’s debate: (I) that supernaturalism provides a sound basis for morality, and (II) that naturalism does not provide a sound basis for morality.

Look with me at that first basic contention, that supernaturalism provides a sound basis for morality. In support of this contention I’d like to make two points:

(1) If God exists, then objective right and wrong exist. God’s own holy and perfectly good nature provides the absolute standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. His commands flow necessarily from His own moral nature and constitute for us our moral duties. In the JudeoChristian tradition, the whole moral duty of man can be summed up in the two great commandments: first, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your strength, with all your soul, with all your heart, and with all your mind,” and second, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On this foundation, we can affirm the objective goodness of love, generosity, selfsacrifice, and equality, and condemn as objectively evil selfishness, hatred, abuse, discrimination, and oppression.

(2) Because, according to supernaturalism, man’s life does not end at the grave, all persons are held morally accountable for their actions. Evil and wrong will be banished, righteousness will be vindicated. Good ultimately triumphs over evil, and we shall see that we do live in a moral universe after all. In the end, the scales of God’s justice will be balanced. Thus, the moral choices that we make in this life are infused with an eternal significance. We can, with consistency, make moral choices which run contrary to our selfinterest and even undertake acts of extreme selfsacrifice, knowing that such decisions are not just empty and meaningless gestures. Rather, our moral lives have a paramount significance.

It’s noteworthy that Professor Taylor, in his writings, agrees that supernaturalism provides a perfectly coherent and sound basis for morality. In his most recent book, Ethics, Faith, and Reason, he writes, “The idea of moral…obligation is clear enough, provided reference to some lawmaker higher…than those of the state is understood. In other words, our moral obligations…can be understood as those imposed by God. This does give a clear sense to the claim that our moral obligations are more binding upon us than our political obligations….”1 Unfortunately, Professor Taylor seems not to believe in God, and so he shuns a supernatural foundation for morality. Nevertheless, he admits that if God exists, then the foundations for morality are secure. Thus I think that we can agree that supernaturalism provides a sound foundation for morality.

What a contrast that—when we turn to naturalism and look at my second major contention—naturalism does not provide a sound foundation for morality. Naturalism does not match supernaturalism in supplying the necessary conditions for successful moral foundations.

(1) If naturalism is true, objective right and wrong do not exist. Again in his writings Professor Taylor agrees with me on this score. He argues that when modern man abandoned God as the foundation of morality, he lost all basis for saying that objective right and wrong exist. Taylor writes,

The modern age, more or less repudiating the idea of a divine lawgiver, has nevertheless tried to retain the ideas of moral right and wrong, not noticing that in casting God aside, they have also abolished the conditions of meaningfulness for moral right and wrong as well…. Thus, even educated persons sometimes declare that such things as war…or the violation of human rights, are ‘morally wrong,’ and they imagine that they have said something true and significant.

Educated people do not need to be told, however, that questions such as these have never been answered outside of religion.2

He concludes, “Contemporary writers in ethics, who blithely discourse upon moral right and wrong and moral obligation without any reference to religion, are really just weaving intellectual webs from thin air; which amounts to saying that they discourse without meaning.”3

I couldn’t agree more. Without God, there is no objective right and wrong. As Professor Taylor says, it’s just conventional. Thus if naturalism is true, it becomes impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as morally wrong. Some action, say, incest, may not be biologically or socially advantageous, and so in the course of human evolution it has become taboo. But there is nothing really wrong about raping someone. If, as Professor Taylor states, moral rules are, “nothing but the customs…that this or that culture adopts over the course of time,”4then the nonconformist who chooses to flout the herd morality is doing nothing more morally wrong than being uncultured. Nor, by the same token, can one praise brotherhood, equality, or love as good. It really doesn’t matter what values you choose, for there is no right and wrong. Moral good and evil do not exist.

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Francis Schaeffer comments on ECCLESIASTES below: 

Relative truth

Solomon plunged in such a scientific procedure finally into the thought of final relative truth.

Ecclesiastes 8:6-7

⁶ For there is a time and a way for everything, although man’s trouble lies heavy on him. ⁷ For he does not know what is to be, for who can tell him how it will be?

In such a setting he is led into misery. Relative truth is also expressed in Ecclesiastes 3:1, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…” He is not saying this in a positive sense, but it is in a negative sense here. Relative truth in light of Ecclesiastes 8:6-7. When you come to the concept of relative truth only one more step remains and that is that chance rules.

Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:

The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there. 

Instead of making a leap into the area of nonreason the better choice would be to investigate the claims that the Bible is a historically accurate book and that God created the universe and reached out to humankind with the Bible. Below is a piece of that evidence given by Francis Schaeffer concerning the accuracy of the Bible.

TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?)

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If we take another hundred-year step backwards in time, we come to King Solomon, son of David. On his death the Jewish Kingdom was divided into two sections as a result of a civil revolt. Israel to the north with Jeroboam as king and Judah (as it was called subsequently) to the south under Rehoboam, Solomon’s son. In both the Book of Kings and Chronicles in the Bible we read how during Rehoboam’s reign: ²⁵ In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem. (I Kings 14:25; II Chronicles 12:2), and how Shishak stripped Rehoboam of the wealth accumulated by his able father, Solomon. The reality of this event is confirmed by archaeology to a remarkable degree.

Shishak subdued not only Rehoboam but Jeroboam as well. The proof of this comes first from a fragment in a victory monument erected by Shishak and discovered at Megiddo, a city in the land of Israel. So the Egyptian king’s force swept northwards, subdued the two Jewish kings, and then erected a victory monument to that effect. Traces of the destruction have also been discovered in such cities as Hazor, Gezer, and Megiddo. These confirm what was written in Second Chronicles:

⁴ And he took the fortified cities of Judah and came as far as Jerusalem. ⁵ Then Shemaiah the prophet came to Rehoboam and to the princes of Judah, who had gathered at Jerusalem because of Shishak, and said to them, “Thus says theLord, ‘You abandoned me, so I have abandoned you to the hand of Shishak.’”⁶ Then the princes of Israel and the king humbled themselves and said, “TheLord is righteous.” ⁷ When the Lordsaw that they humbled themselves, the word of the Lord came to Shemaiah: “They have humbled themselves. I will not destroy them, but I will grant them some deliverance, and my wrath shall not be poured out on Jerusalem by the hand of Shishak.⁸ Nevertheless, they shall be servants to him, that they may know my service and the service of the kingdoms of the countries.”

⁹ So Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem. He took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king’s house. He took away everything. He also took away the shields of gold that Solomon had made…( II Chronicles 12:4-9)

Further confirmation comes from the huge victory scene engraved on Shishak’s order at the Temple of Karnak in Egypt. The figure of the king is somewhat obscured, but he is clearly named and he is seen smiting Hebrew captives before the god Amon, and there are symbolic rows of names of conquered towns of Israel and Judah.

Solomon’s is remembered also for his great wealth. The Bible tells us:

¹⁴ Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was 666 talents of gold, ¹⁵ besides that which came from the explorers and from the business of the merchants, and from all the kings of the west and from the governors of the land. ¹⁶ King Solomon made 200 large shields of beaten gold; 600 shekels^[a]of gold went into each shield. ¹⁷ And he made 300 shields of beaten gold; three minas^[b] of gold went into each shield. And the king put them in the House of the Forest of Lebanon. (I Kings 10:14-17)

This wealth that the Bible speaks of has been challenged. Surely, some have said, these figures are an exaggeration. Excavations, however, have confirmed enormous quantities of precious metals, owned and distributed by kings during this period. For example, Shishak’s son Osorkon I (statuette of Osorkon I, Brooklyn Museum, New York), the one who stood to gain from the booty carried off from Rehoboam’s capital, is reported to have made donations to his god Amon totaling 470 tons of precious metal, gold, and silver, during only the first four years of his reign. This, of course, is much more than Solomon’s 66 talents which equals approximately twenty tons of gold per annum. We also have confirmation of the Bible’s reference to Solomon’s gold as coming from Ophir. The location of Ophir is still unknown, but an ostracon dated a little later than Solomon’s time actually mentions that thirty shekels of gold had come from Ophir for Beth-horon.

The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002

PS: What is the meaning of life? Find it in the end of the open letter I wrote to you on April 23, 2020. 

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Below is the workforce of THE TAMBURY GAZETTE 

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Seen below is the third episode of AFTERLIFE (season 1) when Matt takes Tony to a comedy club with front row seats to cheer him up but it turns into disaster!!!

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Part 1 “Why have integrity in Godless Darwinian Universe where Might makes Right?”

Part 2 “My April 14, 2016 Letter to Ricky mentioned Book of Ecclesiastes and the Meaninglessness of Life”

Part 3 Letter about Brandon Burlsworth concerning suffering and pain and evil in the world.  “Why didn’t Jesus save her [from cancer]?” (Tony’s 10 year old nephew George in episode 2)

Part 4 Letter on Solomon on Death Tony in episode one, “It should be everyone’s moral duty to kill themselves.”

Part 5 Letter on subject of Learning in Ecclesiastes “I don’t read books of fiction but mainly science and philosophy”

Part 6 Letter on Luxuries in Ecclesiastes Part 6, The Music of AFTERLIFE (Part A)

Part 7 Letter on Labor in Ecclesiastes My Letter to Ricky on Easter in 2017 concerning Book of Ecclesiastes and the legacy of a person’s life work

Part 8 Letter on Liquor in Ecclesiastes Tony’s late wife Lisa told him, “Don’t get drunk all the time alright? It will only make you feel worse in the log run!”

