Reading Time: 3 minutes Evangelizing Jesus to strangers (or worse, friends) can be a stressful process. They might think you’re stupid or weird. Now imagine arguing for COVID vaccines with an anti-vaxxer. You might fail to convince, but you won’t feel weird. Why the difference?
Religion
Posted inReligion
Two similar tragedies produce opposite approaches to prayer
Reading Time: 5 minutes Do prayers do anything? Yes and no; says one Christian apologist. The difference reveals the hypocrisy.
Posted inHistory
Fascism in India: Who’s ‘in charge’ of 1.4 billion?
Reading Time: 8 minutes There’s something fascinating, if also disturbing, about Western incuriosity around the world’s largest democracy. 1.4 billion of our world’s 7.8 live in India, a country a third the size of the US, which has under a quarter of India’s population. How can the fortunes of so many mean so little? Nevertheless, India exists in the […]
Posted inEducation
Religion and education: Let’s be perfectly clear
Reading Time: 5 minutes Despite a long-time understanding among sociologists that certain forms of religious belief and identification undercut educational attainment, contrarian social scientists and religious apologists often argue that education and religion are completely compatible. Recent arguments by Ilana Horwitz and Ryan Burge go further to claim that religion may even enhance educational success. Such arguments wither under […]
Posted inPolitics
Supreme Court: The real game behind the coach and his post-game prayers
Reading Time: 6 minutes I affirm the right of my religious fellow citizens to pray. I can even see the good in it. But as the consumer of too many tales of aggressive assertions of Christianity in sports, I could not help but be cynical when I heard about the unassuming public-school football coach who had to lawyer up […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Understanding eternity (Hint: It’s a very long time)
Reading Time: 2 minutes Whether you are a heaven-and-hell-believing evangelical or a Christian universalist (where everyone gets saved), you’ll have some kind of belief in a transcendent soul living in some situation for eternity. But eternity is a very long time. Problematically so. People often seem to defend billionaires without realizing how big a billion really is and how […]
Posted inReligion
Ilhan Omar assailed for asking sensible question about mid-air worship song
Reading Time: 3 minutes When Muslim U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar learned that a captive audience on an easyJet plane flying from Poland to America were forced to endure a bunch of Christians singing “How Great Is Our God,” she said on Twitter, “I think my family and I should have a prayer session next time I am on a […]
Posted inReligion
Dr. Craig: how plausible would a resurrection be?
Reading Time: 4 minutes How reliable is the resurrection claim? And if the short ending of Mark is easily understood, why were so many long endings written?
Posted inReligion
Dr. Craig and the women-at-the-tomb argument
Reading Time: 4 minutes Dr. Craig argues that the embarrassing fact that women found the empty tomb was central to bolstering historians’ accepting the empty tomb. I am not as impressed.
Posted inReligion
If Jesus was a man, why does he never do anything wrong?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Christians like circles. Especially arguing in them. I have just started reading the late biblical scholar Hector Avalos’ recent book Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship. In the introduction, he points out a startlingly obvious and yet incredibly important observation. “My project actually began with a puzzling experience,” he writes. “If one reads […]