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
My attention was drawn to a site calculating the temperature that would have been caused by the radiation if young-earth creationist claims about radioactive decay rates were true. That would make the Earth in the era of its early stories a fiery furnace. And thus if heaven represents a restoration of Eden, then to accept young-earth creationism would mean turning it into hell, so that it resembles the lake of fire rather than a paradise. And of course, literalism has... Read more
Christopher Skinner, who will be known to some of you from his blog Peje Iesous, is moving his blogging to Nijay Gupta’s blog Crux Sola. For more about Christopher, there is an interview with him on Greg Monette’s relatively new blog, which some of you may not be aware of yet. Read more
I made the image above based on a comment Kenneth Gilmore made on Facebook. In the background is a sketch of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in the giraffe. The fact that it takes such an indirect route is strong evidence that giraffes evolved from beings with shorter necks, with the laryngeal nerve lengthening along the route it already followed, rather than being designed from the ground up. But an alternative is of course that the making of the nerve was... Read more
In looking for an image to accompany a post, I came across a website called “Top Pun” which included a number of satirical images of Jesus. Here are a few. Click through to see more, and reflections on them. Read more
Irving Finkel in the New York Times and The Telegraph and also Jerry Coyne on his blog (reprinted in The New Republic) have noted the interesting story (mentioned here a while back) about a Mesopotamian version of the flood myth, another one that is much older than Genesis, featuring a coracle – i.e. a round boat. Click through any of the links above to read more details. Read more
Sabio Lantz shared the following image on his blog: One could point out the ignorance of the person who made the image, clearly unaware that the three traditions collectively would expand the range of God’s action, just in the stories told in their Scriptures, into the Arabian peninsula, Turkey, Greece, and Egypt, at the very least. Or one could go further than the image’s math does, and add some estimate of the size of the universe – we cannot be... Read more
The Eerdmans blog shared an interview with James D. G. Dunn about his work on the oral Gospel tradition:Â Read more
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