Over the last few months, I have become fascinated by Christian mega-church pastor Rob Bell. I recently reviewed his latest book and interviewed him about the book. Yesterday, I stumbled upon an interesting debate Rob Bell had with fellow Christian Andrew Wilson. I love me some Christian vs. Christian debates.
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The Bible contains a lot of extremely silly and ridiculous claims and unless you are a diehard Bible literalist, that should be pretty obvious. When religious believers come face to face with these silly and ridiculous claims of their religion, they typically fall back to the old, “that part is a metaphor” card. Let’s examine that briefly.
For starters, I would like to inquire about this so called “metaphor.” What exactly is the claim a metaphor for, exactly? I mean when Jesus says that it is better to pluck out your eye and chop off your hand rather than to steal or feel lust, he prefaces it why saying that it is better to lose these body parts than to have one’s soul tortured for all eternity. So what exactly is that a metaphor for? Maybe that wasn’t one of those metaphor parts of the Bible?
There is an atheist meme that states that any part of the Bible that contradicts science or is just blatantly ridiculous is obviously a metaphor. Basically, this meme is making light of the ever sliding scale of biblical credibility.
The old “metaphor” card seems to be the new “God of the Gaps” excuse. It seems that as time goes by and our scientific understanding of the universe grows, there also seem to be more and more metaphors in the Bible. Funny how that works out.
Praise be Christian Piatt! One of my fellow contributors on Huffington Post is the very liberal Christian, Christian Piatt. In the past, his articles almost seem to be atheistic. His newest article takes on the same article I took on yesterday. But more than that, his article gave me an interesting thought that I want to share today.
There was a recent article on Huffington Post about whether Christians should be watching Game of Thrones. This to me is just another example of Christians being afraid of fiction.
Many times when I get into conversations with Christians online, I get some Christian who inevitably tells me that not all Christians believe X. That “X” could be Creationism, Hell, Original Sin, Sin itself, even God. Many of these Christians accuse me of painting all Christians with the same brush. The thing is that I haven’t.
I’m pretty excited because on Saturday I’m going to the Wizard World Comic Book/Sci-Fi convention. This got me thinking about the link between science fiction fans and atheism.
Often times I will open up my e-mail in the morning and see some incoherent rant from some anonymous religious believer. One of the more comment rants I get informs me that as a “materialistic atheist” I must believe X. The author then goes on to show that X is immoral, ridiculous, or faith-based.
Who would have guessed that the man in the funny hat is just a figure head? Over the last week or so, we learned that the Pope isn’t in control of the Vatican and that what he says isn’t infallible… okay we already knew that second part.
Days after the Pope implied that good atheists are welcome in Heaven, the Vatican Secretariat of State allegedly Tweeted, “Intolerance against Christians, especially in the name of ‘tolerance’, should be condemned publicly.”
Today, Memorial Day is all about picnics and barbeques but at one time it was about memorializing those Americans who fought and died in service to our country. What does that mean?