I took some words I wrote last year in a comment on another blog and turned them into an image. Read more
Via God of Evolution. This nicely complements the quote from Augustine I shared earlier. Read more
In my Sunday school class last past weekend, as we continued our discussion of sin, we focused on Jesus' teaching. I felt it was important to note not merely what things Jesus emphasized, but how he interpreted those core emphases. One could well imagine someone using the same core principles Jesus articulated – love God and love neighbor – and using them to argue against his point in the parable of the good Samaritan. If love for God comes first,... Read more
UPDATE: For those who may not find it, the quote comes from Augustine’s St. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, “The Literal Meaning of Genesis,” Book 1 chapter 19. That is in itself worth highlighting, since it makes even clearer that Augustine could consider the “literal meaning” important and yet not take it to have the implications that modern-day young-earth creationists do. There is even more irony, since it was Augustine who formulated the understanding of the “Fall” in... Read more
At Reading Acts, there have been two posts on Jewish-Christian Christology. Here are links to part 1 and part 2. See also the video shared at Euangelion, in which Mike Licona and Dale Martin discuss whether Jesus thought he was God: I find the depiction of Paul as claiming that Jesus was God to be problematic. Paul is nuanced in ways that modern conservative Christians are not, and strong evidence of that is the lack of any evidence that Paul’s... Read more
The Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa has research awards to support scholars. The 2014 subject areas include repressive regimes, Minority Faiths and Co-existence/Adaptation, and the Ancient Sources of the Modern Religious Traditions. If there’s someone interested in branching out to include the Mandaeans as part of their scholarly research, this would be a funding source worth pursuing! Read more
Race Hochdorf has a new website which readers will find interesting, and on it a new post, “The Tyranny of Fundamentalist Language.” He writes: The reason why it is impossible to debate a fundamentalist, is because their very language psychologically traps them into their frames of mind. Click through to read the whole thing, including why he views fundamentalists with pity. In a similar vein, Unreasonable Faith asks when fundamentalists came to be accepted as the spokespersons for religion. See... Read more
The above is based on a comment I made in a Facebook group: The evidence for chromosomal fusion in humans compared to other primates is unambiguous evidence either of common ancestry, or of a Creator who deceitfully made it look like we share a common ancestor with other primates. I cannot fathom why anyone who calls themselves a Christian would choose the latter option over the former. They prefer to make God a liar than to admit that their understanding... Read more
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