Straight answers to real questions
"Always be ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you." (1 Peter 3:15)
I have written close to 3,000 answers on Quora. People ask about the Bible, the occult, UFOs, creation, prophecy, psychology, conspiracy theories, the trombone, and plenty more. Most of those answers are buried in Quora's feed. These are some of the best, sorted by topic so you are not looking at a wall of links.
Click a topic to open it. Each answer opens on Quora in a new tab, so this page stays open.
For longer articles, go to Writings. For the music, go back home.
The titles here are my own short versions of the Quora questions and may be tightened later. Each link goes to the original question on Quora.
How to actually read the thing: context, clear verses over unclear ones, Greek words, and whether an ordinary person can understand it without a priest.
Fifty years of daily reading: Genesis to Revelation as one connected story.
You do not need a priest or a scholar standing between you and God's Word.
Is it circular reasoning, or just good reading? Context of the book and the whole Bible.
Pull a verse out of its setting and you can make it say anything.
A practical way to put four eyewitness accounts side by side.
What Matthew 16:18 actually says about "the rock" and what it does not say.
Is the Bible a history book or a collection of myths?
What happens when Scripture overrules what you were taught.
From mocker to believer in 1973, and what changed after.
Hidden in plain sight: Colossians 1:26-27, the Gentiles, and the third heaven.
The centurion, the paid-off tomb guards, and why Rome had every reason to stay quiet.
Constantine Simonides, Codex Sinaiticus, and why the "oldest manuscripts" argument deserves a closer look.
An honest "I'm less sure than I used to be": soul versus spirit and Hebrews 4:12.
The word Roman creditors and tax collectors stamped on a debt that was paid off.
How to read morally troubling stories: the full cultural context, without editing out the supernatural.
Skip "how do I feel about it?" Ask how the original audience heard it, then read the whole Bible at least once.
Hebrews 5:11–14 and Melchizedek, and why the book is mostly the "milk" of the gospel.
Created beings that never end versus a God with no beginning, existing outside space and time.
No. He changed the priesthood from Levi to Melchizedek, and He is now our High Priest forever.
The Old Testament about 34 times, the New about 147. The Word is alive, and the questions keep coming.
The Berenstain Bears threw me too. Why the Mandela Effect can't touch what Scripture says happened or will happen.
Faith versus mere agreement, forgiveness, assurance, hell, heaven, and what living it out looks like at home.
Saving faith is trust in Christ, not just agreeing with facts about Him.
"I never knew you" — who Jesus is talking to, and why it matters.
Election and the Great Commission are not enemies.
Forgiveness that requires repentance versus love that has no conditions.
A common Christian mistake: thinking you must forgive the unrepentant.
Romans 1, the age of accountability, and a near-drowning a month before my conversion.
Hint: it is not one long sermon.
A simple three-chapters-a-day routine that works.
I was at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa in the 1970s. Here is what the movie left out.
Leaving the faith for four years, coming back, and finding that the "unclear" verses were often the clearest ones.
Reincarnation versus an eternal physical body, and what happened when the spirits left.
In 1972 an occult-steeped 8th grader prayed, "If you exist and have truth for me, let me know." A year later I was a Christian.
Yosemite at four, feeling at home in Latvia, and whether eternity could ever get boring.
Matthew 7 in context, Matthew 18's steps for confronting sin, and the difference between judging and condemning.
Both. James 1:27 uses the word thrêskeia: help orphans and widows, and stay unstained by the world.
Links in a chain leading to faith, and Lazarus as a preview of resurrection, not just resuscitation.
Every five-year-old already does. The atheists I've known didn't reason their way out; they felt let down by God.
Method first: let Scripture interpret Scripture. These answers are about how to read prophecy, not about picking dates.
Compare Scripture with Scripture, let the Old Testament define Revelation's symbols, and stay humble about what is still unclear.
God's pattern of unexpected delays, from Eve to Daniel, and why tachu means "quickly," like a tachometer, not "soon."
Reading the whole Bible through in 1995–96 moved me to a post-tribulation view. No dates set.
A boy reads every detail about Disneyland, then gets taken to a vacant lot and told not to take the book so literally.