Part 9 Letter on Laughter in Ecclesiastes , I said of laughter, “It is foolishness;” and of mirth, “What does it accomplish?” Ecclesiastes 2:2

Part 10 Final letter to Ricky on Ladies in Ecclesiastes “I gathered a chorus of singers to entertain me with song, and—most exquisite of all pleasures— voluptuous maidens for my bed…behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” Ecclesiastes 2:8-11.

Part 11 Letter about Daniel Stanhope and optimistic humanism  “If man has been kicked up out of that which is only impersonal by chance , then those things that make him man-hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication-are ultimately unfulfillable and thus meaningless.” (Francis Schaeffer)

Part 12 Letter on how pursuit of God is only way to get Satisfaction Dan Jarrell “[In Ecclesiastes] if one seeks satisfaction they will never find it. In fact, every pleasure will be fleeting and can not be sustained, BUT IF ONE SEEKS GOD THEN ONE FINDS SATISFACTION”

Part 13 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon realizing he will die just as a dog will die “For men and animals both breathe the same air, and both die. So mankind has no real advantage over the beasts; what an absurdity!” Ecclesiastes

Part 14 Letter to Stephen Hawking on 3 conclusions of humanism and Bertrand Russell destruction of optimistic humanism. “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms—no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”(Bertrand Russell, Free Man’s Worship)

Part 15 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Leonardo da Vinci and Solomon and Meaningless of life “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes Book of Ecclesiastes Part 15 “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes 2:17

Part 16 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon’s longing for death but still fear of death and 5 conclusions of humanism on life UNDER THE SUN. Francis Schaeffer “Life is just a series of continual and unending cycles and man is stuck in the middle of the cycle. Youth, old age, Death. Does Solomon at this point embrace nihilism? Yes!!! He exclaims that the hates life (Ecclesiastes 2:17), he longs for death (4:2-3) Yet he stills has a fear of death (2:14-16)”

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Mandeep Dhillon as Sandy on her first assignment in ‘After Life’. (Twitter)

A still from ‘After Life’ that captures the vibe of the Tambury Gazette. (Twitter)

Michael Scott of THE OFFICE (USA) with Ricky Gervais 

After Life on Netflix stars Ricky Gervais as a bereaved husband (Image: Netflix)

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Psychiatrist played by Paul Kaye seen below.

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Tony Johnson with his dog Brandi seen below:

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Related posts:

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Francis Schaeffer THE AGE of FRAGMENTATION

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After Life #1 Trailer

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After Life 2 Trailer

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On Saturday April 18, 2020 at 6pm in London and noon in Arkansas, I had a chance to ask Ricky Gervais a question on his Twitter Live broadcast which was  “Is Tony a Nihilist?” At the 20:51 mark Ricky answers my question. Below is the video:

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If Death is the end then what is the point Kath asks below:

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Kath: You are an atheist?

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July 13, 2020 
Ricky Gervais 

Dear Ricky,  

This is the 87th day in a row that I have written another open letter to you to comment on some of your episodes of AFTER LIFE, and then I wanted to pass along some evidence that indicates the Bible is historically accurate.

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Tony and his wife Lisa who died 6 months ago of cancer

In season 2 episode 5 there is “A Night of a Thousand Stars” held in Tambury and it starts off with the song THE WANDERER. Here are the lyrics:

Oh well, I’m the type of guy who will never settle down
Where pretty girls are, well you know that I’m around
I kiss ’em and I love ’em cause to me they’re all the same
I hug ’em and I squeeze ’em they don’t even know my nameThey call me the wanderer
Yeah, the wanderer
I roam around, around, around

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Ricky Gervais plays bereaved husband Tony Johnson in AFTER LIFE

SOUNDS A LOT LIKE KING SOLOMON IN ECCLESIASTES WHO ACTUALLY HAD OVER 1,000 children!!!
Ricky Gervais

Among his other activities with humanist groups, Gervais has appeared in the Rationalist Association’s Christmas show Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People.

At school the young Gervais became particularly interested in nature and the sciences, his educational and evidentiary findings further validating his new-found path. On reaching university he intended to study Biology but admits that he opted instead for Philosophy because less study hours were required. It would be 20 more years before the comedian would establish his stand-up career, but anyone who has seen his “Animals”, “Science” or “Politics” tours will surely perceive a rhetorical application of humor firmly rooted in a passion for both philosophy and science. 

You have chosen to be identified with the Humanists so I wanted to ask you if you agree with something asserted by Humanist Manifest 2 concerning sexual freedom.

Humanist Manifesto 2 states: 

SIXTH: In the area of sexuality, we believe that intolerant attitudes, often cultivated by orthodox religions and puritanical cultures, unduly repress sexual conduct. The right to birth control, abortion, and divorce should be recognized. While we do not approve of exploitive, denigrating forms of sexual expression, neither do we wish to prohibit, by law or social sanction, sexual behavior between consenting adults.

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Let us take a look at the words in the following Beatles song:

“Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?”Why don’t we do it in the road? Mm
Why don’t we do it in the road? Ah
Why don’t we do it in the road? Mm
Why don’t we do it in the road? Mm
No one will be watching us
Why don’t we do it in the road?Why don’t we do it in the road?
Why don’t we do it in the road?
Why don’t we do it in the road?
Why don’t we do it in the road?
No one will be watching us
Why don’t we do it in the road? OohWhy don’t we do it in the road?
Why don’t we do it in the road?
Why don’t we do it, do it in the road?
Why don’t we do it in the road?
No one will be watching us
Why don’t we do it in the road?

I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog of mine. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how secular humanist man can not hope to find a lasting meaning to his life in a closed system without bringing God back into the picture. This is the same exact case with Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Three thousand years ago, Solomon took a look at life “under the sun” in his book of Ecclesiastes. Christian scholar Ravi Zacharias has noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term ‘under the sun.’ What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system, and you are left with only this world of time plus chance plus matter.” 

HERE BELOW IS SOLOMON’S SEARCH IN THE AREA OF THE 6 “L” WORDS. He looked into  learning (1:16-18), laughter, ladies, luxuries,  and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). TODAY WE WANT TO LOOK AT SOLOMON’S SEARCH INTO THE WORD “LADIES.” 

Ecclesiastes 2:8-10The Message (MSG)

I piled up silver and gold,
        loot from kings and kingdoms.
I gathered a chorus of singers to entertain me with song,
    and—most exquisite of all pleasures—
    voluptuous maidens for my bed.

^9-10 Oh, how I prospered! I left all my predecessors in Jerusalem far behind, left them behind in the dust. What’s more, I kept a clear head through it all. Everything I wanted I took—I never said no to myself. I gave in to every impulse, held back nothing. I sucked the marrow of pleasure out of every task—my reward to myself for a hard day’s work!

1 Kings 11:1-3 English Standard Version (ESV)

11 Now King Solomon loved many foreign women, along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, ² from the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the people of Israel, “You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods.” Solomon clung to these in love. ³ He had 700 wives, who were princesses, and 300 concubines. And his wives turned away his heart.

Francis Schaeffer observed concerning Solomon, “You can not know woman but knowing 1000 women.”

King Solomon in Ecclesiastes 2:11 sums up his search for meaning in the area of the Sexual Revolution with these words, “…behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”

How about today’s most well known playboy the late Hugh Hefner?Schaeffer said that Hefner’s goal with the “playboy mentality is just to smash the puritanical ethnic.” About 30 years ago my pastor, Adrian Rogers of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee noticed an article where Hugh Hefner said he would be willing to trade all of his riches for the experience of just falling in love with one girl of his dreams and getting married. Rogers went on to say that the playboy lifestyle was bankrupt of lasting satisfaction and that God’s plan of marriage was best. In fact, the Book of Ecclesiastes shows that Solomon came to the conclusion that nothing in life gives true satisfaction without God including knowledge (1:16-18), ladies and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and great building projects (2:4-6, 18-20). You can only find a lasting meaning to your life by looking above the sun and bring God back into the picture.

Solomon’s experiment was a search for meaning to life “under the sun.” Then in last few words in the Book of Ecclesiastes he looks above the sun and brings God back into the picture: “The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: Fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil.”

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The Judgment of Solomon, 1617 by Peter Paul Rubens(1577–1640)

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Paul Kurtz pictured above.

I have had the privilege of corresponding with the humanist psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard and I have enjoyed reading several of his books and the last one I read was ENLIGHTENMENT NOW: THE CASE FOR REASON, SCIENCE, HUMANISM, AND PROGRESS. In my view it is the best book written from a humanist point of view that discusses morality. Earlier I would given that recognition to Paul Kurtz and his book FORBIDDEN FRUIT: THE ETHICS OF SECULARISM. 

Dr. Pinker asserted:

But theistic morality has two fatal flaws. the first one is that there is no good reaaon to believe that god exists. In a nonfiction appendix to her novel Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (drawing in part on Plato, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Russell) lays out refutations of every one of these arguments. The most common among them—faith, revelation, scripture, authority, tradition, and subjective appeal—are not arguments at all. It’s not just that reason says they cannot be trusted. It’s also that different religions, drawing on these sources, degree mutually incompatible beliefs about how many gods there are, which miracles they wrought, and what they demand of their devotees. Historical scholarship has amply demonstrated that holy scriptures are all-too-human products of their historical eras…” (page 421).

