John Lynch shared this image originally from Surviving the World: Steve Martin has thoughts on being an evolutionary creationist in a confessionally Reformed church. Mark Vernon has a provocative post on the “politics of evolution.” John Pieret shares some thoughts by Michael Ruse about philosophers and Darwin. I also want to mention that I saw a call for papers about classics and sci-fi, and the same blog (Antiquated Vagaries) explains how that popular Old Spice commercial was made. Read more

The idea is simply brilliant. One sheet of music. One violinist reads it from one side, the other reads it from the other, each starting on opposite ends. And it works! Oh, that Mozart… Read more

A number of resources in a number of different media and formats have come to my attention today. Trimegistos has a number of online publications about Egyptian sources which can be downloaded. Daily Motion has a two-part documentary about Coptic Christians from Al-Jazeera. Mark Goodacre shared the Michael Goulder memorial address in mp3 and pdf formats. There is a radio show about Carl Sagan at Star City Blog. Ephemeral Thoughts shares excerpts from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on... Read more

One category of mythicists, like young-earth creationists, have no hesitation about offering their own explanation of who made up Christianity. They may not always be very specific (or even remotely plausible for that matter) but they do not hesitate to offer an “explanation” of sorts: Christianity began when people borrowed motifs from myths about Horus, Osiris, Mithras and various other figures to create a new dying-and-rising deity. Other mythicists, perhaps because they are aware that such a scenario makes little... Read more

Some colleagues and I gathered at a local theological discussion venue to discuss Richard Grigg’s book Beyond the God Delusion: How Radical Theology Harmonizes Science and Religion this past Friday. One of the things that quickly came up was the notion of “radical theology.” Grigg advocates a form of pantheism which embraces science wholeheartedly and eschews the New Age mumbo jumbo that is often popular among modern-day pantheists. As appealing as his vision may be in certain respects, I find it... Read more

Rick Sumner is the latest to jump into the fray and join the discussion of mythicism. Read more

“Exegesis of a narrative cannot magically conjure up evidence for the historical reality of the narrative…Sanders is merely attempting to calculate what narrative details are more or less likely to make sense of the larger plot, given the assumption that the narrative originated largely from “traditions” going back to an historical Jesus. Historicity itself is an assumption.” –Neil Godfrey, comment on “E.P. Sanders’ test for authenticity of the sayings of Jesus.“ I was tempted to not cite the source and... Read more

E! has an interesting interview with Terry O’Quinn, who plays John Locke (and of course now plays the smoke monster). Read more

Thanks to Sabio Lantz for pointing out that Common Sense Atheism has an interview with Hector Avalos, in which Hector talks about his religious background (he was once a child evangelist!) among other things. His treatment of the role of Biblical translations in hiding rather than communicating what the Bible says is particularly poignant. Read more

I don’t normally link to the blog Metacrock, since the number of typos even in the title of a post is usually enough to put me off. But as there’s a recent post on mythicism, interacting with Earl Doherty and bringing Helmut Koester into the picture, it seemed worth linking to. Meanwhile, Vridar is continuing to post, and I honestly can’t figure out whether there is a point to these posts and if so what it is. There’s a post... Read more