From Genesis 3:15 on, every part of Scripture points toward God's finale. Salvation isn't finished until the resurrection.
Revelation 1:1, the stars God named, the Sphinx's virgin head and lion's body, and the gospel told in the zodiac before astrology twisted it.
"The fulness of time" (Galatians 4:4), Daniel's weeks pointing to the first coming, and why Jesus Christ Superstar got it wrong.
More coming. This list is short on purpose. Each prophecy answer gets read before it goes up here. For the full treatment, see the prophecy articles on the Writings page.
A trained scientist's take on the Flood, fossil dating, and what DNA says about the Table of Nations.
Ancient-alien theories meet a scientist who believes the Flood was real.
Do fossils really overturn a biblical chronology? Look at the assumptions.
Genesis 10 in the age of 23andMe.
Plot the ages from Noah to King David and you get a change-of-state curve Moses couldn't have known to fake.
A headless fly tried to put its own head back on. Science is still far behind on living things.
I measured moonlit pavement as cooler than the shade. Maybe old wives' tales deserve a second look.
A tongue-in-cheek answer written as an evolutionist, listing every creationist argument it can't answer.
Job's cave-dwellers, Behemoth and Leviathan: they are in there if you know where to look.
A sterile earth, no food for the first cell, amino-acid chirality, and the limits of AI.
What the genealogies and the Hebrew word yom do to the old-earth compromise.
Angular versus horizontal velocity, what satellite mission control taught me about orbits, and why near-perfect orbits point to a Creator.
What happened when I had science classes look up both answers in the same textbook, and why I hold to a young universe.
The fountains of the deep in Genesis 7:11, and Peleg, "for in his days was the earth divided."
A Big Bang PhD candidate who walked away from the theory, and why the scientific method can only disprove.
More coming. Also see the Open-Mind Tests and science articles on the Writings page.
From someone who was there: spells, spirits, astrology, hypnosis, and how deception actually works.
As a former warlock: the spells had no power. The spirits only pretended I controlled them.
The Book of Enoch, the origin of demons, and which "Enoch" books to avoid.
What pulls them in, and what the Bible warns about it.
Discernment is not optional, especially now.
The spiritual side of hypnosis, and the myth of being open-minded.
A Civil War captain's spirit, a pendulum kit, and who was really controlling whom.
Reading Seth Speaks, a night of nightmares, and what happened when I prayed and read on.
"You won't marry until 28." I married at 28. Plus why I turned down a Psychic Hotline job.
Six junior-high disciples, a coven's veiled threat, and being banned from a school for exposing psychic tricks.
Every house I lived in until I married was "haunted." What the spirits told me, and why you can't trust it.
I lost my own abilities at 14, and later put psychic claims to the test.
A government insider's tip to my pastor, reverse psychology, and the theory I formed in 1974: the Antichrist may claim to be an alien.
The "watchers," demons in military ranks (Ephesians 6:12), and the two times I saw UFOs while I was deep in the occult.
A former occultist on correlation vs. causation, and why magic "works" just often enough to hook you.
Twenty-nine years in haunted houses, spirits that lie about who they are, and why the Bible says they aren't the departed.
Subbing a high-school psychology class, I staged three Psychic Hotline calls and then showed the students how I did it.
I used to think I could. How spirits can plant the same thought in two people, and how much our body language gives away.
More coming. Also see Frightful Things to Come? and My Testimony.
From an MA in Counseling Psychology: how we change our beliefs, the many kinds of intelligence, polymaths, what our voices give away, and the patterns that run families and marriages.
We treat our beliefs like friends and family, so letting one go means grieving it.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance: what each stage looks like when an old belief is giving way.
IQ measures only a slice. From being called "stupid" in second grade to an engineering degree, and why non-analytical thinking is intelligence too.
Get your childhood curiosity back. "Jack of all trades, master of none" is a lie.
We all start out as polymaths. Didactic schooling kills curiosity, and knowledge is synergistic.
Body language and tone of voice: what we communicate before we ever say a word.
You can't fake your tone for long. Truthfulness, self-applied cognitive therapy, and an engineer's "fixing mode" in marriage.