Dr. Pinker brings up two points and they are that the scriptures are not reliable and this goes for several religions. Let’s look at the historical reliability of the Book of Mormon and then compare that to the Bible.

 The Book of Mormon is blindly accepted even though archaeology has disproven many of the facts that are claimed by it. For instance, wheels and chariots did not exist in North America when they said they did and horses were not present either.

Rick Deem wrote the article, “Archaeology/Anthropolocical Problems in the Book of Mormon,” and in it he asserted:

The Book of Mormon claims to be a record of the inhabitants of the Americas during the period from 2000 B.C. to 400 A.D. It makes many claims about the history and anthropology of pre-Columbian American cultures. Unfortunately, the author of the book, Joseph Smith, had little or no knowledge of pre-Columbian American civilizations. Borrowing and adapting many stories from the Old and New Testaments, Joseph Smith was unaware that the earlier Native American peoples were part of stone-age civilizations that were significantly less advanced than Hebrew and other Middle Eastern cultures of biblical times.

The Book of Mormon describes the following animals as living in the pre-Columbian Americas: donkey, cattle, oxen, horse, pig, and elephants. Although horses and mammoths and mastodons (related to elephants) had existed tens of thousands of years ago in the Americas, they had all disappeared by 10,000 years ago. Horses did not reappear on the American continents until the Spanish brought them after the voyage of Columbus. None of these animals existed in North, Central or South America during Book of Mormon times.

The Old and New Testaments present a rich description of biblical peoples, places and cultures. Archeology of the Middle East has revealed the cities, weapons, crops, animals, coins, writings, and references to biblical characters found in the Bible. However, none of the cities mentioned in the Book of Mormon have ever been identified by qualified archeologists. In addition, many Book of Mormon references to metals, weapons, crops, animals, articles of clothing are known to have not been present in the Americas during the time period claimed in the Book of Mormon.

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Over the years there have been many criticisms leveled against the Bible concerning its historical reliability. These criticisms are usually based on a lack of evidence from outside sources to confirm the Biblical record. Since the Bible is a religious book, many scholars take the position that it is biased and cannot be trusted unless we have corroborating evidence from extra-Biblical sources. In other words, the Bible is guilty until proven innocent, and a lack of outside evidence places the Biblical account in doubt.

This standard is far different from that applied to other ancient documents, even though many, if not most, have a religious element. They are considered to be accurate, unless there is evidence to show that they are not. Although it is not possible to verify every incident in the Bible, the discoveries of archaeologysince the mid-1800s have demonstrated the reliability and plausibility of the Bible narrative.

Here are some examples:

• Many thought the Biblical references to Solomon’s wealth were greatly exaggerated. Recovered records from the past show that wealth in antiquity was concentrated with the king and Solomon’s prosperity was entirely feasible.
• It was once claimed there was no Assyrian king named Sargon as recorded in Isaiah 20:1, because this name was not known in any other record. Then, Sargon’s palace was discovered in Khorsabad, Iraq. The very event mentioned in Isaiah 20, his capture of Ashdod, was recorded on the palace walls. What is more, fragments of a stela memorializing the victory were found at Ashdod itself.
• Another king who was in doubt was Belshazzar, king of Babylon, named in Daniel 5. The last king of Babylon was Nabonidus according to recorded history. Tablets were found showing that Belshazzar was Nabonidus’ son who served as coregent in Babylon. Thus, Belshazzar could offer to make Daniel “third highest ruler in the kingdom” (Dan. 5:16) for reading the handwriting on the wall, the highest available position. Here we see the “eye-witness” nature of the Biblical record, as is so often brought out by the discoveries of archaeology.

How does archaeology conclusively demonstrate the Bible to be reliable and unique among all the holy books of world religions? Answer

For many more archaeological evidences in support of the Bible, see Archaeology and the Bible

[ If this information has been helpful, please prayerfully consider a donation to help pay the expenses for making this faith-building service available to you and your family! Donations are tax-deductible. ]

Author: Bryant Wood of Associates for Biblical Research

The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted. GOD HAS SPOKEN AND HAS NOT BEEN SILENT, BUT YOU CAN’T JUST CONTINUE TO LOOK FOR ANSWERS JUST “UNDER THE SUN.” You want some evidence that indicates that the Bible is true? Here is a good place to start and that is taking a closer look at the archaeology of the Old Testament times. Is the Bible historically accurate? Here are some of the posts I have done in the past on the subject: 1. The Babylonian Chronicle, of Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription. 3. Taylor Prism (Sennacherib Hexagonal Prism), 4. Biblical Cities Attested Archaeologically. 5. The Discovery of the Hittites, 6.Shishak Smiting His Captives, 7. Moabite Stone, 8. Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, 9A Verification of places in Gospel of John and Book of Acts., 9B Discovery of Ebla Tablets. 10. Cyrus Cylinder, 11. Puru “The lot of Yahali” 9th Century B.C.E., 12. The Uzziah Tablet Inscription, 13. The Pilate Inscription, 14. Caiaphas Ossuary, 14 B Pontius Pilate Part 2, 14c. Three greatest American Archaeologists moved to accept Bible’s accuracy through archaeology.

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The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002

PS: What is the meaning of life? Find it in the end of the open letter I wrote to you on April 23, 2020. 

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Below is the workforce of THE TAMBURY GAZETTE 

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Seen below is the third episode of AFTERLIFE (season 1) when Matt takes Tony to a comedy club with front row seats to cheer him up but it turns into disaster!!!

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Part 1 “Why have integrity in Godless Darwinian Universe where Might makes Right?”

Part 2 “My April 14, 2016 Letter to Ricky mentioned Book of Ecclesiastes and the Meaninglessness of Life”

Part 3 Letter about Brandon Burlsworth concerning suffering and pain and evil in the world.  “Why didn’t Jesus save her [from cancer]?” (Tony’s 10 year old nephew George in episode 2)

Part 4 Letter on Solomon on Death Tony in episode one, “It should be everyone’s moral duty to kill themselves.”

Part 5 Letter on subject of Learning in Ecclesiastes “I don’t read books of fiction but mainly science and philosophy”

Part 6 Letter on Luxuries in Ecclesiastes Part 6, The Music of AFTERLIFE (Part A)

Part 7 Letter on Labor in Ecclesiastes My Letter to Ricky on Easter in 2017 concerning Book of Ecclesiastes and the legacy of a person’s life work

Part 8 Letter on Liquor in Ecclesiastes Tony’s late wife Lisa told him, “Don’t get drunk all the time alright? It will only make you feel worse in the log run!”

Part 9 Letter on Laughter in Ecclesiastes , I said of laughter, “It is foolishness;” and of mirth, “What does it accomplish?” Ecclesiastes 2:2

Part 10 Final letter to Ricky on Ladies in Ecclesiastes “I gathered a chorus of singers to entertain me with song, and—most exquisite of all pleasures— voluptuous maidens for my bed…behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” Ecclesiastes 2:8-11.

Part 11 Letter about Daniel Stanhope and optimistic humanism  “If man has been kicked up out of that which is only impersonal by chance , then those things that make him man-hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication-are ultimately unfulfillable and thus meaningless.” (Francis Schaeffer)

Part 12 Letter on how pursuit of God is only way to get Satisfaction Dan Jarrell “[In Ecclesiastes] if one seeks satisfaction they will never find it. In fact, every pleasure will be fleeting and can not be sustained, BUT IF ONE SEEKS GOD THEN ONE FINDS SATISFACTION”

Part 13 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon realizing he will die just as a dog will die “For men and animals both breathe the same air, and both die. So mankind has no real advantage over the beasts; what an absurdity!” Ecclesiastes

Part 14 Letter to Stephen Hawking on 3 conclusions of humanism and Bertrand Russell destruction of optimistic humanism. “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms—no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”(Bertrand Russell, Free Man’s Worship)

Part 15 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Leonardo da Vinci and Solomon and Meaningless of life “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes Book of Ecclesiastes Part 15 “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes 2:17

Part 16 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon’s longing for death but still fear of death and 5 conclusions of humanism on life UNDER THE SUN. Francis Schaeffer “Life is just a series of continual and unending cycles and man is stuck in the middle of the cycle. Youth, old age, Death. Does Solomon at this point embrace nihilism? Yes!!! He exclaims that the hates life (Ecclesiastes 2:17), he longs for death (4:2-3) Yet he stills has a fear of death (2:14-16)”

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Mandeep Dhillon as Sandy on her first assignment in ‘After Life’. (Twitter)

A still from ‘After Life’ that captures the vibe of the Tambury Gazette. (Twitter)

Michael Scott of THE OFFICE (USA) with Ricky Gervais 

After Life on Netflix stars Ricky Gervais as a bereaved husband (Image: Netflix)

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Psychiatrist played by Paul Kaye seen below.

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Tony Johnson with his dog Brandi seen below:

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Adrian Rogers on Evolution

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Charles Darwin Autobiography

Francis Schaeffer “The Age of NONREASON”

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Ricky Gervais plays bereaved husband Tony Johnson in AFTER LIFE

Tony and his wife Lisa who died 6 months ago of cancer

(Above) Tony and Anne on the bench at the graveyard where their spouses are buried.

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July 12, 2020 
Ricky Gervais 

Dear Ricky,  

This is the 86th day in a row that I have written another open letter to you to comment on some of your episodes of AFTER LIFE.

