by VorJack
The Tim Minchin clip from last week reminded me of a theory that was going around for a while.
The pseudonymous Christoph Luxenberg wrote a work titled A Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran, in which he maintained that Muhammad and other early Muslims incorporated certain words and phrases from Aramaic into their Arabic. He [...]
by VorJack
… to these books about self-help. Self-help is a multi billion dollar industry in America, selling millions of books. Here are a few that take a look at the movement from the outside.
Legacy of the Occult
Pullquote: ”The leaders in [New Thought] have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded [...]
by VorJack
You may know of Dr. James McGrath, a professor of religion at Butler University. He’s the author of two excellent books on the history of Christianity, The Burial of Jesus and The Only True God. He’s also a blogger at Exploring Our Matrix, where he blogs about religion, biblical history and the [...]
by VorJack
The New York Times has come out with a very interesting article about the fight over textbook history standards in Texas: How Christian Were the Founders?. It’s a long, weaving article that uses the debate in Texas as a frame to discuss the movement among Conservative Christians to inject more explicit mentions of [...]
Here’s a list of six saints who could kick your ass:
Ignatius of Loyola survived a shot from a cannon blast.
Vladimir of Kiev had a viking army and 800 wives.
Symeon the Stylite lived in a crevice in a rock in the desert until he moved on top of a stone pillar 50 ft high for 36 [...]
by VorJack
Alright, the title is a bit hard to justify. How do you measure blasphemy, by volume? But if you were to measure the blasphemy of a book by the dubious means of counting the number of blasphemy convictions it produced, one book would stand above all others: Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason.
Ironically, [...]
by VorJack
In my last post, I wrote about one of the ways that the ancient Jews interpreted their scriptures: by finding hidden meanings within the text that were relevant to their current situations. This was usually done in the service of some exiting belief, i.e. That a certain person was the messiah or that [...]
by VorJack
One of the most common arguments used to support Christianity is the “argument from prophecy.” Jesus, we are told, fulfilled numerous prophecies laid down in the Hebrew Testament. There are a number of responses, but let’s look at it from the perspective of history: what did the authors of the Gospels and [...]
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Jerdog: That’s good satire for ya. Pope Forgives Molested Children
Elemenope: That sounds pretty tame for him. Jon Stewart Becomes Glenn Beck Elemenope: My problem with teaching it to kids as though it should be recited by rote is that by the time any of the... A Reversal on the Pledge
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