You know the Bible 92%!
Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!
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This is, obviously, not because [...]
I’m always puzzled by the fact that, in discussions about abolishing the monarchy, so many people assume it would be necessary to replace the monarch with some kind of president.
To me, ‘king’ suggests a small god. A slight odour of divinity attaches to the idea of a monarch which is sets it apart from other [...]
I was thinking about why the atheism thing seems important to me at the moment.
I don’t think I’ve ever articulated it to myself explicitly before, but I think it amounts to a sense that if, in a hundred years time, the world is less religious — fewer believers and less fervent belief — that’s a [...]
I’ve just finished The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, which I enjoyed more than I expected, since generally I prefer Dawkins when he’s writing about biology. I might blog about the book later, but for now it got me thinking about religion.
My own opinions are uncompromising: I don’t believe there is anything beyond the material [...]
With the Amish in the news, I was thinking how odd it is that they have such a generally positive image. These people are religious extremists who define themselves by ignorance and dogma, who oppose art and science, who treat women as second-class citizens, and won’t even talk to their own family members if they [...]
The V&A seems to have put lots more of their stuff online since I last looked, and it’s all searchable. I wondered if there was a photo of the terracotta Virgin Mary and Child I wrote a poem about a few years ago, but it seems not. Lots of other good stuff though, like this [...]
Alan Sullivan says:
Robert Spencer has written a book to challenge conventional views of Islam. He contends that the jihadists have interpreted their tradition correctly. It is the ‘religion of peace’ apologists who promulgate a heresy. The Islam of Osama bin Laden is quite authentic. I wonder if the American President realizes this, but attempts to [...]
Seville! City of tiny platesful of food!
The food has indeed been yummy. Garlic prawns, morcilla (the local version of black pudding), scrambled eggs with garlic shoots and ham, etc etc. I haven’t been getting my 5 servings of fruit and vegetable a day, mind you. Even if you count bread and breadsticklets as seperate vegetables. [...]
I said a few posts ago, about my own atheism, “I don’t believe in unicorns either, but I’m not about to go to any meetings about it.” Well, I haven’t been going to any atheist meetings, but I have been reading the comment threads at Pharyngula, which is a pretty good internet equivalent.
My own [...]
I think I’ll move this out of the comments into its own post:
From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are [...]
This article about atheists in Texas (via Pharyngula) is just mind-bogglingly odd to me. I grew up in secular, middle-class London where the default position was a casual agnosticism, so the image of atheists as a secretive minority, afraid to give their name in a newspaper interview, seems surreal. The flipside of that is the [...]
He’s going to do it today, according to the Times.
EDIT: I find this Pope-quote about Limbo amusing, btw: “Personally, I would let it drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis.” Unlike purgatory, sainthood, and the papacy itself, presumably.
“The Vatican’s chief astronomer said on Friday that Intelligent Design Theory isn’t science and doesn’t belong in science classrooms.”
The ‘Vatican’s chief astronomer’? I wonder if CERN has a head priest who can be consulted for a theological perspective on particle physics.
I don’t suppose the Vatican astronomer is empowered to define the Catholic Church’s theological stance [...]
In the Washington Post, Salman Rushdie makes the case for a profound reform of Islam - which I don’t have a problem with. There’s a certain irony, though, in calling it an Islamic Reformation, since the Reformation was a time of biblical literalism and iconoclasm - the closest thing Britain ever had to the Taleban.
And I’m not talking about Sam.
Since the London bombings (and their sequel, which like so many sequels, failed to live up to the promise of the original) the press has, naturally enough, turned to the question ‘why did those nice British boys try to kill me?’ Or, to phrase it in a more objective [...]
One of the arguments that has surfaced repeatedly since the London bombings is over the term ‘Islamic terrorists’ - some people pointing out that we never referred to the IRA as ‘Catholic terrorists’, others riposting that the IRA never claimed to be acting in the name of the Catholic faith, unlike Al-Qaeda.
This argument is [...]