Despite the fact that the Bible is hopelessly boring, the characters have no depth to them, and many of the stories challenge human credibility and morality the Bible remains the bestselling book of all time. The History Channel recently capitalized on the books popularity with much success. Now they are planning on creating a sequel mini-series.
Tag Christianity
One of the events that I am planning is the annual Philadelphia Coalition of Reason picnic. On the flyers and press release, I invited atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers, rationalists, skeptics, etc. Well, someone messaged me demanding that I openly invite theists too.
“Man of Steel” has recently hit theaters and as I discussed yesterday, the religious media are abuzz talking about how the film was filled with religious references. As it turns out, the last Superman film “Superman Returns” actually have more religious symbolism in it.
I recently saw the new Superman film, “Man of Steel” and the religious media is ablaze with talk about how the film was “filled” with Christian references. To be honest, I really didn’t see any Christian references in the film… at least not any more than one can pull out of any film if you were intent on finding them.
I recently started working part time in retail and I can foresee some issues that might come up and I want to hear your opinions on them. For starters, I see a lot of my fellow coworkers wearing religious necklaces. Should I wear atheistic jewelry?
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.
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.
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.