From Kudzu, by Doug Marlette

 

Some religious beliefs and practices — including belief in God and regular prayer — increase with years of education, the research found.

 

Most of all I detest the New Atheism because I think it is playing into the hands of the Religious Right. The way fundamentalism—scientific creationism, creation science, intelligent-design theory—has been kept out of the biology classes of the nation is by drawing a line between science and religion and arguing that it is a violation of the First Amendment to allow religion (scientific creationism, etc.) into the classrooms. If you blur the science-religion distinction, specifically if you mesh evolution and atheism, then I just don’t see how you can continue that strategy. The fundamentalists argue that since the evolutionists’ position has religious implications, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Either you don’t talk about origins at all or—and they prefer this alternative—you allow talk about everyone’s views on origins.

Do they have a point? Well, I’m inclined to think that they do. There is no question but that any reasonable reading of New Atheist material totally meshes evolution and atheism. Look at the best blog of them all—University of Chicago biology professor Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True. It intersperses quite brilliant discussions of evolutionary topics with diatribes against religion, and makes it very clear that these two are connected. If you are for evolution, you cannot legitimately be for or even tolerant of religion. Accomodationism, as he and others refer to the position I take—that you can keep the two separate—is just not a viable option.

Read it all if this is the sort of thing you like: New Atheism Redux – Brainstorm – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

Only slightly less annoying, yet far more accurate.

Our dear friend Jim-A-Mighty would label this a “dilettante alert.” Ms. Diana deRegneir admits to an ad hoc learning of religious matters, including the Lord’s Prayer. You too will be “surprised” by what she has found in “the Lords [sic] Prayer.” (I suppose I could stop there, but no, let’s go on.)

However, when I heard the prayer in its original Aramaic I was bitten by curiosity. So here’s what I learned.

The Lord’s Prayer is the accepted universal prayer for all Christians. In the latter part of the second century, Matthew interpreted the instructional passage spoken by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:9-13). The Sermon on the Mount is derived largely from the teachings of the Essenes, a Jewish sect in Palestine of which Jesus may have belonged. Thus, the prayer bears a striking resemblance to “The Kadish” found in the Talmud.

Matthew’s translation which most of us were taught in childhood is also admitted by scholars to be inaccurate. The problem of mistranslation arose in part because Matthew was translating into Latin from Greek rather than from Aramaic.

*sigh* It doesn’t get any better folks. I have no energy to deal with this and you all know better, so how about we all just give a wry chuckle, shake our heads, and go have an afternoon cup of tea?  If you really must, you can read it all via American Chronicle | Some Surprises in the Lords Prayer.

 

I read this book back in college and it has stayed with me remarkably well over the years. The concepts, or the vague shadows of the concepts, at least. The physical book has long since gone missing. I was pleased then to find that is available in electronic form for my reading pleasure on my iPad. Just dipping into the Preface, just the preface mind you!, I found it greatly amusing how direct and accurate Lewis often was in his assessment of such issues.

Blake wrote the Marriage of Heaven and Hell…. In some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable ‘either-or’; that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain. This belief I take to be a disastrous error.

I have not read Bell’s book (although I have downloaded the sample on iBooks so I will be sure to leap to conclusions based upon that free snippet) and I am very sympathetic with the question-asking that is often not allowed (tacitly at least) in Christian communities regarding the afterlife (see my post on “Immediate Resurrection” that received another comment just today). The difficulty is, of course, that our conclusions will always be biased by our assumptions. Given the Gospel’s own testimony of Jesus’ statements about hell I am inclined to begin with the assumption that, like a good Pharisee, there is a resurrection of the dead, a Day of Judgment, and appropriate consequences. (I am sympathetic to the annihilationist view, but we can save that for another day.) Lewis’ further observations are much my own or, rather, mine are his, I suppose.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good. I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it.

 

This was a leading entry in PepsiCo’s Super Bowl commercial contest. When word leaked out about it, the Catholic Church went bananas.

Pepsi has been trying to squash every occurrence of it on the Web; so, I don’t know how long this will be up.

I cannot confirm that this is the case, that the Catholic Church was upset or that Pepsi is trying to remove the ads, but I wonder if you all think this is funny or sacrilegious? Or perhaps neither.

 

Working out their own variation on the politically charged sci-fi subgenre pioneered by District 9, filmmakers David Gidali and Itay Gross inject a dark dose of civilian paranoia into an Israeli setting with their striking new short film, Secular Quarter #3.

Juiced up by UFOs, the visual-effects-rich clip (embedded above) pictures an alien intervention that takes place in a slightly futuristic Jerusalem ridden with walls and dome-shaped cages.

Avatar producer Jon Landau and other judges at the Jerusalem 2111 International Animation Competition awarded the festival’s $10,000 first prize to Secular Quarter #3 director Gidali and cinematographer Gross for doing the best job of creating an “urban sci-fi vision of the city of Jerusalem” as it might look a century from now.

You can see other entries from the competition at Wired.com.

 

Photo by: Google Earth

The Jerusalem Post (in a section that is in this instance oddly titled “Iranian Threat”) reports that Google Earth images reveal that the Iran Air headquarters has a Star of David on its roof. The building was built prior to the revolution by Israeli engineers and the Jewish symbol has gone unnoticed for over 30 years. Putting images on roofs in hopes that Google Earth will capture it is a recent phenomenon so clearly these engineers were indulging in a private amusement by including the Star on the building that is in Teheran’s Revolution Square.

So if you were to make a statement by putting an image on your roof for Google Earth and the world to see what would you put up there?

 

A civil rights complaint has been filed against a woman in Grand Rapids, Mich., who posted an advertisement at her church last July seeking a Christian roommate.

The ad “expresses an illegal preference for a Christian roommate, thus excluding people of other faiths,” according to the complaint filed by the Fair Housing Center of West Michigan.

“It’s a violation to make, print or publish a discriminatory statement,” Executive Director Nancy Haynes told Fox News. “There are no exemptions to that.”

Haynes said the unnamed 31-year-old woman’s case was turned over to the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. Depending on the outcome of the case, she said, the woman could face several hundreds of dollars in fines and “fair housing training so it doesn’t happen again.”