Having just posted yesterday about treating the Bible as a card game, I was struck when Scot McKnight today shared quotes from an article in Relevant magazine about treating the Bible as an arms race. The point being made is much the same. Here’s a sample: I like to call this exercise a “Bible Verse Arms Race.” The key to winning is to pile up as many verses on your side of the argument as you can while simultaneously discounting your... Read more
Two comments on my recent “Mumpsimus” post seemed worth sharing. First, James Snapp shared an anecdote about the origin of the term: The story goes that there was a medieval priest who habitually mispronounced part of the liturgy; when he was supposed to say “sumpsimus” (we have taken/consumed), he instead said “mumpsimus,” a non-word. He did this for decades, and one day, another priest visited and informed him of the mistake. But the old priest replied, “For forty years I... Read more
Michael Zimmerman introduced me to the word mumpsimus when he used it in his recent Huffington Post piece to describe Ray Comfort. Michael refers to Anu Garg, who defines the word as “a view stubbornly held in spite of clear evidence that it's wrong; and a person who holds such a view.” Ray Comfort is misrepresenting scientists he interviewed for an upcoming movie. The video trailer below was shared by P. Z. Myers, who appears in the film and is... Read more
Unfortunately the sentence on this church sign can be understood in two different ways. And unfortunately there are churches for which each of the possible meanings is true. Read more
Thom Stark wrote the following on Facebook: In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, if someone didn’t like the Constitution of the U.S., they criticized it. In the 21st century, if someone doesn’t like it, they claim that it says what they’d rather it say. That’s because the Constitution has become a religious text. I think he is right, and would just add that this typical way of approaching religious texts is also problematic in and of itself. What... Read more
The Gospel of Luke depicts a Jesus who learned. Many fundamentalists view Jesus as someone who always knew everything, being a divine person unhindered by human frailties (even if in theory they claim he was fully human as well as fully divine). Yet this Jesus who is supposedly infallible is kept on a very short leash, and consistently becomes not the one whose teaching they seek to follow as perfectly as they can, but a spokesperson for their own viewpoints,... Read more
Neil Godfrey has a post which claims that I’m unconcerned with facts and details. And unsurprisingly, his post has little interest in facts and details. It repeats Richard Carrier’s claim that mythicism is embraced by individuals like Thomas Thompson (who has distanced himself from mythicism) and Kurt Noll (whose contribution to Is This Not the Carpenter? is rather wonderful and does much to undermine mythicism). He also claims that I am somehow ignoring the plain words of what Brodie wrote, even... Read more
Fred Clark has a post about one problematic but very popular approach to using the Bible, namely as a sort of card game in which clobber verse is pitted against clobber verse. He writes: But the problem, in her inquisitor’s eyes, is that this passage is not itself a clobber-text. He reads the Bible like a child playing the old card game of “War.” He puts down his card — a clobber-text from Leviticus. And now it’s her turn to... Read more
This seems particularly fitting for the occasion of 4th of July and an ongoing interest of this blog (it is authored by Mike Beidler, and first appeared on the blog Rethinking the αlpha and Ωmega: An Evolutionary Creationist’s Declaration of Independence (Apologies to Mr. Jefferson) In the BODY OF CHRIST, February 26, 2010. The unanimous declaration of theistic evolutionists in the Evangelical Christian community. When, in the course of Christian history, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the... Read more
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