Dysfunctional families, marriages, and getting out of the cycle.
The DSM, cognitive therapy, my own fight with anxiety, and why some "constructs" don't fit reality.
Why my "ADD" turned out to be a gift, and why we shouldn't be quick to label people.
Perfect logic with wrong inputs, emotional investment in beliefs, and Festus calling Paul mad.
Musical intelligence, the cat on a noisy street, and the coins everyone turned around for.
What giving IQ tests taught me: the gap between "gifted" and "genius" is mostly photographic memory.
A year of cognitive therapy for lifelong anxiety, why the real culprit was serotonin, and why sin still matters.
Four reasons it is closer to alchemy: the single-school rule, the DSM revisions, the Kinsey Report, and insurance codes.
Flat earth, QAnon, the Illuminati, COVID, the atomic bomb, and the New World Order: how people come to believe what they believe, and how to test a claim instead of just mocking it or swallowing it.
What "open-minded" really means, and why the label cuts both ways.
Why an honest question can set off otherwise kind people.
Labels as a shortcut to avoid thinking.
The mental mechanisms behind belief, from a counseling-psychology background.
What believing and passing a theory along does for the person sharing it.
The motives behind passing along a story you do not even believe.
The psychological traits of people who question what most accept at face value.
Researching a claim versus simply wanting it to be true.
Intelligence is not the same as discernment.
Weighing who is behind it and why it caught on.
How to get your footing back when fear has taken over your thinking.
What the phrase means, and a biblical perspective on it.
Belief, mental illness, and the danger of forced treatment.
Children are natural scientists until school hands them dogma. Plus quarantining the healthy, and getting back to the Socratic method.
Socratic versus didactic learning, and music as "logic and programming for artists."
I set out in 2015 to refute a flat-earth video and ended up convinced. Origen, Hellenism, and what raqia (the firmament) really means.
The anomalies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet declaration of war that actually ended it, and whether nukes ever existed.
A former radar engineer on frequencies and living tissue, Wuhan's early 5G rollout, and the 1918 Fort Riley transmitter.
Temple Square, Freemasonry, the Order of the Arrow, and why I believe Satan runs both the "black hats" and the "white hats."
A loaded question gets a deadpan answer. Tongue firmly in cheek.
The resurrection (no one dies for a lie he knows is a lie) and what I saw for myself at Dealey Plaza.
A trained scientist on what the scientific method can and can't settle, and an airline admission about fuel additives.
Isaiah 40:22 uses chug (circle), not dur (ball). A Hebrew word study for both sides.
Trombone technique and range, writing for brass, why music hits us the way it does, and where creativity comes from.
Resonance points, Bill Watrous, Zoltan Kiss, and how high it can really go.
Warm-ups, long tones, and the mouthpiece buzz.
What composers need to know, F-attachment range included.
Why one progression gives you chills and another does nothing.
What your ears and brain are doing.
Taste, exposure, and wiring.
Does background music help or hurt Bible study?
An engineer and composer on creativity and pattern recognition.
What grad-school papers taught me about organizing thought.
The pipe organ was the first synthesizer. A composer on autotune, AI, and what the gripers miss.
Around 40 I had to relearn the trombone with less mouthpiece pressure, and came back better than ever.
What I learned as a theme-park sound engineer about how much music shapes what we feel.
"How OK Thou Art": praise is a sacrifice, and God doesn't want a lame one.
A symphony trombonist's take on the most famous silence in music.
The Alan Parsons Project's "Time," and telling a story through solos.
Brass alloys and timbre, from a brass player who has thought about it.
A composer's long search: chasing pop formulas, why it failed, and how much of our taste is programmed into us.
A grandfather in the Boston Symphony, KHJ peer pressure, and the few pop songs that broke through.
Humming while you play, a fly made out of an outer slide, and the talent show where I never got to my solo.
Why breath support shapes the tone and not just the volume, with a candid take on Bill Watrous's sound.
These are only a selection of close to 3,000. If something here sparked a question, dig into the full list on my Quora profile.
This list grows as more answers are added. Have a question I have not answered? Ask it on Quora, or write me.
Questions or comments about any of these writings? Use my E-mail page.
