I have just come across a blog article on God, fire and brimstone by Jim Finn. It’s a reply to an article by the biblewarroiress, whose blog I follow. The question that is… no, let me start differently: In her article which is headlined with „Terrorizing People to Jesus“ the Warrioress makes a valid point: Asking someone to submit to Jesus Christ out of fear isn’t love offered freely. Threatening them and making them afraid isn’t how God wants us to come to Him....
Yesterday I wrote about people are leaving church because they don’t find God there anymore, but rather some civilized idol, an image of God we made ourselves and civilized, to have in control. Anybody remember the commandments? Wasn’t there one saying we should not make an image of God? Right! But this was rather about statues. The God of the OT is to be invisible. Yet we do still need some image, to think „God“ at least....
I just ran across a blogpost by Dan Wilkinson on why people are leaving the church. There he responds to a quote by some guy named Ken Ham who claimed people would leave church because of the teachings of evolution and because this would tell them the bible could not be trusted. Then Dan writes why young people are really leaving church, well in his opinion. Read it, I think he has a point....
The sad thing is that the cartoon has a point. There are lots of believers who mix up belief and knowledge, faith and facts. But actually faith does NOT mean pretending to know something you are as clueless about as others. Faith in God has rather few to do with hard facts. God can be there if creation or evolution is true, that won’t hinder too much. And God can even be there without any afterlife....
I like God’s Politics Blog a lot, and read their articles from time to time. It gives me insight to what’s going on in American Christianity and more specifically, the American Christianity we don’t hear much about in the media here, because God’s Politics Blog belongs rather to the Christian Left than the Christian Right and the Christian Left is something you wouldn’t know about here unless you sought for the term on google, I guess....
There are times when you are looking for a solution of a problem and nothing seems to help… until you realize that you missed something very stupid. This happened to me today: I’m playing around a bit with ckeditor and of course, I wanted it to play nice with languages like Hebrew and Greek (for those wondering: I study Theology). So I tried to have some Hebrew letters as initial values, and what I got looked like this:This does not look very HebrewWhen I clicked on „Quellcode“ which is German for „source code“ I saw what I learned is called html entities, 4 or 5 character sets that all started with &....
The complain in this comic is obviously that Muslim women have to cover up with hijabs or even burqas, so (Muslim) men’s lust was not provoked. Before all I want to point out that I am not at all interested in whether Muslims do claim so or whether it would be a right claim or not. This is not what this post is about. This post is about the image Atheists, at least certain ones, have of Muslims and spread about them in comics as the above and whether or not one could call this hypocritical....
I ran across an article by Gary where he addresses the question of whether you are saved through works or through faith. He points out correctly that it is faith alone, which isn’t very surprising as he is lutheran, or should I say, protestant? Because basically, I only knew about catholics being accused of teaching that you’d have to earn entrance to heaven through good works, and that without them you could have faith as much as you wanted, but wouldn’t be let in....
It’s been a couple of days since I came across Bruce Gerencser’s Blog „The Way Forward“. From all what I have understood, Bruce used to be a minister for years, before he became atheist. On his blog, there is a „start here“ series with posts to understand his journey. In order to understand – why woud I be reading anything at all if not to gain further understanding on God knows what – I started reading those posts (I haven’t come far yet, but I shall)....
I commented on another video by darkmatter2525 yesterday (which lead to some discussion on diapsora*), and if you checked the source page where I found it, you’ve seen that there’s also another one. This one. Somehow I even like this one. It does a fair bit of critizising satisfaction theory, which I do not consider correct myself either. It might not be doing the satisfaction theory justice, but it points out some good points that speak against it....