Tony Johnson in AFTER LIFE asserted, “You never know what’s around the corner, do you? One minute you’re happy and safe and smug about it, the next minute, everything’s taken away from you.” Let me tell you a recent story that illustrates that point. I have been reading the books and listening to the talks of Ravi Zacharias since his visit to Harvard in 1992 (which I heard on cassette tapes.) Then in January it was announced that Ravi was coming in February to Immanuel Baptist in Little Rock where my grandchildren go to church and my son and daughter-in-law invited me to come hear him speak. I also daydreamed of meeting him since back in the 1990’s my sister and her husband had a personal dinner with Ravi when he came in town to speak at Bellevue Baptist (the church I grew up attending.) However, one week before the event at Immanuel Ravi had to post the event because he had to have his bad back examined, and when he did they found cancer. He was sent then to M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston and when they couldn’t do anything then he was sent home to Atlanta and he died two weeks later. Ravi Zacharias (March 26, 1946- May 19, 2020) was a Christian who knew the Bible well and how Christ could change a life. Ravi Zacharias put his faith in Christ while in a hospital bed after a failed suicide attempt. You can see how this relates to AFTERLIFE and this is why I have purposely put many of his responses to the issues you have raised against the Bible. So much better to read his responses than Kath’s. Also many of the issues that AFTERLIFE brings up can only be dealt with satisfactorily with spiritual answers.

As you know I am writing you a series of letters on Solomon’s efforts to find a meaning and purpose to life. Solomon tried to find a meaning and purpose to life UNDER THE SUN in the Book of Ecclesiastes in all of the 6 “L” words and looked into  learning(1:16-18),laughter, ladies, luxuries,  and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). 

After Life has Tony giving his postman a hard time constantly: 

Postman Pat arrives at Tony’s door one morning exactly when Tony opens it:

Pat: Do you still want me to put it through the door?

Tony: Just give it to me.

Pat: Just a postcard from Mike and Beth whoever they are. 

Tony: Friends. What does it say?

Pat: It says they have been having a great time and Mike has been having diarrhea. 

Tony: Good. Let’s hope you are still are my postman when I am blind. 

On your Twitter Live broadcast on March 21, 2020 you commented:

One day I will be too fat and old to do any more. I will look back on my life. It will be just me on a big toilet with wires coming out of me. Just watching [television] and drinking. Just keeping me alive. I wake up and say “Hell, I didn’t die and I got to do it again. Nurse!” I will be just eating smoothies mixed with Vodka. That is my future. 

Skip’s Teachings > Bible from 30,000 Feet, The > Destination: Ecclesiastes 1-12

Skip Heitzig on ECCLESIASTES 12

Now watch this, very vivid description of old age. I have never ever in literature found a more picturesque description of age, than the next few verses.

Ecclesiastes 12:2
While the sun and the light — Verse 2, the moon, and the stars are not darken, and the clouds do not return after the rain; describes the fading mental powers that comes with old age. It is one of the marks of older people, their memory can sometimes — I have to say that, sometimes fade.

Ecclesiastes 12:3
“And the days when the keepers of the house tremble, those would be your arms and your hands that would defend from anybody trying to attack. The keepers of the house tremble, he starts shaking, your body shakes as you get older. And the strong men bow down, that’s your legs, that’s like the supporting pillars give way, you hobble. When the grinder cease, because they are few, what is that? It’s your teeth. Dentistry wasn’t what it is today, and you just lost teeth back in those days. You got two teeth to chew your food, and a meal could take quite some time. And those who look through the window grow dim. What’s that? Your eyesight, fades away, glasses are so thick you can burn ants with them.

I notice this as soon as I got into my 40s, I used to do this, then I was like that. And then pretty soon it’s like this. The elasticity is lost in the eyes, and you can’t focus, so I have always – well, I grew up wearing glasses, then I got contacts, and now as I get older, I have a contact that focuses in for the distance, and then one that focuses for the close, and I have to keep changing them every few years, because this happens. When the doors are shut in the streets, the ancient homes had courtyards, and that gate that led out into the street is what he is speaking about here, but this metaphorically, probably speaks of the face falling inward because you lose your grinders.

Right, make sense? And the sound of grinding is low. Some scholars believe this refers to the digestive system. Enough said, I am not going to describe how that works. Notice what’s next.When one rises up at the sound of a bird, you wake up a lot at night, and usually I have heard older people talk, my mom and dad they are like, how many times did you wake up last night? And start numbering how many times as they get older. And the daughters of music are brought low. What’s that? Your hearing, it’s not as sensitive as it is used to be. Those bones and membrane aren’t sensitive as they used to be in your ear. Everyone, sounds like they are mumbling, speak up.

Also they are afraid of height and terror in the way, fear of falling.When the almond tree blossoms. What’s that? That’s your hair turning white. Almond tree has white flowers in the spring, white blossoms. So, you get older. Of course, again, this was before the days of hair color, but I have got the almond tree happening here on the sides. The grasshopper is a burden, and desire fails, for men goes to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets. You know age is funny, and I know we have noticed this. When you are young, you think eternity is spread out before you, will never die, you will never get old, we have all thought that somehow.

But then as you get a little bit older, the years go faster, they clip by, and so you tell the kid, don’t worry we’ll do this next year. What? You might as well say, in the eternity that will happen. Now we say, I will do it next year. Good, and you put that off of two years; put it off a while, because it will happen so quickly.

Verse 13 and we will close, Verse 13 and 14. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. So here is the summary statement made by the searcher, made by the man who observed under the sun. Here is the summary statement, here is the basics. Here is the conclusion of the whole matter. Fear God and keep His Commandments, for this is man’s all. For God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or bad.

These three things I want you to walk away with, and they are all right here. Here is the summary statement of life from a guy who lived it all.

Number one, fear God. Remember what that means, fear God, when we went through proverbs? Reverential awe that produces loving submission to a Holy God, fear God.

Number two, obey God, keep His Commandments. Don’t just get enthusiastic; enthusiasm is a lot easier than obedience. You get worked up and worship and enthusiastic about Jesus, obedience, though harder than enthusiasm should follow a fear of the Lord, obey Him. Jesus said, “If you love Me, keep My Commandments”.

Number three, prepare to give an account.

Ecclesiastes 12:14
“God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or bad. Now six times in this course called the Ecclesiastes, Solomon mentions, “One day we are all going to stand before God and give an account for our lives”.

Think of this, think of this. If you are a believer tonight, if you are a believer this earth is the closest you will ever get to hell. Now that’s good news. If you are a believer tonight, no matter how you have suffered, no matter trials, how many losses you have had, as bad as it is that has ever been, you will never ever see hell. You have been saved from that. This is the closest you will ever get to it.

If you are an unbeliever tonight, and you don’t turn to Christ, this earth is the closest you will ever get to heaven. How sad is that? That’s like ultra-sad, that’s like way sad. Yet I hear unbelievers die, I always hear, when they die, I hear their relatives say, yeah, well, they are in heaven, up in the great golf course in the sky right now. No, they are not. This earth was as good as it got for them, if they don’t know Christ. So here’s the sum of it all. Give your life to Jesus Christ, fear God, keep His Commandment, for this is man’s all.

I will give you three summary statements, life is an opportunity, life without God is empty, death without God is a calamity.

Let’s pray, Heavenly Father, I thank You for the struggles and the journal that came from the struggles of Solomon. Thank You that we could learn from it tonight. I pray that these would be abiding lessons that would form our worldview that we wouldn’t just look at life under the S-U-N, but under the SON. As You rule and reign in our lives, things makes sense. I pray if anybody here doesn’t know You, they’ll make their commitment tonight. In Jesus name, Amen!

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The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002

PS: What is the meaning of life? Find it in the end of the open letter I wrote to you on April 23, 2020. 

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Below is the workforce of THE TAMBURY GAZETTE

—

Seen below is the third episode of AFTERLIFE (season 1) when Matt takes Tony to a comedy club with front row seats to cheer him up but it turns into disaster!!!

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Part 1 “Why have integrity in Godless Darwinian Universe where Might makes Right?”

Part 2 “My April 14, 2016 Letter to Ricky mentioned Book of Ecclesiastes and the Meaninglessness of Life”

Part 3 Letter about Brandon Burlsworth concerning suffering and pain and evil in the world.  “Why didn’t Jesus save her [from cancer]?” (Tony’s 10 year old nephew George in episode 2)

Part 4 Letter on Solomon on Death Tony in episode one, “It should be everyone’s moral duty to kill themselves.”

Part 5 Letter on subject of Learning in Ecclesiastes “I don’t read books of fiction but mainly science and philosophy”

Part 6 Letter on Luxuries in Ecclesiastes Part 6, The Music of AFTERLIFE (Part A)

Part 7 Letter on Labor in Ecclesiastes My Letter to Ricky on Easter in 2017 concerning Book of Ecclesiastes and the legacy of a person’s life work

Part 8 Letter on Liquor in Ecclesiastes Tony’s late wife Lisa told him, “Don’t get drunk all the time alright? It will only make you feel worse in the log run!”

Part 9 Letter on Laughter in Ecclesiastes , I said of laughter, “It is foolishness;” and of mirth, “What does it accomplish?” Ecclesiastes 2:2

Part 10 Final letter to Ricky on Ladies in Ecclesiastes “I gathered a chorus of singers to entertain me with song, and—most exquisite of all pleasures— voluptuous maidens for my bed…behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” Ecclesiastes 2:8-11.

