Fred Clark shared the image below promoting the Father, Son, and Holy Candidate – or is it the GOP that is the third member of this Trinity, with Romney as its incarnation? I liked Fred’s quip about the image: “Jesus/Romney is the answer. What was the question?” Read more
As if in answer to my earlier question, George Takei posted this on Facebook: That is also the attitude of progressive Christians, and many others, despite the existence of a vociferous minority who thinks that they can use ancient human texts to deny the realities before our eyes, or under our microscopes, or glimpsed through telescopes. Read more
Someone commented on my post about “Messianism in Music” that they expected me to post something by Oliver Messiaen. So here is his Quartet for the End of Time: And here is his “Alléluias sereins d’une âme qui désire le ciel” which is the second part of his L’Ascension. Both can also be connected to messianism even without the use of bad puns… Read more
Many of the recent discussions about “free speech” in connection with the internet video about Islam called “Innocense of Muslims,” the violent reactions to it, and the apologies for it, seem to me to miss the point. In our democracy, within limits to ensure that the safety of people is safeguarded, people can express themselves freely. That includes making movies, or art, or telling stories, or blogging, or doing anything else that someone of a particular religious viewpoint may find... Read more
Where do mythicism, young-earth creationism, mainstream biology and mainstream historical study (including but not limited to the study of the historical Jesus) fit in the diagram below, in the view of readers of this blog? Even though one cannot run “history experiments,” are historians not doing something similar when they take their ideas about the past and test them against the available evidence? Just having an idea that is compatible with the evidence does not show it to be correct... Read more
Fred Clark posted on his blog asking “What if I’m wrong about the clobber verses?” He is referring to the point, which he considers a valid one, that he could be wrong. That anyone considers this necessary to point out is itself striking, and says a lot about humanity. There are, alas, people who don’t seem to realize that they could be wrong. But what I was most struck by was the assumption that, since you might be wrong, the conservative... Read more
The first episode from the last season of Sylvester McCoy’s time as the Doctor is “Battlefield” and it is ripe to be revisited in the era of Matt Smith. Spoilers follow. In this episode, the Doctor comes to Earth at a time when former Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stuart has retired and is married (although he eagerly comes out of retirement when he hears that the Doctor has turned up). There is a new Brigadier in charge of UNIT, a woman... Read more
The title of this post comes from Proverbs 10:17. I could have quoted Proverbs 12:1, or 15:12, or any number of other Bible verses about accepting correction, but Prov. 10:17 seemed the most fitting of all of them. I’ve recently been trying to communicate with someone who, because he pays lip service to the divine authority of the Bible (and so allegedly should know and accept the teaching found in Proverbs) insists that I am not a Christian (since I... Read more
Thanks to blog reader Admiral Mattbar for drawing this song by Jon Foreman, “Instead of a Show,” to my attention! Read more
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Blogging BibleWorks 9, Part 1
I’ve decided that the best way to review and illustrate the capabilities of the BibleWorks 9 software is to blog my way through using it for various purposes, taking screenshots along the way. Today I will blog about one example, an investigation of the lexical meaning and history of interpretation of a particular term. I decided for this example to look into the word תַּֽדְשֵׁ֤א found in Gen 1:11. The Hebrew text in this blog post, by the way, is copied... Read more