On Having Your PhD and Eating it Too
Young earth creationists are notorious for two things (among others): a handful of them have obtained a PhD in a relevant scientific domain, doing research the legitimacy of and basis for which they intend to repudiate as soon as they have the letters after their name, with the sole aim of adding legitimacy to the ideology that they adhered to before ever studying science; and they claim that the overwhelming consensus of those who have PhDs in biology, genetics, paleontology, geology, and other relevant scientific domains is wrong, and that these experts are untrustworthy. They cannot have it both ways. Either a PhD is indicative of expertise in an area, in which case laypeople … [Read More...]
Time, Space, and Faith: Religion and Doctor Who (Conference Announcement and Call for Papers)
Time, Space, and Faith: Religion and Doctor Who John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, 2nd November 2013 Doctor Who is a cultural phenomenon in both the UK and the United States, continuing to go from strength-to-strength as it celebrates its 50th anniversary in November 2013. Over the show’s long history on television—and in various spin-off TV shows, audio adventures, novels and comic books—religion and religious themes have consistently been a subject of interest. From early depictions of Buddhism and pagan religion to recent years when the show has attracted everything from Church of England conferences dedicated to its use in preaching to guest appearances by Richard … [Read More...]
Christianity Means Not Knowing All The Answers
Kathy Vestal wrote an interesting post with this title at Red Letter Christians. Here is a taste: [W]e forget our place before God. We twist our religion to be about knowledge. We contrive and memorize “facts” about God, dividing ourselves from those who understand differently, making God into our image rather than us in God’s, because our image is all we are humanly capable of understanding. What if we devote our whole life to trying to understand God? Our knowledge will still be but an infinitesimal dot on the infinite picture of who God really is. We are part of creation, not designed for that kind of comprehension.We can gain from listening with discernment to others’ … [Read More...]
American TARDIS
I saw this today on the University of Indianapolis campus. Apparently American TARDISes are even smaller on the outside. … [Read More...]
Maligning Mythicist and Nazareth Nazorean
Richard Carrier has written a characteristically-long blog post which ends with the following sentence: "But alas, when people make false claims about our work and straw man our arguments in an effort to malign our competence, sometimes we have to pay at least the respect of exposing what they’ve done." The post also mentions a "McGrath" who I assume is me, and he writes this: If he was fabricating, he would invent a prophesy that said Jesus would be a “Nazaretos.” Clearly, Matthew was stuck with a prophesy that didn’t quite match the town, but he ran with it anyway. That all but entails he wasn’t lying. He was reading a scripture (or scripture variant) we no longer have (of … [Read More...]
1 Corinthians 13 in a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Unvirtuous Abbey posted this status update on Facebook: If I speak in the tongues of men or R2 units, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or bleeping android.Someone added the comment: If I am fluent in over six million forms of communication, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give up my body to be frozen in carbonite, but have not love, I gain nothing.There are so many others one could think of. Here is one of my own:If I have great Jedi skills, so that I can trick my way into Jabba's palace, but have not love, I am but a snarling Rancor. What others can Star Wars fans come up with? … [Read More...]
Statistics and the Synoptic Problem
Statistics tell us... well, even though they are numbers, statistics do not automatically provide answers to questions. And 73.2% of all statistics are made up on the spot - as that one was. But sometimes statistics can tell us something important. They can quantify what otherwise may seem vague and merely impressionistic. I regularly cite statistics in talking about the differences between the Gospel of John and the Synoptics. Comparing how often "kingdom," "father," and "I" occur (as James D. G. Dunn does in The Evidence for Jesus) shows that it is not just a subjective impression that the style and content of John is significantly different from the other Gospels. And statistics are … [Read More...]
House of Cards
David Hayward's cartoon which he posted today depicts what "faith" is for many people: Hundreds of years ago, faith meant a response of trust and faithfulness to a God whose existence was thought to scarcely be in serious doubt. The order of the cosmos, the power of storms, and many other aspects of life seemed to point to a powerful personal agent within and behind it all. Faith meant responding with faithfulness and trust to that entity. Today most of us cannot simply view the cosmos in the same way. But the appropriate response, in my opinion, is not to turn faith into a determined attempt to think about the divine in the same way as people did in the past, despite evidence to the … [Read More...]
The Desmond Tutu Chair of Global Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation Studies
The president of Butler University, Jim Danko, made this announcement today: Dear Butler Community Members, Butler University values its Indianapolis neighbors and opportunities to collaborate with them on innovative projects. This announcement concerns one such very fulfilling partnership. During the 2012-2013 academic year, world-renowned South African theologian Allan Boesak held a joint visiting appointment at Butler University and Christian Theological Seminary (CTS). While at Butler, he worked with students in a number of classes in peace studies, political science, religion, and philosophy. He also spoke as a part of the Celebration of Diversity Distinguished Lecture … [Read More...]
Hebrews: On Earth as it is in Heaven?
I've discussed Hebrews a lot lately, since I've been working through it in my Sunday school class. A comment on a recent post got me thinking once again about an aspect of Hebrews that continues to puzzle me: How the author can speak about the Son both as a celestial reality that seems to be timeless, and a human being who learns obedience and only attains his exalted status as a result of that obedience? This is a challenge even (or perhaps especially) when one has the later creeds in view. But the extensive debates that occurred f0r the next several centuries indicate that the end results of those debates were not simply assumed and taken for granted among early Christians. And so what … [Read More...]
Only a Game: Religion in Science Fiction
Today Chris Bateman reposted a link to a post about religion in Doctor Who that previously appeared on the blog Only a Game. This in turn made me aware that an entire series about religion in science fiction appeared there around the same time. I just found out about these posts, and so have yet to explore them, but given their subject matter, I thought I not only could but should go ahead and share this find here right away. In related news, Tony Rossi blogged about the movie Frequency, Theofantastique shared an infographic about 2001, and Inter-Galaxy Portal has a post about building a TARDIS. … [Read More...]
The Heavens Declare
Mark Goodacre pointed out on Facebook that my earlier blog post was missing something, and kindly provided the above altered image to rectify things! … [Read More...]
Betraying the Bible
John Shore has the following to say in a post today: The conservatives’ kill shot has always been a silver bullet with four words engraved into it: “It’s in the Bible.” A wife is to submit to her husband. A woman shouldn’t speak in church. Spare the rod, spoil the child. The Earth is the center of the universe. God’s plan is for the white man to have slaves. Gay people are a moral abomination. People who die without having accepted Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior must spend eternity burning in the hellfire of damnation. The conservative Christian makes this sort of ruinous proclamation, and then shrugs innocently, smiles with humble assurance, and says, … [Read More...]
Follow Patheos
Progressive Christian: