Tag: Religion
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Religion likely killed Jerry
Jerry (not his real name) is dead. Jerry, age about seventy, died recently of covid-19. Jerry could have been vaccinated but chose not to be. Jerry is also the first person I know personally to die needlessly of covid-19. With 800,000 deaths you would think I would know some others, and perhaps I do. I…
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The Atlanta shootings and why pornography may be a good thing
Robert Aaron Long went on a shooting spree in Atlanta last Tuesday. When he was done an hour later, the twenty-one year old man left eight people dead, six of them Asian women who worked at three different area health spas. Long was caught by police fleeing to Florida after having earlier been kicked out…
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God won’t save you from COVID-19, but science might
Everyone’s feeling out of kilter these days. Most of us are feeling somewhat scared too. It’s reasonable to expect that in the weeks ahead we will feel more scared, as the COVID-19 crisis gets much, much worse. When people we know, particularly family and celebrities, are felled by the disease we’re going to be looking…
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Christianity Today
From the perspective of this non-Christian, Christianity today is a mess. The magazine Christianity Today hinted as much with its December 19th editorial calling for Donald Trump to be removed from office. Needless to say, it didn’t go over well with Donald Trump, or the evangelical wing of Christianity which it supposedly represents. Trump quickly…
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Lessons from Book of Mormon (the musical)
We visited New York City last week, our first trip there since probably 2003. You rarely go there and not see a Broadway show. We saw two: Come from Away, a heartwarming musical about how a community of 9000 in Newfoundland, Canada took care of 7000 people after 9/11 when their flights were diverted there…
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Religion is failing us, Part Two
(Read Part One, if you haven’t.) For a couple of decades now, I’ve been interested in the phenomenon of Near Death Experiences (NDEs). I’m not obsessive about it, but my interest in it picks up from time to time. Yesterday, it was snagged again watching this video on YouTube: The speaker at this TED Talk,…
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Religion is failing us, Part One
We just finished Season 2 of NBC’s series The Good Place, which we are watching on Netflix. It’s a comedy of sorts on the afterlife, more specifically on our views of the afterlife. In this version, pretty much everyone ends up in “The Bad Place”, i.e. Hell. Four clearly flawed not so good people end…
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Evangelicals rooting for Armageddon
On April 29, I inconveniently pointed out that most Christians in America are acting like the devil. Jesus himself seemed to be aware that people have this tendency, which is captured in the Bible in Luke 6:42 and Matthew 7:3: How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of…
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The devil in American Christianity
A confluence of events is proving just how dead and unchristian most of American Christianity is today. There are exceptions, most notably the Catholic Church. If you can overlook its rampant misogyny and long history of pedophilia, it still thinks it’s important to feed the hungry and shelter the poor regardless of race, color or…
Occam's Razor 