David Hayward has created and shared a cartoon that illustrates a central message in both nativity stories in the New Testament. Those who were “invited” to the birth or infancy of Jesus were the marginalized, the excluded. Somehow the powerful and dominant have managed to co-opt these stories and treat them as their own, seemingly without realizing how subversive their message is, and what its implications are for them. More than that, some seem to think that being a follower... Read more
Here’s a spoof version of a classic Christmas carol that I wrote some years ago, sarcastically and satirically highlighting what happens when fundamentalists shift the focus of their Christianity from God and Jesus onto other matters such as the age of the earth: We wish you a Merry Creationmas We wish you a Merry Creationmas We wish you a Merry Creationmas And a happy new year (the first of which was less than 10,000 years ago) Don’t stop at the... Read more
The “mousetrap argument” is popular among proponents of Intelligent Design. A mousetrap is supposedly irreducibly complex and thus evidence of direct design by a cosmic Designer. But what we find in real-life organisms is evidence of evolutionary kluges, solutions cobbled together from whatever was already there to work with. The image made me smile as it seems to put the contrast between the claims of Intelligent Design, and biological realities as seen and studied by mainstream biology, into a nice... Read more
Get it? He spent three days in Wales? 🙂 I really enjoy and appreciate this cartoon because it does some subversive things. Fox News is notorious for its distortion and bias, and yet it is popular among people who claim to value truth and being “Biblical.” And so the cartoon subversively asks what if behind some of the stories in the Bible there is similar bias and distortion? In the case of Jonah, I don’t think this is at all what... Read more
The blog +972 shared the news earlier today that the Israeli embassy in Ireland had posted a derogatory status update about Palestinians, in connection with Jesus and Mary, on their Facebook page: A thought for Christmas…If Jesus and mother Mary were alive today, they would, as Jews without security, probably end up being lynched in Bethlehem by hostile Palestinians. Just a thought……. This started off a meme, as such things tend to in Israel. Here’s an example (by Itamar Shaltiel):... Read more
Here’s the latest minisode prequel to the upcoming Doctor Who Christmas special: HT IO9 Read more
That’s not “job” as in employment in the title of this post, but “Job” as in “the Book of…” Someone asked me on Facebook recently what I thought the message of Job is and how it relates to the tragedy in Connecticut. I said that the Book of Job has a number of points that it conveys. But in light of the recent comments by right-wing Christians (which I’ve already commented on more than once), I want to highlight one... Read more
This is a reminder that today is the last day to participate in the Theologians Trading Cards giveaway here at Exploring Our Matrix. Click through to read the rules and leave a comment to enter. You can enter as many times as you want, just by leaving a comment on that post (not this one). And obviously the more often you enter, the greater your chances of winning one of the sets in the random drawing. But there is another... Read more
Jerry Coyne recently shared this Bizarro comic: I think the cartoon illustrates nicely some of the problems involved in thinking about God in such anthropomorphic terms. Coyne adds the comment: The whole nature of God for these people (and for many, many Americans) is that of a personal God, something with the characteristics of a human. To deny the ubiquity of this concept of God belies profound ignorance of religion. Either many theologians are ignorant in that way, or simply... Read more
I made some recordings, when practicing before church today, of music I would be playing during the service. The first is a jazz arrangement of “Angels We Have Heard On High,” arranged by Phillip Keveren (published in the volume Yuletide Jazz): The second is a medley from the “Charlie Brown Christmas Special” which I played as a prelude before the service began: Read more
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