I learned a lesson with my last post -- don't think out loud on the Internet. People freak out, the Friendly Atheist gets his friendly on, and all sorts. But lesson learned, the upswing of it all is that thanks to the remarkably thoughtful comments and correspondence with people far more intelligent than myself, I can happily say I was wrong in regards to the question of whether a married couple with an HIV-infected individual could have sex with a condom. The problem that I began thinking … [Read more...]

What is Truth? It seems that a good way to begin answering the question of what an abstract is is to establish our reaction to it. What is my reaction to fear? It makes my knees shake and my adrenal glands pump. What then, is my reaction to Truth? To give her a place of authority greater than our own. If two men are arguing over whether a fetus is a human being, and the truth of the matter is presented to them in the form of a DNA sample, we would expect them to admit the primacy of … [Read more...]

In my last two posts we established the following: Prophecy is the province of the honest. A prophet need not be a religious, a mystic or some visionary of the distant future, but may very well be the old woman at the grocery store who tells you the Honest Truth, that you're beautiful, a miserable human being, or whatever the Honest Truth may be. For though the Old Testament prophets often foretold the future, they were just as likely to tell the Present:  "You are living in sin." "Israel has … [Read more...]

Pagan prophecy is sweet. Take Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, a poem written a little while before the birth of Christ about the birth of a divine child. The parallells between the mythical event -- constructed by Virgil -- and the historical event -- the birth of Jesus -- are striking. Justice returns, returns old Saturn's reign,  With a new breed of men sent down from heaven.  Only do thou, at the boy's birth in whom  The iron shall cease, the golden race arise... The reign of Saturn can be … [Read more...]