Part 11 Letter about Daniel Stanhope and optimistic humanism  “If man has been kicked up out of that which is only impersonal by chance , then those things that make him man-hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication-are ultimately unfulfillable and thus meaningless.” (Francis Schaeffer)

Part 12 Letter on how pursuit of God is only way to get Satisfaction Dan Jarrell “[In Ecclesiastes] if one seeks satisfaction they will never find it. In fact, every pleasure will be fleeting and can not be sustained, BUT IF ONE SEEKS GOD THEN ONE FINDS SATISFACTION”

Part 13 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon realizing he will die just as a dog will die “For men and animals both breathe the same air, and both die. So mankind has no real advantage over the beasts; what an absurdity!” Ecclesiastes

Part 14 Letter to Stephen Hawking on 3 conclusions of humanism and Bertrand Russell destruction of optimistic humanism. “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms—no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”(Bertrand Russell, Free Man’s Worship)

Part 15 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Leonardo da Vinci and Solomon and Meaningless of life “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes Book of Ecclesiastes Part 15 “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes 2:17

Part 16 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon’s longing for death but still fear of death and 5 conclusions of humanism on life UNDER THE SUN. Francis Schaeffer “Life is just a series of continual and unending cycles and man is stuck in the middle of the cycle. Youth, old age, Death. Does Solomon at this point embrace nihilism? Yes!!! He exclaims that the hates life (Ecclesiastes 2:17), he longs for death (4:2-3) Yet he stills has a fear of death (2:14-16)”

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Mandeep Dhillon as Sandy on her first assignment in ‘After Life’. (Twitter)

A still from ‘After Life’ that captures the vibe of the Tambury Gazette. (Twitter)

Michael Scott of THE OFFICE (USA) with Ricky Gervais

After Life on Netflix stars Ricky Gervais as a bereaved husband (Image: Netflix)

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Psychiatrist played by Paul Kaye seen below.

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Tony Johnson with his dog Brandi seen below:

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Related posts:

Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on various issues Part I “Old Testament Bible Prophecy” includes the film TRUTH AND HISTORY and article ” Jane Roe became pro-life”

April 12, 2013 – 5:45 am

I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control  and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on fulfilled prophecy from the Bible Part 2

August 8, 2013 – 1:28 am

I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too.  I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry King’s Show. One of two most popular posts I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on fulfilled prophecy from the Bible Part 1

August 6, 2013 – 1:24 am

I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too.  I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry King’s Show. One of two most popular posts I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events |Tagged Bible Prophecy, john macarthur | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur: Fulfilled prophecy in the Bible? (Ezekiel 26-28 and the story of Tyre, video clips)

April 5, 2012 – 10:39 am

Prophecy–The Biblical Prophesy About Tyre.mp4 Uploaded by TruthIsLife7 on Dec 5, 2010 A short summary of the prophecy about Tyre and it’s precise fulfillment. Go to this link and watch the whole series for the amazing fulfillment from secular sources. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvt4mDZUefo________________ John MacArthur on the amazing fulfilled prophecy on Tyre and how it was fulfilled […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | Edit|Comments (1)

John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 2)

August 1, 2013 – 12:10 am

John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 2) I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too.  I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 1)

July 30, 2013 – 1:32 am

John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 1) I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too.  I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Adrian Rogers: “Why I believe the Bible is true”

July 9, 2013 – 8:38 am

Adrian Rogers – How you can be certain the Bible is the word of God Great article by Adrian Rogers. What evidence is there that the Bible is in fact God’s Word? I want to give you five reasons to affirm the Bible is the Word of God. First, I believe the Bible is the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Biblical Archaeology | Edit|Comments (0)

The Old Testament is Filled with Fulfilled Prophecy by Jim Wallace

June 24, 2013 – 9:47 am

Is there any evidence the Bible is true? Articles By PleaseConvinceMe Apologetics Radio The Old Testament is Filled with Fulfilled Prophecy Jim Wallace A Simple Litmus Test There are many ways to verify the reliability of scripture from both internal evidences of transmission and agreement, to external confirmation through archeology and science. But perhaps the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology, Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on various issues Part M “Old Testament prophecy fulfilled?”Part 3(includes film DEATH BY SOMEONE’S CHOICE)

April 19, 2013 – 1:52 am

  I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control  and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit|Comments (0)

Evidence for the Bible

March 27, 2013 – 9:43 pm

Here is some very convincing evidence that points to the view that the Bible is historically accurate. Archaeological and External Evidence for the Bible Archeology consistently confirms the Bible! Archaeology and the Old Testament Ebla tablets—discovered in 1970s in Northern Syria. Documents written on clay tablets from around 2300 B.C. demonstrate that personal and place […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | E

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After Life #1 Trailer

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After Life 2 Trailer

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On Saturday April 18, 2020 at 6pm in London and noon in Arkansas, I had a chance to ask Ricky Gervais a question on his Twitter Live broadcast which was  “Is Tony a Nihilist?” At the 20:51 mark Ricky answers my question. Below is the video:

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If Death is the end then what is the point Kath asks below:

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(Above) Tony and Anne on the bench at the graveyard where their spouses are buried.

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July 10,, 2020 
Ricky Gervais 

Dear Ricky,  

This is the 84th day in a row that I have written another open letter to you to comment on some of your episodes of AFTER LIFE, and then I wanted to pass along some evidence that indicates the Bible is historically accurate from Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop Book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?

As you know I am writing you a series of letters on Solomon’s efforts to find a meaning and purpose to life. Solomon tried to find a meaning and purpose to life UNDER THE SUN in the Book of Ecclesiastes in all of the 6 “L” words and looked into  learning(1:16-18),laughter, ladies, luxuries,  and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). 

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When Kath, asks, “If your an atheist, and you don’t believe in heaven and hell and all that, how come you don’t go around raping and murdering as much as you want?” Tony’s answer is, “I do. I do go around raping and murdering as much as I want, which is not at all.” Lenny adds, “Because he [Tony] has conscience.”

I agree that Tony has a God-given conscience as the Bible tells us:

Romans 1:18-19 (Amplified Bible) ” For God’s wrath and indignation are revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who in their wickedness REPRESS and HINDER the truth and make it inoperative. For that which is KNOWN about God is EVIDENT to them and MADE PLAIN IN THEIR INNER CONSCIOUSNESS, because God  has SHOWN IT TO THEM,”(emphasis mine)

Louise Antony comments:

Piety is doing what is pleasing to the gods, doing good and being good. Surely what is most pleasing of all then is someone who does good because it is good, because he or she understands what the good is and that she values it for itself and not for the prizes it might bring. Atheists if they commit themselves to justice, peace and the relief of suffering can only be doing so out of love for the good. Atheist have the opportunity to practice perfect piety.

Dr. Antony misses the boat here and I would ask her to watch Woody Allen’s film “Crimes and Misdemeanors”  and just tell me one reason that Judah should not eliminate his troublesome mistress who is about to break up his marriage and send him to prison out of spite?

William Lane Craig has rightly noted: 

If life ends at the grave, then it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Stalin or as a saint. As the Russian writer Dostoyevsky rightly said, ” If there is no immortality, then all things are permitted.“5 Given the finality of death, it really doesn’t matter how you live. So what do you say to someone that concludes that we may as well just live for selfinterest, live just as we please, for pleasure?

Here is a portion of this thought-provoking debate between William Lane Craig and the secular humanist Richard Taylor.

Is the Basis of Morality Natural or Supernatural?

William Lane Craig vs. Richard Taylor

Union College, Schenectady, New York, United States – October 8, 1993

(2) If naturalism is true, there is no moral accountability for one’s actions. Even if there were objective moral values under naturalism, they’re irrelevant because there is no moral accountability. If life ends at the grave, then it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Stalin or as a saint. As the Russian writer Dostoyevsky rightly said, ” If there is no immortality, then all things are permitted.“5 Given the finality of death, it really doesn’t matter how you live. So what do you say to someone that concludes that we may as well just live for selfinterest, live just as we please, for pleasure? Perhaps Professor Taylor would say to him that it’s in his best selfinterest to adopt a moral lifestyle. But clearly that’s not always true. We all know of situations in which morality runs smack in the face of selfinterest. That’s called temptation, right? Moreover, if one is sufficiently powerful, like a Ferdinand Marcos, or a Papa Doc Duvalier, or even a Donald Trump, one can pretty much ignore the dictates of conscience and live in pure selfindulgence. Acts of selfsacrifice become particularly inept in a naturalistic worldview. [tape unintelligible] but pure selfinterest. Sacrifice for another person would just be stupid. Thus the absence of moral accountability in the philosophy of naturalism makes the virtues of compassion and selfsacrifice hollow abstractions. Naturalism therefore fails to match supernaturalism in supplying the elements necessary for any sound moral foundation.

Humanist Roger Penrose Comments:

I tend to call myself an atheist versus agnostic but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have doubts. I don’t think the words convey appropriately the differences. I mean an agnostic is someone who doesn’t know and take the view that some religions could be right. I certainly think it would be highly unlikely that any existing religion in the sense of the stories that go along with it, particularly the Christian religion,  Christ having a particular role in this where as it doesn’t mean that God in a more metaphorical sense couldn’t exist. I don’t like using the term God because it has too much baggage with it, and you might think you could pray to this entity which doesn’t seem to me as necessary…

Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:

The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there. 

