Author Bart Ehrman — getting rich by attacking Christianity

By Gregg Wendorf
Advance News Journal

As I mentioned last week, my best buddy, Roberto, was in hospice. I visited him Sunday, Feb. 11th when he was still conscious to a degree, still able to smile at something funny. By Monday, he was no longer conscious, on heavy doses of morphine, sucking oxygen to stay alive. By Tuesday, he was dead.

So, in the span of basically four weeks, he lost his life to some form of cancer, most likely renal (kidney). Looking at him a month ago, talking to him, no one would have a clue that a deadly tumor was hiding beneath his skin, seeding cancer cells to all parts of his body. Then, he was still laughing, cracking jokes, hugging his wife and grandkids.

Such is life, say the cynics.

For most of us, we’ll die in our 70s or 80s, based on current medical data. It will either be a fast death or a slow death, usually from one of the Big Four: a heart-related disease, cancer, diabetes Type 2 problems, or some neurological degenerative disorder.

Robert died within the span of 3.5 to 4 weeks. My other buddy Craig, who died two years ago, lived through five months of hell before esophageal cancer finally delivered the lethal blow.

Slow death vs. fast death.

As we grow older and see family and friends die, our parents, grandparents, is it any wonder that we think more often about death than we did when we were decades younger?

I’ve been reading a fascinating book lately that my son gave me for my last birthday. Hopefully, not my “last,” in the final literal sense, but the one I celebrated last August.

With Robert in mind, I now choose my words carefully.

This book published last year, “OUTLIVE – The Science & Art of Longevity,” was written by an M.D., Peter Attia. Wish it was available 20 years ago, but then again, I probably wouldn’t have read it 20 years younger. Two decades ago, I had no health problems. I still considered myself relatively invincible to death and disease, although images of my mom dying from ALS always played with my head, to be honest.

Now when I see something pass by about “living longer,” I usually take an interest. If Willie Nelson and Clint Eastwood can still function relatively well into their 90s, why can’t the rest of us?

Okay, good genes have a LOT to do with it, but so does the way in which one chooses to live their life. For example, exercise, what we drink and eat, paying attention to our emotional health, which is the essence of the book that my son gifted me.

The Faith Healer

What made it easier for my two buds, Craig and Robert, to pass from this world into the next was their total belief in God and an afterlife. Because of that, death had lost its sting and they were no longer afraid of dying as death grew ever closer.

Granted, if we’re honest to ourselves, none of us knows for sure if there is a God or if there is a Heaven. We can hope and pray all day long, but it doesn’t make it so.

These books, stories, about near-death experiences (NDEs), where people in the ER, for example, claim to have gone to Heaven and seen Jesus, and then returned to the land of the living, I’m never sure if the writer is trying to make money, if it was a hallucination as their bodies drifted toward death only to recover, what? Or was it real?

What I do know without a doubt is that faith in God has helped people accept the inevitable — I have a fatal disease from which I will never recover. I am going to die with no hope of living another year. Or my spouse, with whom I’ve been married 50 years, is going to die.

Faith in God has also helped their family members accept that their loved ones are no longer going to be around come next Christmas. No more birthday celebrations.

I’ve seen it first-hand, in both family and friends. They can accept death with far less anxiety, fear, because they are certain, they have hope, that the grave, cremation, isn’t all there is to life. They believe they are going to a better place.

Even if they’re wrong, let’s just say the atheists are right, this is all there is to this life: happiness, pain, pleasure, tears, tragedy, and sadness. There is no god, no heaven. We’re young once, and then we grow old and feeble. That’s it, end of story. Hello, grave; goodbye, life.

How would that make anyone happy as they face death?

Debbie Downer

Seeing first-hand how faith has helped people deal with death is why I hold such contempt for a best-selling author by the name of Bart Ehrman.

He was once an Evangelical, but now considers himself an agnostic (has no belief about God one way or the other).

Ehrman sells tons of books (“Misquoting Jesus,” etc.) discounting the New Testament, makes millions off the 30 or so books he’s written and sold at Amazon and Barnes & Noble while working as a tenured professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I’ve read a few of his books. I’ve listened to a few of his debates on YouTube, and he can easily poke holes in scripture. With the amount of scholarship he has under his belt, it’s not hard to do if one wants to abandon all faith.

Clearly, there are discrepancies, contradictions, between the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), which Ehrman loves to underscore.

For people of faith, though, like my buddies Craig and Robert, Ehrman’s books, his agnostic message, doesn’t detract from the bigger picture — there is a beautiful afterlife that does indeed exist.

I think to myself, why do that, though? Why cast doubts on religious faith, religious traditions like Christianity, which is still the world’s largest religion, population wise, approximately 1.8 billion.

A writer and professor like Ehrman sure isn’t poking holes in the Quran. He’s not slamming Islam. He knows better, because he wouldn’t last long. So instead, he chooses to slam Christianity and the Bible. If people choose to believe a certain way, why would anyone choose to essentially discount what they hold most dear, if not for money? Do what they can to tear down any hope of an afterlife? Remove the hope that people have as they move toward the grave, hoping that heaven does indeed exist, and that there is a loving God waiting at the end of the road, willing and ready to welcome them home?

I’m not sure that I believe in a literal hell, but if there is one, it’s people like Ehrman, who probably deserve to end up there. Not roasting in hellfire, just apart from a wonderful afterlife where we can play pool all day long, hang out with friends and family, with no fear of pain and death.

Because removing hope from the dying, and the family and friends left behind, has to be one of the worst sins one can commit.

All for the love of money.