2012-12-28T10:15:27-05:00

Last updated on: December 28, 2012 at 10:15 am   By

David Hayward shared this older cartoon of his today: The title seems to me precisely wrong. There is indeed a dividing line between those who see the world in terms of binary opposites, and those who see the world as rich, complex, deep, beautiful, and defying simple categories. But that line cuts through the whole of humanity, distinguishing between different sorts of religious believers, but also between different sorts of atheists, while placing some in those categories together on the... Read more

2012-12-28T07:49:35-05:00

Last updated on: December 28, 2012 at 7:49 am   By

Revelation 21:8 says: But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. Revelation 21:27 adds in reference to the New Jerusalem: Nothing evil will be allowed to enter, nor anyone who practices shameful idolatry and dishonesty—but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. Given that the claims of young-earth creationism about both the... Read more

2012-12-27T22:43:55-05:00

Last updated on: December 27, 2012 at 10:43 pm   By

Like the proverbial hieroglyphics, the song “My Egyptian Grammar” by The Fiery Furnaces seems like it must have a key somewhere to deciphering it. Can anyone help make sense of it? Both the name of the band and the title of the album from which it comes (Widow City) have religious references. HT The Oriental Institute, which is mentioned in the song. Here are the lyrics: “My Egyptian Grammar” I never thought it could have happened to me. But on the... Read more

2012-12-27T21:31:37-05:00

Last updated on: December 27, 2012 at 9:31 pm   By

Via Inside Higher Ed, I discovered this parody of Les Misérables which depicts instead the despair not of young revolutionaries in France in a bygone era, but young graduates in the present day: I think the video simultaneously makes a useful point, and undermines it, illustrating in the process what education is really for. On the one hand, many students go to university anticipating that it will all but guarantee them a certain type of job or standard of living. It... Read more

2012-12-27T15:05:34-05:00

Last updated on: December 27, 2012 at 3:05 pm   By

Mithras is one of the more popular figures for Jesus mythicists to point to as having been the precursor to and inspiration for everything Christians eventually believed about Jesus. There have been numerous attempts to address the misinformation about bogus and slim parallels online. But since the claims continue to be made (much as creationist misinformation continues to circulate with no apparent effect of its having been debunked on countless occasions), I thought I would mention a couple of Mithras-related... Read more

2012-12-27T08:38:47-05:00

Last updated on: December 27, 2012 at 8:38 am   By

I continue to encounter – and to find incredibly puzzling – the claim that depicting God creating through evolution portrays God less favorably than depicting God creating directly and instantaneously. Here is why: In either view of creation, the world includes suffering, starvation, carnivores eating other animals, parasites devouring hosts alive, illnesses of a variety of sorts, and much pain. While there is no evidence that the world ever contained living things but lacked the above, even if one accepted... Read more

2012-12-27T00:05:43-05:00

Last updated on: December 27, 2012 at 12:05 am   By

I’ve long loved the melody “Ashokan Farewell” and so I was delighted when someone brought to my attention this video of Jay Ungar, who wrote it, performing his composition, accompanied by the Molly Mason Family Band. Read more

2012-12-26T17:06:45-05:00

Last updated on: December 26, 2012 at 5:06 pm   By

I neglected to embed links to my previous posts about Doctor Who episodes featuring the Great Intelligence, when I wrote my recent posts about “The Snowmen.” And so I thought that I would not only go back and rectify that in those posts, but also offer links here in a separate post to those things that I wrote earlier. The Abominable Snowmen The Web of Fear The Snowmen and More Ideas of God in The Snowmen You can also watch... Read more

2012-12-26T14:25:26-05:00

Last updated on: December 26, 2012 at 2:25 pm   By

You may think that, now that Christmas is over, the war on Christmas will cease to be such a concern for a few months, and people of faith can relax. But it is not so. There is a very serious related issue that Christians dare not neglect: The War on New Year's Day. As I have blogged about before, New Year's Day is a Christian holiday. It commemorates the anniversary of the day on which a Romanian monk miscalculated the... Read more

2012-12-26T13:03:43-05:00

Last updated on: December 26, 2012 at 1:03 pm   By

While I have been blogging about the Doctor Who Christmas special, “The Snowmen,” Indianapolis and central Indiana have been blanketed in a blizzard dumping a foot of snow on the city, and it is still falling, with strong winds. I am very disappointed that some employers have not shown the sort of concern for their employees I would have hoped for. Those that waited until too late to decide to close today put their employees at risk, making them come... Read more

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