Instead of making a leap into the area of nonreason the better choice would be to investigate the claims that the Bible is a historically accurate book and that God created the universe and reached out to humankind with the Bible. Below is a piece of that evidence given by Francis Schaeffer concerning the accuracy of the Bible.

TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?)

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So the story goes on. We have stopped at only a few incidents in the sweep back to the year 1000 B.C. What we hope has emerged from this is a sense of the historical reliability of the Bible’s text. When the Bible refers to historical incidents, it is speaking about the same sort of “history” that historians examine elsewhere in other cultures and periods. This borne out by the fact that some of the incidents, some of the individuals, and some of the places have been confirmed by archaeological discoveries in the past hundred years has swept away the possibility of a naive skepticism about the Bible’s history. And what is particularly striking is that the tide has built up concerning the time before the year 1000 B.C. Our knowledge about the years 2500 B.C. to 1000 B.C. has vastly increased through discoveries sometimes of whole libraries and even of hitherto unknown people and languages.

There was a time, for example, when the Hittite people, referred to in the early parts of the Bible, were treated as fictitious by critical scholars. Then came the discoveries after 1906 at Boghaz Koi (Boghaz-koy) which not only gave us the certainty of their existence but stacks of details from their own archives!

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The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002

PS: What is the meaning of life? Find it in the end of the open letter I wrote to you on April 23, 2020. 

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Below is the workforce of THE TAMBURY GAZETTE 

—

Seen below is the third episode of AFTERLIFE (season 1) when Matt takes Tony to a comedy club with front row seats to cheer him up but it turns into disaster!!!

——

—-

—

Part 1 “Why have integrity in Godless Darwinian Universe where Might makes Right?”

Part 2 “My April 14, 2016 Letter to Ricky mentioned Book of Ecclesiastes and the Meaninglessness of Life”

Part 3 Letter about Brandon Burlsworth concerning suffering and pain and evil in the world.  “Why didn’t Jesus save her [from cancer]?” (Tony’s 10 year old nephew George in episode 2)

Part 4 Letter on Solomon on Death Tony in episode one, “It should be everyone’s moral duty to kill themselves.”

Part 5 Letter on subject of Learning in Ecclesiastes “I don’t read books of fiction but mainly science and philosophy”

Part 6 Letter on Luxuries in Ecclesiastes Part 6, The Music of AFTERLIFE (Part A)

Part 7 Letter on Labor in Ecclesiastes My Letter to Ricky on Easter in 2017 concerning Book of Ecclesiastes and the legacy of a person’s life work

Part 8 Letter on Liquor in Ecclesiastes Tony’s late wife Lisa told him, “Don’t get drunk all the time alright? It will only make you feel worse in the log run!”

Part 9 Letter on Laughter in Ecclesiastes , I said of laughter, “It is foolishness;” and of mirth, “What does it accomplish?” Ecclesiastes 2:2

Part 10 Final letter to Ricky on Ladies in Ecclesiastes “I gathered a chorus of singers to entertain me with song, and—most exquisite of all pleasures— voluptuous maidens for my bed…behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” Ecclesiastes 2:8-11.

Part 11 Letter about Daniel Stanhope and optimistic humanism  “If man has been kicked up out of that which is only impersonal by chance , then those things that make him man-hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication-are ultimately unfulfillable and thus meaningless.” (Francis Schaeffer)

Part 12 Letter on how pursuit of God is only way to get Satisfaction Dan Jarrell “[In Ecclesiastes] if one seeks satisfaction they will never find it. In fact, every pleasure will be fleeting and can not be sustained, BUT IF ONE SEEKS GOD THEN ONE FINDS SATISFACTION”

Part 13 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon realizing he will die just as a dog will die “For men and animals both breathe the same air, and both die. So mankind has no real advantage over the beasts; what an absurdity!” Ecclesiastes

Part 14 Letter to Stephen Hawking on 3 conclusions of humanism and Bertrand Russell destruction of optimistic humanism. “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms—no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”(Bertrand Russell, Free Man’s Worship)

Part 15 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Leonardo da Vinci and Solomon and Meaningless of life “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes Book of Ecclesiastes Part 15 “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes 2:17

Part 16 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon’s longing for death but still fear of death and 5 conclusions of humanism on life UNDER THE SUN. Francis Schaeffer “Life is just a series of continual and unending cycles and man is stuck in the middle of the cycle. Youth, old age, Death. Does Solomon at this point embrace nihilism? Yes!!! He exclaims that the hates life (Ecclesiastes 2:17), he longs for death (4:2-3) Yet he stills has a fear of death (2:14-16)”

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Mandeep Dhillon as Sandy on her first assignment in ‘After Life’. (Twitter)

A still from ‘After Life’ that captures the vibe of the Tambury Gazette. (Twitter)

Michael Scott of THE OFFICE (USA) with Ricky Gervais 

After Life on Netflix stars Ricky Gervais as a bereaved husband (Image: Netflix)

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Psychiatrist played by Paul Kaye seen below.

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Tony Johnson with his dog Brandi seen below:

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Related posts:

Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on various issues Part I “Old Testament Bible Prophecy” includes the film TRUTH AND HISTORY and article ” Jane Roe became pro-life”

April 12, 2013 – 5:45 am

I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control  and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on fulfilled prophecy from the Bible Part 2

August 8, 2013 – 1:28 am

I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too.  I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry King’s Show. One of two most popular posts I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on fulfilled prophecy from the Bible Part 1

August 6, 2013 – 1:24 am

I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too.  I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry King’s Show. One of two most popular posts I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events |Tagged Bible Prophecy, john macarthur | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur: Fulfilled prophecy in the Bible? (Ezekiel 26-28 and the story of Tyre, video clips)

April 5, 2012 – 10:39 am

Prophecy–The Biblical Prophesy About Tyre.mp4 Uploaded by TruthIsLife7 on Dec 5, 2010 A short summary of the prophecy about Tyre and it’s precise fulfillment. Go to this link and watch the whole series for the amazing fulfillment from secular sources. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvt4mDZUefo________________ John MacArthur on the amazing fulfilled prophecy on Tyre and how it was fulfilled […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | Edit|Comments (1)

John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 2)

August 1, 2013 – 12:10 am

John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 2) I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too.  I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 1)

July 30, 2013 – 1:32 am

John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 1) I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too.  I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Adrian Rogers: “Why I believe the Bible is true”

July 9, 2013 – 8:38 am

Adrian Rogers – How you can be certain the Bible is the word of God Great article by Adrian Rogers. What evidence is there that the Bible is in fact God’s Word? I want to give you five reasons to affirm the Bible is the Word of God. First, I believe the Bible is the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Biblical Archaeology | Edit|Comments (0)

The Old Testament is Filled with Fulfilled Prophecy by Jim Wallace

June 24, 2013 – 9:47 am

Is there any evidence the Bible is true? Articles By PleaseConvinceMe Apologetics Radio The Old Testament is Filled with Fulfilled Prophecy Jim Wallace A Simple Litmus Test There are many ways to verify the reliability of scripture from both internal evidences of transmission and agreement, to external confirmation through archeology and science. But perhaps the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology, Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on various issues Part M “Old Testament prophecy fulfilled?”Part 3(includes film DEATH BY SOMEONE’S CHOICE)

April 19, 2013 – 1:52 am

  I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control  and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit|Comments (0)

Evidence for the Bible

March 27, 2013 – 9:43 pm

Here is some very convincing evidence that points to the view that the Bible is historically accurate. Archaeological and External Evidence for the Bible Archeology consistently confirms the Bible! Archaeology and the Old Testament Ebla tablets—discovered in 1970s in Northern Syria. Documents written on clay tablets from around 2300 B.C. demonstrate that personal and place […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | E

Kath: You are an atheist?

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Adrian Rogers on Evolution

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Charles Darwin Autobiography

Francis Schaeffer “The Age of NONREASON”

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Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais

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Francis Schaeffer below:

Richard Dawkins vs John Lennox | The God Delusion Debate

Ben Stein vs. Richard Dawkins Interview

XXXX Peter Singer – The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews – Richard Dawkins

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Science Confirms the Bible with Ken Ham

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Schaeffer with his wife Edith in Switzerland.

Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

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Francis and Edith Schaeffer seen below:

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Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris 

Canary Islands 2014: Harold Kroto and Richard Dawkins

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September 18, 2019

Richard Dawkins c/o Richard Dawkins Foundation, 
Washington, DC 20005

Dear Mr. Dawkins,

i have enjoyed reading about a dozen of your books and some of the most intriguing were The God Delusion, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist, and Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science.

I am looking forward to reading Outgrowing God which is your latest book, and I have been reading several reviews of it. The best interviewer is Krishnan Guru-Murthy in my opinion. He did a great job of asking you some very insightful questions, and I thought your answers gave the audience a good feel for what is in the book.

On September 14, 2019 you tweeted out:

The Clergy Project provides support, community, and hope to clergy who have lost their faith and no longer believe in God. I’m proud of my role in its history: bit.ly/2lVgPRa

I responded by tweeting out:

In a 1994 debate with Phillip Johnson, the late William Provine insisted: “No ultimate foundations for ethics exist, no ultimate meaning in life exists, and free will is merely a human myth. These are all conclusions to which Darwin came quite clearly.”thedailyhatch.org/2016/08/25/

In a 1994 debate with Phillip Johnson, a leading figure in the intelligent design movement, the late evolutionary biologist William Provine insisted: “No ultimate foundations for ethics exist, no ultimate meaning in life exists, and free will is merely a human myth. These are all conclusions to which Darwin came quite clearly.”

