Now’s the Time To End Tax Exemptions for Religious Institutions, by Mark Oppenheimer
LINK. I agree.
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Friday that it is legal for all Americans, no matter their gender or sexual orientation, to marry the people they love.Robert Price in his essay, Changing Morals and the Fate of Evangelicalism, predicted that the issue of sexuality, all by itself, could be the death of evangelicalism. If so, with this Supreme Court decision the death of evangelicalism has arrived. It's been long overdue
The decision is a historic victory for gay rights activists who have fought for years in the lower courts. Thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia already recognize marriage equality. The remaining 13 states ban these unions, even as public support has reached record levels nationwide.
The justices found that under the 14th Amendment, states must issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and recognize same-sex unions that were legally performed in other states. LINK.
The question is not really a matter of dispute among experts, even though mythicists as a rule would like it to be and sometimes even insist it is. But the reality is this: if you were to look at the program of the annual meeting of (the many thousands of English-speaking) professors of Biblical Studies, the Society of Biblical Literature meeting (this year in Atlanta), you will not find a session (out of thousands) devoted to arguing both sides of this issue. That’s because there is no debate. LINK.There are some signs this is not as rock solid of a consensus as Ehrman makes it out to be. For Richard Carrier has defended Jesus mythicism in a book published by Sheffield Phoenix Press, the most prestigious Christian scholarly publisher around, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. His massive book is a magisterial treasure trove of research and information. There is a minor difficulty in using Bayesian math to establish something in the past, which seems quite fashionable right now in some circles. For my part I don't have a stake in who wins this debate, so long as both sides agree that the Jesus depicted in the Gospels never existed.
Kenneth |
honeymonster |
Labels: Ridicule
Labels: Ridicule
Chart A |
Chart B |
I have been to a lot of discussion forums, and I have never read so many intelligent and civil posts in my life. Tempers flare from time to time, but this is a great site.
I'm As Bored As I Can Get! |
I've been hanging around Mr. Loftus' Debunking Christianity for many years, and now my default position is that Christianity is thoroughly debunked since no Christian can show any Christianity-specific claim to be true... LINK.His comment was in response to a Catholic who came here to tell us which religion is the trooth. One of the reasons I'm posting less is because I haven't seen anything that warrants accepting one specific religious sect over the others that exist, or accepting religious faith itself. There is nothing coming from the believing side that's even worthy of mentioning. It's all been debunked. But later today, or tomorrow, or the next day, some believer will repeat this same claim with a different religious faith using many of the same tired arguments. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. I'm as bored as I can get of this.
1. Can you make a moral judgment against rape or slavery using only scripture?By going to the link and subscribing to Atheist Republic you can download the book "Your God is Too Small" for free.
2. Would you sacrifice your child if god asked you to?
3. Is it acceptable to cherry pick the bible and only follow the parts you agree with?
4. How did animal X get from point Y to point Z after the great flood?
5. How did carnivorous dinosaurs supposedly eat plants before the biblical fall of man, when their teeth and digestive systems were not equipped to process a vegetarian diet?
6. Can god tell a lie?
7. Is observable physical evidence more important and valid than what the bible claims to be true?
8. Is there any amount of evidence that would change your views?
9. What physical proof is there that your particular god even exists?
10. Do you believe hell is a justifiable punishment for a simple lack of belief? LINK.
It’s often said that Britain’s church congregations are shrinking, but that doesn’t come close to expressing the scale of the disaster now facing Christianity in this country. Every ten years the census spells out the situation in detail: between 2001 and 2011 the number of Christians born in Britain fell by 5.3 million — about 10,000 a week. If that rate of decline continues, the mission of St Augustine to the English, together with that of the Irish saints to the Scots, will come to an end in 2067."The deadliest enemy of western Christianity," he writes, "is not Islam or atheism but the infinitely complex process of secularisation."
That is the year in which the Christians who have inherited the faith of their British ancestors will become statistically invisible. Parish churches everywhere will have been adapted for secular use, demolished or abandoned.
Our cathedral buildings will survive, but they won’t be true cathedrals because they will have no bishops. The Church of England is declining faster than other denominations; if it carries on shrinking at the rate suggested by the latest British Social Attitudes survey, Anglicanism will disappear from Britain in 2033. One day the last native-born Christian will die and that will be that.
Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually. However, many are ignored even within scientific communities - 82 per cent of articles published in humanities are not even cited once. No one ever refers to 32 per cent of the peer-reviewed articles in the social and 27 per cent in the natural sciences.Dr. Hector Avalos speaks to the masses by writing a monthly column in the Ames Iowa Tribune. For my part I'm writing for the university student and the educated person in the Pew, bringing scholarly arguments down to them.
If a paper is cited, this does not imply it has actually been read. According to one estimate, only 20 per cent of papers cited have actually been read. We estimate that an average paper in a peer-reviewed journal is read completely by no more than 10 people. Hence, impacts of most peer-reviewed publications even within the scientific community are minuscule.
Many scholars aspire to contribute to their discipline's knowledge and to influence practitioners' decision-making.
However, practitioners very rarely read articles published in peer-reviewed journals. We know of no senior policymaker or senior business leader who ever read regularly any peer-reviewed papers in well-recognised journals like Nature, Science or Lancet. LINK.
Labels: "Rauser", God or Godless
Labels: "Avalos"
I have become convinced that the only origins issue that really matters to most Christians is Adam and Eve. Leave Adam and Eve—and their Fall—in place, and most opposition to the Big Bang, evolution, and the great age of the earth will recede. The historicity of Adam and Eve is the single most important issue driving evangelical Christianity’s widespread, deep, and disturbing opposition to science.
Evangelical opposition to science is no small matter. It spills over into Catholicism, and moderate and liberal Christianity to a degree. It has taken up residence in the GOP where it is worn as a badge of pride by leaders who reject much of mainstream science and deflect concerns with the populist refrain “I am not a scientist.” This opposition plays a significant role in America’s declining global leadership in science. It plays into a general distrust of science in America that nurtures the rejection of modern cosmology, climate science and vaccinations.
Adam and Eve stand on the bulls-eye of this controversy, which has risen steadily over the past few decades as the human genome has been mapped. This progress has established with near certainty that humans are closely related to chimps and bonobos, with whom they share a common ancestor; that the human race originated in Africa millennia before the events in Genesis took place; and that the human race never consisted of only two people. Link.
[Alter's book next to my favorite brew for size comparison.] |
Labels: Bayes Theorem, Real Atheology
The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th
ed.
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I don't know anyone who can match the High Definition clarity of John Loftus when it comes to navigating the labyrinthine world of Christian evangelical apologetics for the general public. This is a relentless and incisive critique of the pseudo-scholarship that passes for genuine intellectual inquiry under the name of Christian apologetics.He joins others who have written one. Below you can see the book cover and Contents.
--Dr. Hector Avalos, Professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University and author of The End of Biblical Studies(2007), Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship(2011), and The Bad Jesus: The Ethics of New Testament Ethics(2015).
Rev. Darrell Morgan with Wife
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Labels: Lowder
Labels: Lowder