I’ve discussed Hebrews a lot lately, since I’ve been working through it in my Sunday school class. A comment on a recent post got me thinking once again about an aspect of Hebrews that continues to puzzle me: How the author can speak about the Son both as a celestial reality that seems to be timeless, and a human being who learns obedience and only attains his exalted status as a result of that obedience? This is a challenge even... Read more
Today Chris Bateman reposted a link to a post about religion in Doctor Who that previously appeared on the blog Only a Game. This in turn made me aware that an entire series about religion in science fiction appeared there around the same time. I just found out about these posts, and so have yet to explore them, but given their subject matter, I thought I not only could but should go ahead and share this find here right away.... Read more
Mark Goodacre pointed out on Facebook that my earlier blog post was missing something, and kindly provided the above altered image to rectify things! Read more
John Shore has the following to say in a post today: The conservatives’ kill shot has always been a silver bullet with four words engraved into it: “It’s in the Bible.” A wife is to submit to her husband. A woman shouldn’t speak in church. Spare the rod, spoil the child. The Earth is the center of the universe. God’s plan is for the white man to have slaves. Gay people are a moral abomination. People who die without having accepted Jesus... Read more
Do you need a PhD to understand the Bible? Short answer: yes. But a longer answer is called for. And the longer answer includes the fact that you need more than one PhD to understand the Bible. When I say you need a PhD, I don’t necessarily mean that you yourself need to earn a PhD, much less several. But you will need multiple people with PhDs involved in the process. You will not understand the entire Bible without people... Read more
I came across this image today on Reddit: It poses two axes, knowledge and belief. But one of them strikes me as peculiar. Why is the one that runs from left to right categorized as having to do with “belief”? It seems to me that a graphic that explores religious and non-religious options, and the relative sense of certainty adherents to them have, could be useful. The “knowledge” axis is clearly about confidence in one’s views and not “knowledge.” And... Read more
After a couple of years of practice typing on an iPad, I still find that (at least when I am typing without looking at the keyboard) my name ends up coming out more frequently as Ja,es than James. Presumably this is due to the slight difference in size between the iPad’s on-screen keyboard and a typical physical computer keyboard. Has anyone else noticed this sort of thing? Can one retrain one’s mind and muscles to type more effectively on a... Read more
I recently finally got around to watching Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, a prequel to the rebooted Battlestar Galactica series, but one set in between it and the still earlier Caprica. I appreciated its exploration of the zeal of a young Bill Adama, who was eager to kill as many of the enemy as he could, inspired by the stories of other heroes in the war. As the story progresses, Adama learns that much of what he has heard is... Read more
Thanks to Mark Goodacre and Matthew Montonini for sharing the above video, featuring New Testament scholar George Caird and also David Flusser being interviewed for the 1977 documentary, “Who Was Jesus?” Read more
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