It's *So* Predictable...



[appropriately via Surviving the World, here]

Lying about Santa: The Irrelevance of Proof to the Holiday Spirit

[via Religion Dispatches]

Toxic to Democracy: Conspiracy Theories, Demonization, & Scapegoating
by Chip Berlet

[via PublicEye.org]

not positing god v. positing “no god”

[via Notes From Off-Center]

Faith, not Just Good Works, Needed in Africa–according to an Atheist

[via Prof. John Stackhouse's Weblog]

Why it is important not to love the God of the Bible

[via Ancient Hebrew Poetry]

An Islamless World by Martin E. Marty

[HT: Ponderings on a Faith Journey]

In Order To Stand

regardless of the holes, i still believe in Jesus. i still believe in the weird and crazy ways of the Spirit, the unexplainable way God brings hope and peace and freedom to darkness and brokenness and emptiness. the upside-down ways expressed in the sermon on the mount still resonate in deep places in my heart and stir up a desire to live this short life on earth differently. i believe in the power of Jesus’ love and that it gets expressed in many diverse and wonderful ways that cross over our limitations of language and expression and culture. i do still really love the power and conviction and hope scripture sometimes brings.

and when i think of the power of the cross this holy week, it is comforting to me in ways that all of my cynicism about weird religious stuff and church politics can’t take away.

i don’t have new answers to all of the jenga pieces i have taken out over these past few years. it’s not like i just replaced the blocks with new certain, stronger, better ones. i am living in the tension of a lot of holes, a lot of uncertainty about things that somehow don’t seem to matter as much as i thought they did. some blocks i’ve looked at for a while and put back in. they didn’t need to come out all the way. others, i honestly don’t think they are going to be finessed back into place or placed back at the top; they’re pretty much out of the game.

when i reflect on Jesus’ ministry in the gospels i am reminded that he didn’t really have a long list of pieces that i needed to have in my jenga tower in order for it to stand. in fact, he sort of honed in on what was enough to focus on: love God, love people, including ourselves. honestly, for now, that is plenty to play with.

[via the carnival in my head]

The Same, Old Story

What could be better for the Christmas spirit than one of those books that tells us Jesus may or may not have been born in Bethlehem, Mary may or may not have been a virgin, the wise men from Babylon following a star is a real stretch, the dates are all wrong, those shepherds are only out in the fields between March and November, and Herod slaughtering the young children (admittedly, not one of our favorite episodes from the Christmas pageant) is not very probable? When the whole thing is written by Geza Vermes, our favorite Hungarian ex-Catholic-priest turned Jewish Oxford professor, you know that Paige Patterson won’t be sending any of these out for gifts this season.

Still, I’m a sucker for “historical Jesus” books like The Nativity: History & Legend (Doubleday, 172 pp., $17.95), even though the arguments are always the same:

1. Here’s what the gospels say.
2. They don’t agree with each other.
3. They don’t agree with other contemporary sources.
4. We don’t have much to go on, but here’s a little tiny bit from Philo and Josephus.
5. Each gospel writer was probably shaping his story for a particular audience.
6. The gospels aren’t history.{continue...}

[via The Wittenburg Door]

An Atheist Christmas Homily

[via Rumblings]

Remembering...Always

To me, remembrance is about learning who we are and who we want to be.

...We can make people/criminals feel guilty for doing wrong in-the-eyes-of-another, but we can’t make people/criminals feel shame. Shame starts from within us. And it’s a means of personal change initiated by oneself. And the change can only be for the better when it’s understood (through increased skills to empathize with our victims) that disappearing will not benefit those we’ve hurt. Nothing can erase the damage done. But the best compensation for our victims is gaining healthier relationships. And the best way for victims to receive justice is to help the wrong-doer find their own true shame.

...Falsifying our personal history by censuring it is a crime. History should reveal the world of the adult along with the world of the child, memories of the good, and bad, in all.

