Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s been another grim week for world watchers. In the past seven days: Thirty-three Palestinians, including six children and three Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants (PIJs), were killed amid air strikes, as the Iron Dome faced off against over 970 PIJ rockets, accidentally killing an Israeli and injuring five others in the process. Sudan’s civil war […]
Religion
Posted inReligion
Guessing why his religion is declining, a Christian clings to a beloved fantasy
Reading Time: 13 minutes A recent Medium piece about Christianity’s decline has been making the rounds on social media. In it, a Christian makes three assertions about his religion’s decline. Two are partially correct. But the last reflects a beloved but completely untrue myth that Christians almost universally embrace. Let’s examine each of these assertions to find an answer […]
Posted inReligion
The Empty Tomb: The claim that the Bible refutes
Reading Time: 12 minutes The Empty Tomb has, for years, been a mainstay for Christian apologists, who claim Jesus rose from the dead in a glorious Resurrection. The Empty Tomb was used as one of the “minimal facts” to “prove” the resurrection of Jesus. So, what exactly is the Empty Tomb apologetic? According to all four gospels (attributed to […]
Posted inReligion
Why do believers cling to religion even after escaping it?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Whatever we’re doing now to ensure church-state separation clearly isn’t working as the Founding Fathers intended. The problem is that even former true believers still have religion on the brain—literally—as do continuing true believers. I’ll explain later. The upshot is that until we change the U.S. Constitution to explicitly, categorically separate all religious intrusion and […]
Posted inReligion
The pitfalls of prayer
Reading Time: 6 minutes In 2014, I attended a lecture by a man who had written a book about his experience with loss and grief. His infant daughter had died suddenly in 1990, and nine years later his wife died from a heart condition. Six years after that his 13-year-old son died of brain cancer. He described his […]
Posted inReligion
Revisiting Hitchens’ challenge and the value of hope
Reading Time: 6 minutes Atheist Christopher Hitchens made a famous moral challenge to Christians. Let’s consider a second Christian response.
Posted inReligion
When Christians confuse an explanation with an argument
Reading Time: 5 minutes Explanations and arguments: we come across both, but they’re quite different. An explanation is, “Here’s how I see it,” and an argument is, “Here’s how YOU should see it.” Don’t confuse one for the other.
Posted inReligion
Faith: a ‘gateway drug’ to real-world tragedy
Reading Time: 6 minutes I’m a child of the ’60s, an era when the term “gateway drug” was commonly evoked by anti-drug zealots in reference to marijuana. And it was probably true, but only in the sense that young people who were scofflaw enough to try smoking pot in that era—it was a legally very risky behavior then—were presumably […]
Posted inReligion
Hell is more important than heaven
Reading Time: 5 minutes Hell is at the center of evangelical Christian theology, more so than heaven or even Jesus. Without belief in hell and the exclusionary politics it inspires, Christianity would cease to exist.
Posted inLaw
Supreme Court picks religious case, passes on solitary confinement
Reading Time: 5 minutes There’s almost too much to choose from when attempting to sum up recent US strife: On Thursday, Missouri’s Attorney General bypassed sitting representatives to launch the most prohibitive ban on gender-affirming care yet, which would effectively deny treatment to adults and children alike. Judge Samuel Alito issued a short-term stay on a Texas judge’s revocation […]