Darwinism, the Meaninglessness of Life, and of Death

Richard Weikart April 8, 2016 4:31 AM | Permalinkhttp://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/04/darwinism_the_m102757.html&layout=button_count&show_faces=true&width=300&action=like&font=trebuchet+ms&colorscheme=light&height=21

In a video on YouTube, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne states that science has demonstrated that

the universe and life are pointless….Pointless in the sense that there is no externally imposed purpose or point in the universe. As atheists this is something that is manifestly true to us. We make our own meaning and purpose.

He went on:

Evolution is the greatest killer of belief that has ever happened on this planet because it showed that some of the best evidence for God, which was the design of animals and plants that so wonderfully matched their environment could be the result of this naturalistic, blind materialistic process of natural selection.

Coyne is by no means alone in claiming Darwinism, with its insistence that all organisms have arisen through chance events (mutations) without plan or purpose, leads logically to the position that human life has no meaning or purpose. In my book The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life, I provide many examples of evolutionary biologists and other intellectuals who argue Darwinism sweeps away the benighted notion that human life has meaning.

In a 1994 debate with Phillip Johnson, a leading figure in the intelligent design movement, the late evolutionary biologist William Provine insisted: “No ultimate foundations for ethics exist, no ultimate meaning in life exists, and free will is merely a human myth. These are all conclusions to which Darwin came quite clearly.”

However, as I also explain in detail in my new book, many Darwinists are unable to really live in accord with their own philosophy. For instance, Coyne has stated that evolution “says that there is no special purpose for your life, because it is a naturalistic philosophy. We have no more extrinsic purpose than a squirrel or an armadillo.” But, in a different blog post, Coyne waxed indignant at those who have blamed mass shootings, such as those at Columbine, on Darwinism. (Coyne will likely be enraged that I explain Eric Harris’s Darwinian motivations in The Death of Humanity.) But why does Coyne care about these people, whose lives — according to his philosophy — have no meaning or purpose? He evidently recognizes that the lives of those teenagers gunned down at Columbine did have some point or purpose after all, greater than squirrels or armadillos.

Duke University philosophy professor Alex Rosenberg shows the same inconsistency. He co-authored an article in 2003, “Darwin’s Nihilistic Idea: Evolution and the Meaninglessness of Life,” in which he dismissed morality as an illusion. However, Rosenberg assured us that we have nothing to fear, because nihilism has no effect on our behavior, since “Most of us just couldn’t persistently be mean, even if we tried.” Rosenberg needs to take some of my history courses — or just read the news — if he doesn’t think many people could be mean to each other.

In a 2013 debate with William Lane Craig, Rosenberg objected to some of Craig’s arguments as “morally offensive,” because some of his relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. But if life is meaningless and morality is an illusion, why does it matter if Hitler killed millions? That would be just another meaningless event in the meaningless flow of history. Rosenberg apparently knows better.

Despite what they may say, many Darwinists are fully aware that human lives have meaning and purpose, no matter how loudly they deny it.

Dr. Weikart is professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, and Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture; his new book, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life, has just been released.

Photo credit: ESO/H. Dahle [CC BY 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

I have spent alot of time talking about Woody Allen films on my blog and looking at his worldview. He has a hopeless, meaningless, nihilistic worldview that believes we are going to turn to dust and there is no afterlife. Even though he has this view he has taken the opportunity to look at the weaknesses of his own secular view. I salute him for doing that. That is why I have returned to his work over and over and presented my own Christian worldview as an alternative.

My interest in Woody Allen is so great that I have a “Woody Wednesday” on my blog www.thedailyhatch.org every week. Also I have done over 30 posts on the historical characters mentioned in his film “Midnight in Paris.” (Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway,T.S.Elliot,  Cole Porter,Paul Gauguin,  Luis Bunuel, and Pablo Picassowere just a few of the characters.) Francis Schaeffer also discussed Woody Allen several times in his writings on modern culture. Here is a section that again mentions the nihilistic conclusions that Schaeffer says that Woody Allen has come to and Schaeffer salutes Allen for being consistent with his Godless worldview unlike many of the optimistic humanists that I have encountered.

Materialistic Humanism: The World-View of Our Era
What has produced the inhumanity we have been considering in the previous chapters is that society in the West has adopted a world-view which says that all reality is made up only of matter. This view is sometimes referred to as philosophic materialism, because it holds that only matter exists; sometimes it is called naturalism, because it says that no supernatural exists. Humanism which begins from man alone and makes man the measure of all things usually is materialistic in its philosophy. Whatever the label, this is the underlying world-view of our society today. In this view the universe did not get here because it was created by a “supernatural” God. Rather, the universe has existed forever in some form, and its present form just happened as a result of chance events way back in time.
Society in the West has largely rested on the base that God exists and that the Bible is true. In all sorts of ways this view affected the society. The materialistic or naturalistic or humanistic world-view almost always takes a superior attitude toward Christianity. Those who hold such a view have argued that Christianity is unscientific, that it cannot be proved, that it belongs simply to the realm of “faith.” Christianity, they say, rests only on faith, while humanism rests on facts.
Professor Edmund R. Leach of Cambridge University expressed this view clearly:
Our idea of God is a product of history. What I now believe about the supernatural is derived from what I was taught by my parents, and what they taught me was derived from what they were taught, and so on. But such beliefs are justified by faith alone, never by reason, and the true believer is expected to go on reaffirming his faith in the same verbal formula even if the passage of history and the growth of scientific knowledge should have turned the words into plain nonsense.78
So some humanists act as if they have a great advantage over Christians. They act as if the advance of science and technology and a better understanding of history (through such concepts as the evolutionary theory) have all made the idea of God and Creation quite ridiculous.
This superior attitude, however, is strange because one of the most striking developments in the last half-century is the growth of a profound pessimism among both the well-educated and less-educated people. The thinkers in our society have been admitting for a long time that they have no final answers at all.

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Take Woody Allen, for example. Most people know his as a comedian, but he has thought through where mankind stands after the “religious answers” have been abandoned. In an article in Esquire (May 1977), he says that man is left with:
… alienation, loneliness [and] emptiness verging on madness…. The fundamental thing behind all motivation and all activity is the constant struggle against annihilation and against death. It’s absolutely stupefying in its terror, and it renders anyone’s accomplishments meaningless. As Camus wrote, it’s not only that he (the individual) dies, or that man (as a whole) dies, but that you struggle to do a work of art that will last and then you realize that the universe itself is not going to exist after a period of time. Until those issues are resolved within each person – religiously or psychologically or existentially – the social and political issues will never be resolved, except in a slapdash way.
Allen sums up his view in his film Annie Hall with these words: “Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.”
Many would like to dismiss this sort of statement as coming from one who is merely a pessimist by temperament, one who sees life without the benefit of a sense of humor. Woody Allen does not allow us that luxury. He speaks as a human being who has simply looked life in the face and has the courage to say what he sees. If there is no personal God, nothing beyond what our eyes can see and our hands can touch, thenWoody Allen is right: life is both meaningless and terrifying. As the famous artist Paul Gauguin wrote on his last painting shortly before he tried to commit suicide: “Whence come we? What are we? Whither do we go?” The answers are nowhere, nothing, and nowhere.

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The humanist H. J. Blackham has expressed this with a dramatic illustration:
On humanist assumptions, life leads to nothing, and every pretense that it does not is a deceit. If there is a bridge over a gorge which spans only half the distance and ends in mid-air, and if the bridge is crowded with human beings pressing on, one after the other they fall into the abyss. The bridge leads nowhere, and those who are pressing forward to cross it are going nowhere….It does not matter where they think they are going, what preparations for the journey they may have made, how much they may be enjoying it all. The objection merely points out objectively that such a situation is a model of futility.79
One does not have to be highly educated to understand this. It follows directly from the starting point of the humanists’ position, namely, that everything is just matter. That is, that which has existed forever and ever is only some form of matter or energy, and everything in our world now is this and only this in a more or less complex form. Thus, Jacob Bronowskisays in The Identity of Man (1965): “Man is a part of nature, in the same sense that a stone is, or a cactus, or a camel.” In this view, men and women are by chance more complex, but not unique.
Within this world-view there is no room for believing that a human being has any final distinct value above that of an animal or of nonliving matter. People are merely a different arrangement of molecules. There are two points, therefore, that need to be made about the humanist world-view. First, the superior attitude toward Christianity – as if Christianity had all the problems and humanism had all the answers – is quite unjustified. The humanists of the Enlightenment two centuries ago thought they were going to find all the answers, but as time has passed, this optimistic hope has been proved wrong. It is their own descendants, those who share their materialistic world-view, who have been saying louder and louder as the years have passed, “There are no final answers.”
Second, this humanist world-view has also brought us to the present devaluation of human life – not technology and not overcrowding, although these have played a part. And this same world-view has given us no limits to prevent us from sliding into an even worse devaluation of human life in the future.
So it is naive and irresponsible to imagine that this world-view will reverse the direction in the future. A well-meaning commitment to “do what is right” will not be sufficient. Without a firm set of principles that flows out of a world-view that gives adequate reason for a unique value to all human life, there cannot be and will not be any substantial resistance to the present evil brought on by the low view of human life we have been considering in previous chapters. It was the materialistic world-view that brought in the inhumanity; it must be a different world-view that drives it out.
An emotional uneasiness about abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and the abuse of genetic knowledge is not enough. To stand against the present devaluation of human life, a significant percentage of people within our society must adopt and live by a world-view which not only hopes or intends to give a basis for human dignity but which really does. The radical movements of the sixties were right to hope for a better world; they were right to protest against the shallowness and falseness of our plastic society. But their radicalness lasted only during the life span of the adolescence of their members. Although these movements claimed to be radical, they lacked a sufficient root. Their world-view was incapable of giving life to the aspirations of its adherents. Why? Because it, too – like the society they were condemning – had no sufficient base. So protests are not enough. Having the right ideals is not enough. Even those with a very short memory, those who can look back only to the sixties, can see that there must be more than that. A truly radical alternative has to be found.
But where? And how?

