Next summer, the Enoch Seminar will hold a conference with the title “John the Jew: Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as a Form of Jewish Messianism.” It will be held in Camaldoli, Italy, and I am delighted to be one of the participants in this event. Here’s a description of the purpose of the meeting from the Enoch Seminar website: Purpose: The purpose of the sixth Nangeroni meeting is to explore the Gospel of John’s christology, traditionally considered to be... Read more
It is one of the major problems with fundamentalism that it recognizes no other form of its religious tradition as authentic than its own narrow version. And so it perceives as an attack on religion what is in fact an attack on narrowness, on unjustified dogmatism, on sloppy thinking, and many other things that deserve to be criticized not out of dislike for religion in general or Christianity in particular, but first and foremost by those who love Christianity and want to see it... Read more
Today’s Non Sequitur. If God is a personal being, then God would have to have a sense of humor, to put up with the things that are said about God and in the name of God. If God was as intolerant as some of God’s purported followers are and make God out to be, then either fundamentalists, or atheists, or both, would be dealt with in a less comical fashion and long before reaching the pearly gates. Read more
Claude Mariottini has shared the latest Biblical Studies Carnival. Click through to see it. Read more
I had the chance to endorse Chris Crawford‘s novel, The Tuning Station, and since today is its official release date, I want to share what I wrote about it here, and to recommend it to readers of this blog. There have been plenty of debates between a Christian and an atheist in fiction. But only rarely are both characters as compelling as they are in The Tuning Station, in which we are offered what is arguably the most original approach... Read more
I had been meaning to blog about the movie Ex Machina for a while now. It makes explicit the potential for the creation of artificial intelligence to be thought of in terms of godlikeness. It is interesting that, whenever we imagine creation of sentient beings taking place, whether in Genesis or sci-fi, they never fail to rebel against their creator(s). Does this reflect the impact of Genesis? Or does all this human storytelling, Genesis included, reflect our experience with children, made... Read more
I am grateful to Gavin Rumney for drawing my attention to the blog post by Valerie Tarico which included the above quote. Along related lines, Larry Behrendt wrote about “Clobber Verses” and emphasized the need to take responsibility for how we use the Bible. See also Neil Carter’s recent post on the absurdity of inerrancy. Read more
Dale Tuggy makes some excellent points in his recent blog post, “Where did Jesus claim to be God?” He writes: What bothers me the most is that this whole strategy perversely ignores the explicit, central, repeated, emphasized point of all the gospels, which is Jesus is the Messiah, God’s anointed. The assumption here is that God’s anointed isn’t God himself. God has no need to send, authorize, endorse, or empower himself. Anyway, when you interpret a book, you go with the clear thesis... Read more
Bruce Gerencser shared the above Non Sequitur cartoon. This might explain why my post about a very effective and inexpensive squirrel baffle is so popular! Read more
This video offers a great treatment of how conspiracy theory thinking works, and has a superb punny ending. Enjoy! Read more
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