The episode focuses in an effort to relocate the homeless in downtown Philadelphia to an abandoned hospital in Bucks County. Mulder accuses the two conflicting sides, saying they really speak for themselves. He asks who speaks for the homeless. While investigating, Dana gets a call that her mother is in ICU. Dana goes to the hospital and talks to her, asks her not to go home yet, recalling her own experience when she was in a coma. Later she mentions... Read more
David Hayward shared the above cartoon, which makes the point that people with the same sacred texts apply them in very different ways. And so it can be argued that what people do with a sacred text is much more interest and telling than what the text itself says. A text which teaches love will not prevent people from carrying out atrocities, and a text which depicts people committing genocide will not prevent people from acting kindly towards others. Read more
One of my first posts on this blog, after it moved from its original self-hosted location to Blogger back in 2007, was on this topic. Here is what I wrote: This is just a short entry, just to share a further illustration of how the Bible is mythologized, personalized and in some cases deified by well-meaning but misguided Christians. I received a message from someone who disagreed with an answer of mine on Yahoo! Answers, and this individual said he isn’t interested... Read more
Fred Clark recently posted on the connection between the Left Behind series and Right Wing conspiracy theories. The two overlap extensively, with the non-religious leaving out the Rapture, but overlap in many other particulars, such as that the United Nations is a bad thing, and so too would world peace be. This while various news outlets were reporting that Michele Bachmann was predicting that Barack Obama will become the Antichrist after his presidency. I wonder whether anyone will remember that... Read more
The image and quote come from Oné R. Pagán’s blog BaldScientist. The quote really is a great one. There is no approach to reality that bypasses mystery. Whether one posits that the ultimate first cause is a divine mind that simply exists, or a law of physics that simply exists and which keeps bringing universes into existence, mystery is not eliminated. And the challenge to formulating a coherent worldview is finding the balance between eagerness to push back the boundaries of... Read more
I’m not sure how many of my blog readers took my advice and went to see the musical Amazing Grace after I blogged about it back in 2014. It subsequently made it to Broadway, and at that point several other Patheos bloggers mentioned it. Now its run is over, but a CD of the music is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I’m looking forward to owning a copy. I thought I should spread the word about it here too, for... Read more
This came to my attention via the Facebook page Science Meets Faith, and I thought it worth sharing here. “I am a Christian and recognize that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. It is a discovery, much like Copernicus’ theory of heliocentricity, Newton’s theory of gravity and Einstein’s theories of relativity, and definitely not a wild, unsubstantiated guess, desperately propped up by scientists trying to find some godless answer to the questions they have. Those aforementioned theories accurately describe the... Read more
A provocative video by Michael Dowd. Don’t just fast forward to the commandments, as interesting and as important as they are. The introduction is also full of great insights and memorable quotes. Read more
I found myself reflecting recently on the language used in Star Wars of the “will of the Force.” If the Force were anything like a theistic personal God, of the sort that it is natural to view as having a will, then the provision of power to the Sith over against the Jedi would seem hard to understand – although one can always speak of the Force moving in mysterious ways. But if the Force is an impersonal…well, force, then... Read more
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