The video above is the recording of today’s chat that myself and several other Patheos bloggers had with director Cyrus Nowrasteh about his new movie The Young Messiah. If you missed the live chat earlier today, this is your chance to hear the conversation. There were some technical hitches that kept me from being there right at the start, but they were soon resolved and I then join in. I hope you enjoy the discussion – and the movie! Read more
Matthew Morgenstern made me laugh when he shared the above image, with the caption, “I told them: NEVER use Comic Sans on a tombstone!” Read more
Patheos will be hosting a live chat about the new movie The Young Messiah tomorrow afternoon. You can register and participate here: https://patheos.learnitlive.com/class/8531/Live-Chat-The-Young-Messiah# I may not be able to stay for the whole thing, but I’m planning on being there for at least the first half. Hope you can join us! See also my blog post about the movie, if you haven’t already. Read more
Samantha Field has written an excellent post about the fundamentalist way of thinking. Far from being irrational, Field suggests, the fundamentalist might be called hyper-rational. There is a desire for absolute consistency and clarity, which is precisely why fundamentalist atheists who embrace mythicism, as well as fundamentalist Christians who embrace Biblical inerrancy, cannot tolerate the kind of uncertainty that historical inquiry, for instance, must treat as par for the course. Here’s a sample, containing excerpts from several sections of the post:... Read more
The quote comes from a blog post on the Book of Esther. It is one of the most meme-worthy quotes that I’ve come across, and so here it is in that form, in the hope that it will circulate widely. Read more
I had a wonderful conversation recently, which lasted for hours and only ended because of concern about severe weather. It was with Matt Kovacs and Arick Mittler, formerly of Miami Valley Skeptics, now working on another project. We talked about a number of points which I cover in my book The Burial of Jesus, but one point that I don’t recall making there, and which I only mentioned after we stopped recording, seemed interesting enough to Matt and Arick that... Read more
A quote from a recent post. Read more
I am grateful to have had the opportunity (as part of the Patheos Movie Club) to see an advance viewing of The Young Messiah, a movie based on the novel by Anne Rice, the original title of which was Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. The story begins with text suggesting that many Jews fled to Egypt during the time of King Herod, as he was an oppressive puppet of the Romans. That seems an odd suggestion, given that Egypt... Read more
Hemant Mehta shared this cartoon from The Atheist Pig: On the one hand, if the point of the cartoon is that one cannot prove a historical point simply by appealing to the Bible as authoritative scripture, then of course that is true. But appealing to Paul’s letters, or other early Christian writings, which happen to have ended up as part of a collection known as the Bible, is not inappropriate if we are using them not as scripture, but as human texts which... Read more
It seems that Craig Evans and Richard Carrier will be having a debate about whether Jesus existed. I’m glad to see that it is co-sponsored by two organizations, one Christian and one non-religious or anti-religions, although there is a sense in which that co-sponsorship may simply foster the sense that Carrier’s is the natural or appropriate view for an atheist to adopt, and may obscure that Evans’ view is not a Christian one but one that Christians and non-Christians alike... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In