Reading Time: 7 minutes Thanks to growing up Catholic, I got really excited about Easter. The sheer number of rituals and special events going on around that weekend used to make my little head spin, for a reason. Today, I’ll show you one of the Bible stories that I never noticed in all that activity.
theology
Posted inReligion
3 more Christian defenses of Josh Duggar, and why they fail
Reading Time: 6 minutes Here’s a quick between-meals snack of three new defenses that are emerging around the Josh Duggar molestation scandal and why they fail completely.
Posted inReligion
Josh Duggar: Excusing the inexcusable
Reading Time: 12 minutes The scandal around Josh Duggar has had a few days to ferment. News sites that previously hadn’t even breathed a word about the scandal are now tiptoeing into the waters with super-carefully-worded pieces about what he did, now that it’s painfully obvious that Christians as a group are talking about it. Mainly, unfortunately, they’re largely defending it.
Posted inReligion
The Handbook: Wishful Thinking in Apologetics.
Reading Time: 10 minutes Today we’re talking about wishful apologetics: those arguments that ache and yearn for an idealized form of Christianity. Special Guest: C.S. Lewis.
Posted inReligion, The Secular
Islam vs Christianity: the core differences
Reading Time: 5 minutes I have articulated this many, many times, but never yet as a full blog post, so here goes. What is it that differentiates the two major world religions, and how does this translate across to the behaviour of their adherents?
This is a pretty vital question for understanding the state of affairs with world religions and worldviews, especially in present day context…
Posted inGeneral
Consolidation and the Dwindling of Belief
Reading Time: 9 minutes I saw this really interesting piece about “church cannibalism” and it ties into something else I was reading about the dwindling of religious belief in America. What these two stories tell me is that Americans are steadily becoming less religiously observant over time, but huge megachurches are growing in membership and numbers. But I’m not […]
Posted inReligion
Winell on the ridiculousness of the Atonement
Reading Time: < 1 minute Marlene Winell, an ex-Christian, in Leaving the Fold, wrote, The most serious demand for unquestioned belief is, of course, the atonement. First the believer is to suspend familiar notions of justice, such as punishment for the guilty as opposed to an innocent party. You are then expected to accept the necessity of blood sacrifice for sin; […]
Posted inReligion, The Secular
Theology, a con
Reading Time: < 1 minute “Christianity teaches the sublime message that man can know his Creator. It does not teach that man can fathom his Creator!.” – all these sorts of claims do is inoculate God from falsifiability so that he/she/it becomes a pea in a conman’s shell game, moving from one shell to the other when any given shell is […]
Posted inReligion, The Secular
The Holy Trinity as incoherent #1
Reading Time: 6 minutes The Holy Trinity has had a problematic history, partly evidenced by point of fact that theologians still don’t agree on how it works, and partly seen from its ex post facto evolution, shoehorned into the scant evidence of the biblical texts. From Ignatius of Antioch onwards we see development of the idea in early church thinking, until it is codified at the Council of Nicaea in the 4th century CE. There will be more talk later on what was creedally set out.
Posted inReligion
When We Can’t Both Be Right
Reading Time: 10 minutes Sometimes it happens that two people have two completely opposing opinions about something. We can take identical lists of objective facts, filter them through a big variety of cultural conditioning, expectations, mores, and personal inclinations, and come out with an opinion that might totally differ from someone else with the same exact list of facts. […]