Charles Halton has shared his translation of the Akkadian “Prayer to Any God” as well as an introductory video. Read more

Chapter 4 of Earl Doherty’s book Jesus: Neither God Nor Man focuses on the subject of disciples and apostles. Doherty begins by asserting that “In the rough and tumble world of religious proselytizing, the appeal to Jesus’ own words and actions, the urge to claim a direct link back to Jesus himself in order to confer authority and reliability on each apostle’s preaching of the Christ, would have been an inevitable and indispensable mark of the early missionary movement. There would also have been an... Read more

Via John Morehead I learned of two interesting articles about robots and artificial intelligence. The first is “The Myth of the Three Laws of Robotics – Why We Can’t Control Intelligence.” It argues that we cannot simply program away the danger of robots harming us or taking over. The second is “Robo Credos, Digi-Dogmas, and Android Orthodoxy: The Belief Systems Of Robots In Cinema.” I think the title says it all. Read more

Respectful Insolence has a post up with the title “Straw men and projection: Tools of quacks and conspiracy theorists to deflect critical thinking.” It will likely be of interest no matter which sort of fringe pseudoscience/pseudoscholarship most interests/frustrates you. Read more

Michael Bird and Joel Willits announced yesterday that their blog Euangelion has moved to Patheos. We’ll be neighbors soon – although I’m guessing I may end up around the corner with the Mainline Protestants.:-) Read more

It is certainly an advantageous aspect of Earl Doherty’s book Jesus: Neither God Nor Man – The Case for a Mythical Jesus that it consists (at least thus far) of relatively short chapters, suitable for blogging. Chapter 3 begins with some general information about the Hellenistic world, before turning its attention to the argument that Paul’s language of Jesus having been revealed suggests something spiritual, and does not naturally serve as a reference to an incarnation (p.40). This last point I... Read more

As the blog prepares to relocate, taking a look back is not only appropriate, but perhaps inevitable. It is striking that three of the four most popular blog posts at Exploring Our Matrix (at least since Blogger has been keeping track of stats) relate to movies or TV, while the other relates to annoyingly problematic Microsoft  technology. Here are links the most popular posts: The Ending of LOST ExplainedThe Vista Black Screen After Login Mystery…Solved!TRON Legacy and Isomorphic Algorithms: Not... Read more

I just saw a comment on Facebook from someone who said “fun dies” a lot. I soon realized that they meant “fundies” and that was being autocorrected to “fun dies.” There is something poignant, and something amusing, about the change. But mostly I’m posting this so that anyone who reads this blog and tends to use the term “fundies” knows to watch out for what autocorrect might do to the word. The other thing I learned in writing this post,... Read more

I received an e-mail recently about ARDA – the Association of Religion Data Archives – and thought I would share a link to the site, which looks like it has lots of interesting data (hence the name) collected from surveys about people’s religious beliefs and opinions. I also received an e-mail from Ben Griffith, who has begun blogging at the Huffington Post, asking if I’d share his latest post which is about Protestant appreciation of Church Fathers. Read more

Here are some quotes that give a sampling of posts about science and faith, evolution and religion, around the blogosphere: Arni Zachariassen writes: Ken Ham gives me hope. His numbers tell me that Christian colleges don’t work with the rigid binaries he works with. Which means that young Christians are introduced and inculcated with the theological wiggle room that’s both befitting for the faith and likely to save a number of commitments that might otherwise be lost. And cheers to... Read more