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Francis Schaeffer in Art and the Bible noted, “Many modern artists, it seems to me, have forgotten the value that art has in itself. Much modern art is far too intellectual to be great art. Many modern artists seem not to see the distinction between man and non-man, and it is a part of the lostness of modern man that they no longer see value in the work of art as a work of art.” 

Many modern artists are left in this point of desperation that Schaeffer points out and it reminds me of the despair that Solomon speaks of in Ecclesiastes.  Christian scholar Ravi Zacharias has noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term ‘under the sun.’ What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system, and you are left with only this world of time plus chance plus matter.” THIS IS EXACT POINT SCHAEFFER SAYS SECULAR ARTISTS ARE PAINTING FROM TODAY BECAUSE THEY BELIEVED ARE A RESULT OF MINDLESS CHANCE.

The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221, United States

Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

The Basis of Human Dignity by Francis Schaeffer

Richard Dawkins, founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Credit: Don Arnold Getty Images

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Francis Schaeffer in 1984

Christian Manifesto by Francis Schaeffer

Francis Schaeffer in 1982

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Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Episode 1

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Garik Israelian, Stephen Hawking, Alexey Leonov, Brian May, Richard Dawkins and Harry Kroto

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Dark History of Evolution-Henry Morris, Ph.D.

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Featured artist is Andy Warhol

Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans and the Decline of Connoisseurship

Above: A 2007 visitor to MoMA in New York City takes in Andy Warhol’s 1962 set of 20 by 16 inch canvasses depicting 32 varieties of Campbell’s soup.

On June 29th I published a blog titled “Robert Hughes and the Warhol Faultline: Where Do You Stand?” In that blog, I included the following personal observation about Andy Warhol:

“I don’t think Warhol was stupid — I think he was a genius as a social observer and marketeer — but I also think he did genuine damage to the field of art.”

A week later I learned that MOCA Los Angeles will be exhibiting the complete set of Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soup can paintings through September 7th. I’ll use the opportunity — and the soup cans — to say about more about just what I think the damage was.

Before I get started, I need to offer a disclaimer. What I am about to say comes only from my intuitions, and not from any rigorous or reasonable study of Warhol or his works. I am going to take advantage of the wide latitude available to me as a blogger to let my own biases, personal issues and art world conspiracy theories guide my commentary.

I think of Andy Warhol’s soup cans as a statement about the decline and increasing irrelevance of connoisseurship. The word connoisseur comes from the French term conoistre which means roughly “to know” or “to know intimately.” The dictionary tells us that a connoisseur is “a person with expert knowledge or training, especially in the fine arts,” or “a person of informed and discriminating taste.” By bringing a representation of mundane consumer choices into an art context I feel that Warhol was saying “In the future you will be choosing art the same way you shop for groceries.”

To choose between Golden Mushroom and Scotch Broth doesn’t take much effort, and Campbell’s is and was an established brand. Warhol, who became one of the art world’s leading brands not long after he exhibited his soup cans, was becoming clear in his mind that if he could become famous collectors wouldn’t need to make fine distinctions in choosing his works. Warhol, who had absorbed much of what the sociologist and media theorist Marshall McLuhan had to say, was convinced that fame, and its cousin — the name brand — would increasingly subvert our decision-making faculties.

The soup can series stands for the situation of all consumers in a modern, capitalist, industrial society. We get to “choose” from groups of factory produced items whose packaging and labeling attempt to convince us that we are indeed choosing items of quality. I must be a bit Marxist in my views of this, as I do believe that the main goal of modern marketing is to give us the illusion of choices to screen out the mundane origins and the lack of variety in the products that dominate our markets and our lives as consumers.

Warhol correctly prophesied, and perhaps contributed to, the McDonaldization of aesthetic culture. According to sociologist Georger Ritzer, McDonaldization is characterized by culture moving away from the traditional motivations of morality, custom and emotion and becomes more interested in efficiency and rational thought. It is the kind of culture you get in a society consumed by thinking about money, production, marketing and consumption.

Although the soup cans images were not created using photo-silkscreening, as were many of his later works, they were executed in what have been characterized as “semi-mechanical” methods. I call the soup can series “works” because I just can’t bear to call them paintings. If anything, they are an open-casket funeral for the traditional of painting. Just as the factory made object wiped out hand work and decoration in the late 19th century, Warhol’s aesthetics did away with the connection between the hand and the sensory imagination. Morality — which other modernists had also tended by bypass — was totally gone.

The soup cans, seen together, can be seen as a still-life. The tradition of the still life, so full of symbols and moral suggestions comes to a dead end in Warhol. The viewer of a still-life used to be invited to participate by pondering plentitude, gluttony, or vanity. In Warhol, all that is left is for the viewer, if inclined, to reach out, choose a soup and grab the can opener. Choices, in Warhol, are innocent and amoral.

Anyone who has taken a course in modern art has heard all the various proclamations about the moment painting “died,” but I think Warhol out-did Malevich and all the others who tried to assassinate painting. The way he drained the sensuality and nuance right out of it, replaced it with a mechanical approach and used appropriated subject matter is devastating. If you think Warhol was great — and believe me, I know that many, many people do — I would think that it was his effective attack on painting that you might consider one of his greatest accomplishments. No doubt about it: he changed things.

Honestly, I could make the 2 hour drive to LA to see the soup cans at Warhol, but Warhol’s works are among the very least interesting works in terms of being seen in person. They do well in reproduction, which isn’t surprising since Warhol’s key works tend to bereproductions.

The things about the tradition of painting that I so love are the human elements: touch, the connection between the hand and the mind, discovery, spontaneity, surprise, difference, eccentricity, transcendence, nuance, these are the things that Warhol felt he could do without. They, and a billion other things that there are no words for, are the qualities that Warhol’s rubber-stamp approach were meant to expunge. These tangible and intangible qualities also represent much of what connoisseurs, critics, afficianados and experts have traditionally done the work of trying to discern and discuss.

If you were to argue that Warhols work does have the qualities above, I would tell you that his work tends to quote or even parody those qualities. In his aesthetic the mechanical and the dispassionate were elevated, while the human and the passionate were extinguished. As a result, the set of faculties that a person uses in appreciating a Warhol is remarkably sparse. Warhol designed his works for a very, very broad demographic: everyone.

Believe me, I am not saying that Warhol didn’t leave some things to be written about. Case in point: I am writing about him now. Art dealer Irving Blum, who first showed the soup cans in his Los Angeles gallery has stated that spending time with the works convinced them that they are “complicated” and I agree with that. However, I think the complications are intellectual, sociological and philosophical. Warhol made painfully boring objects, and that is the interesting part, the complicated part.

In an insightful article that appeared in the LA Times on July 10th, critic Christopher Knight argues that the genius of Pop Art was that it provided an “acute critique of high culture’s supercilious conceits.” I like Knight’s thinking, and perhaps my real quarrel with Warhol and his soup cans is that we have a profound disagreement over what matters in artistic culture and who it is meant to address.

If you go to LA, see the Warhol soup cans and find them fascinating, more power to you. I do think that they may have what you could call a “relic” fascination, and by that I mean that they are historic objects and that they can evoke a direct physical connection to an era and a place. Yes, they were made in Andy Warhol’s silver factory studio while the beautiful people were around, and you may want to connect with that.

By the way, am I the only super-serious one who thinks that by naming his working studio “The Factory” Warhol in fact mocked the situation of workers in real factories? In retrospect, just how cool was that whole scene?

After you leave MOCA, get on the Pasadena freeway and head up to the Huntington Museum and Gardens, and there you will find a single Warhol soup can: “Small Crushed Campbell’s Soup Can (Beef Noodle)” from 1962. You may find it dull, as I did, but hanging on the opposite wall was Richard Diebenkorn’s 1954 “Berkeley #24,” on loan from the Norton Simon Museum. Compared to the Warhol it looked refreshingly uncertain in its attempts to balance representation and abstraction.

In the age of Wal-Mart, where simply “liking things” seems increasingly sinister, I’m hungry for painting and all of its rich human traces and connections. Maybe we live in a world where “Rembrandt” is a toothpaste, but every educated person should know who Rembrandt was before he was a brand. Warhol is a brand name too, but not one that I will be buying anytime soon. I don’t have the cash, or the appetite for what he served up.

Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Cans
July 9-September 7, 2011
MOCA Los Angeles, Grand Avenuue

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