There are some great comments on IO9 about the latest trailer for the next new episode of Doctor Who, which airs two weeks from today. “Maximum extermination” is indeed a funny sort of phrase. Personally, I’m more intrigued by the reference to [SPOILER ALERT] the Doctor’s “last will and testament.” I was tempted to make that the title of this post, but thought that such a spoiler displayed without warning might cost me some friends. Read more
The book If Eve Only Knew: Freeing Yourself from Biblical Womanhood and Becoming All God Means for You to Be is now available, and I wanted to draw attention to that fact. I mentioned the book when I reviewed another book, Damaged Goods. Here’s what I wrote as an endorsement: “This new book by Irons and Mock tackles the Biblical and contemporary aspects of Evangelicalism and other conservative strands of Christianity which denigrate and subordinate women. Not only do they succeed in... Read more
Bruce Gerencser shared the above graphic, which another blogger made from a quote of his. Bruce writes, “for any Christian who happens to stumble upon my deep, dark, evil corner of the blogosphere, I’d love to hear your explanation of Jesus saying, love your enemies, while God, the alter-ego of Jesus, tortures his enemies in hell. It seems the words of Jesus don’t match the actions of Jesus.” I’ve suggested before (taking my cue from Rabbi Harold Kushner) that there are principles... Read more
I appreciated the convergence of these two cartoons in my feed today. The first came to my attention via Ted Herrlich. The second is by David Hayward, who also made a similar point in an earlier cartoon: Read more
I appreciated this way that Tim Dooley expressed a major problem with Jesus mythicism on Facebook, and so asked for permission to turn it into a meme. Mythicism tries, on the one hand, to turn the writings of early Christians who thought Jesus had lived in history into evidence of something else, while on the other hand, it concocts belief in Jesus as a purely celestial figure for which the evidence is there own implausible interpretations of texts which appear to mean something else.... Read more
The Institute for Creation Research recently shared the above image on Facebook, claiming that Jesus quotes from Genesis more often than any other book in the Old Testament. That claim is verifiably false. This is a clear example of them (1) assuming that what is central to them simply must have been important to Jesus, (2) not bothering to actually check, (3) asserting as truth what they have not in fact investigated, and (4) not knowing the Bible well enough to have... Read more
A quote from Dan McClellan, which I mentioned in another recent post, and have now turned into a meme. Read more
It may be time to redesignate the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” as the “Gospel of Grondin’s Interlinear.” A new development that it has taken me a couple of days to blog about, but which is still in time for the upcoming York Christian Apocrypha Symposium focused on “Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian Apocrypha.” Mark Goodacre has two guest posts by Andrew Bernhard, and there is also a post by Christian Askeland on the ETC blog.... Read more
Several memes and political cartoons have addressed the hypocrisy in Kim Davis’ desire to have her own freedoms respected, while demanding the right to discriminate against others. Here are a few of my favorites: And this one is from a while back, yet could have been made today: The first two come via other Patheos bloggers Hemant Mehta and Ben Corey. Ben’s mirrors this statement which Daily Kos turned into a meme: Read more
On Facebook, Joe Childers wrote the following: Concerning the county clerk in Kentucky: Religiously neutral civil mechanisms are the only possible way for true religious freedom to exist for multiple religions simultaneously. Civil servants who are religious ought therefore to be even more scrupulous about preserving religious neutrality in their duties than non-religious servants, for they are more directly enjoying religious freedom in their own lives and have more to lose from threats to that freedom. I asked for permission... Read more
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