If you saw the first episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, you’ll probably have been impressed with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s testimony about the impact of Carl Sagan on his life. This reminded me of a powerful “sermon” he “preached” at the Beyond Belief 2006 conference, which is the video embedded above. His account of being a physics major at a Liberal Arts school is powerful and very timely in our era when some students think the point of a university... Read more
Last Sunday in my sunday school class, we talked about prayer. Perennial questions came up, the most pressing of which was how to avoid having prayers asking for help, and giving thanks for good fortune, become things that cause harm to those around you. It is ultimately the same issue that got Job’s friends into trouble, only the flip side of it. They tried to interpret Job’s suffering in relation to God’s will and activity. Today more often people ignore... Read more
HT Roger Wolsey on Facebook Read more
I’ve seen this quote from Homer Simpson pop up in a few places recently: If God needs money, why doesn’t he just write another Bible? The first one sold pretty well. Bruce Gerencser also included the image, and so I thought I ought to combine the two. Read more
Someone shared the “Oracle of Bacon” on Facebook. Through it, I learned that I have a Bacon Number of 3, assuming that one is calculating connections of all genuine friends and acquaintances, and not only people who were in movies together. Krystina Ptasinski, an actress who majored in religion as well as theater at Butler University, has a Bacon Number of 2. And since I know Krystina, that makes my Bacon Number 3. And if you are acquainted with me,... Read more
HT Hemant Mehta I found this funny. But there is a serious side to it. The truth is that young-earth creationists really do redact and selectively quote scientists to try to support their own bogus claims. And the substitution of “God” in the place of a lengthy summary of scientific evidence, in addition to being comical, illustrates the more serious problems with those who treat the two as competing. Why not do the same to everything? When the weather report... Read more
Another gem from TheologyGrams! Read more
This cartoon by David Hayward reminded me of the carnival games which, if you didn’t know it already, tend to be rigged, or at the very least are much more difficult to win than you are led to believe. Religions and their adherents often take advantage of the fact that knowledge about God is elusive, and a sense of connection with God fleeting, prizes that may consistently seem just out of reach. And so they hold up a target and... Read more
Eddie Arthur shared a wonderful set of excerpts from the Not So Unpleasant Version of the Bible, shared by Archdruid Eileen. Here is the text of that post: It was Snargent who originally started it. He complained about the Crucifix in the Chapel of Contemplation – said that the depiction of an execution was quite unseemly for a religious group. And that was nothing to when I pointed out that it was based on the accounts in the Gospels. The... Read more
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