[via daydreamer]

Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously

[via The Heresy]

Not Politics, Not Alarm

I've noticed two patterns in global warming skepticism. Firstly, many reasons for disbelieving in anthroporphic global warming (AGW) seems to be political rather than scientific. Eg - it's all a liberal plot to spread socialism and destroy capitalism (or sometimes just plain dislike for Al Gore). As one person put it, "the cheerleaders for doing something about global warming seem to be largely the cheerleaders for many causes of which I disapprove".

But beneath the politics is a more elemental instinct - an aversion to alarmism. We've been burnt before. The media predicted an ice age in the 70's which never eventuated. Y2K was going to destroy society - it was barely a hiccup. And I won't deny there are alarmists in the global warming camp. Urgent cries that the ice sheets are on the verge of sliding into the sea. Hysteric predictions that Manhattan will soon be underwater. Or emotional pleas to save those cute little polar bears. Sadly, alarmists seem to be the loudest voices in the global warming debate. But that doesn't change the science underneath.

So I avoid the distractions of political agendas, ad hominem arguments and hyperbole about "the new religion". Instead, I concentrate on the science. {more...}

[via Skeptical Science, HT: The Heresy]

Statements By Leaders...

In times past, I used to read stories about how people in the Soviet Union, China and other authoritarian states had learned to ignore the propaganda that was being disseminated as information by their leaders.

Now, as Gen. Petraeus testifies before Congress, I am reading stories about the American public's cynicism in regard to statements being made by our leaders. Here's an example {continue...}

[via Mainstream Baptist]

The Myth of Consistent Skepticism

[via Skeptical Inquirer, May/June 2007]

Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach

[via Kruse Kronicle]

My Need For Another’s Artistic Expression

[via daydreamer]

Eternal Expiration

Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that the first cells were indeed designed and used to seed this planet. What would this look like to someone who was convinced that this planet instead spawned those seeds? A gap. That is, if one is committed to the hypothesis that the planet’s geochemistry is sufficient cause for the origin of these cells, yet their origin depends, at least in part, on some form of intelligent design, the non-teleological perspective interprets its difficulty in bridging the discontinuity in epistemological terms – a gap.

Now, once we realize that such a design event will be perceived by non-teleologists as a gap, two other interesting insights follow....

Things get more interesting when you realize that most non-teleologists believe that a design inference necessarily depends on the ability to identify and describe independent information about the designer(s). Without such information, the teleologist is left with nothing more than gaps. If it can thus appear the gaps are slowly being filled, the non-teleologist will never suspect that life was designed (remember we are making this assumption for the sake of argument).

But there is one major problem with the Promissory Note Argument – it has no expiration date. Since, FAPP, we can indefinitely generate new speculations and lines of inquiry that provide new sets of circumstantial evidence, the perception of a discontinuity as a gap can be maintained long past my lifetime. And this takes us to Dawkins' argument about the origin of life – the OOL event was so ancient and improbable that we should NOT expect an ability to completely close the gap. In other words, the Promissory Note has been given an expiration date after all – eternity.

[via Telic Thoughts]

Related: PUC in the Gaps

Another Fact That Can Be Proved?

A faith proven is no longer faith, it is fact. By attempting to distinguish between Christianity and science by proving faith in a scientific way, all Ham has done is simply blurred the two. Now, Christian faith has been reduced to just another type of science, another fact that can be proved.

Everyday we are bombarded by a sea of facts. Have you watched CNBC lately? There are more scrolling bars than any normal human can handle. Apparently a business degree enables you to sit there in a trance and ingest the data without causing your head to explode. We in the West suffer from information overload to the point that we can no longer sift through what’s true and what’s not....

If faith can be proven, it can also be unproven. That little “fact” does not sit well with me.

Ultimately our faith has to transcend grudge matches of “my facts are more true than your facts”. Seekers of truth are not looking for facts, they are looking for a genuine and authentic faith which can be applied everyday. They have to wade through diverse sets of facts everyday, so what’s one more?

....People who are persuaded to be a Christian based on facts, rather than faith, will have a much harder time putting that faith into practice.

[via Moral Contradictions]

The Denialists' Deck of Cards: An Illustrated Taxonomy of Rhetoric Used to Frustrate Consumer Protection Efforts

[via denialism blog]