Consciencebound

Archive for the ‘bible’ Category

Doug Wilson is a Christian pastor, author, professor and theologian and he co-wrote a paper a few years back defending the ownership of slaves by Christians in the south prior to abolitionism. It is a published pamphlet and it entitled, Southern Slavery As It Was. A Monograph by Steve Wilkins & Douglas Wilson. You can read this pamphlet here in it’s entirety(it is only 22 pages). I recommend that all Christians read this paper. Although you may not agree with his point of view, he is trying to be consistent with what the Bible teaches on the subject of slavery and is not shy about saying so. It will challenge you to think about the issue and to grapple with what the Bible says about it.

When I was an evangelical Christian, I used to listen to and read much of what Doug Wilson has written. He is a very well educated and classically trained man with a great sense of humor and a sharp whit. He has more recently done a documentary with Christopher Hitchens entitled Collision which you can read about here. Wilson and Hitch traveled around the united states doing debates and discussing their differences and much of it is very interesting to watch.

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This is a great little 4 minute video by Sam Harris on why trusting miracle claims in the Bible is a foolish and very inconsistent thing to do. There is far better evidence for the miraculous claims of other non Christian people and Christians reject that out of hand. Yet they accept without any critical analysis the miracles found in the pages of the Bible.

Today I listened to a Radio Lab podcast from WNYC in New York. Quickly becoming one of my favorite podcasts to listen to. The episode that I listened to today is called Vanishing Words and can be listened to here. The gist of this very interesting episode was that a guy is using computer linguistic analysis to study Agatha Christie’s novels. Upon doing this he discovered that over time, Christie’s vocabulary decreased by a significant amount as she got older. There had been some people who thought that she may have suffered from some kind of dementia but it was not clear. This study seemed to lend support to that theory. They also discussed another study where they were able to predict with 85% accuracy whether a person would develop dementia when they got older by looking at their vocabulary and writing style when they were young. Although certainly not conclusive it was very interesting.

So why I am bring this up today? Well, other than the fact that Radio Lab is simply a cool show to listen to that always makes you think, this made me think about something else that I thought was interesting. In keeping in line with my developing skepticism of the Bible and other “authoritative” religious books of the past, it seems that studies like this should give us pause. Often, when trying to figure out who wrote what book in the bible there is a linguistic analysis that is done on the vocabulary of the writings to compare with this persons other attributed writings. There are conclusions that are arrived at about two different people who wrote Isaiah, five possible people who wrote the Pentateuch (the first 5 books of the Bible) as well as different theories on Paul’s letters in the new testament. Given some of the ideas discussed in this podcast, it seems reasonable to conclude that the change in vocabulary with some of these different books may be the result of changing mental faculties over the years. Maybe Moses or Isaiah or Paul simply had some form of dementia and this is what made some of their ideas hard to square with other of their ideas. Maybe this is why there seems to be evidence of multiple authors of various biblical books. This of course would only make our job that much harder when it comes to trying to understand ancient authors, but it is definitely something to consider.

Luke over at Common Sense Atheism interviewed Chris Hallquist, author of UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God: Debunking the Resurrection of Jesus. The interview can be found here. In this interview they discussed the following:

* the claim that there wasn’t enough time between Jesus’ death and the writing of the gospels for legends to develop
* the claim that if the empty tomb story had been fabricated, the fabricators would not have said that women discovered the tomb
* do prophecies point to Jesus as the Jewish Messiah?
* the nature of Christian apologetics

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The doctrine of Hell in modern Christianity causes much consternation both with those who are not believers as well as with believers themselves. If you believe in a God that is loving and who cares for humans as if they are his children, it is difficult to fathom how he could send those people to an eternal torture chamber for simply not believing. It is also difficult to stomach the thought of loved ones who have died being tortured for all eternity. I remember as a believer that this caused me much anguish at various times when i was confronted with the death of someone that I knew who was not a “professing Christian”.

On the side of those who are not believers, the tension of a loving god and a fiery Hell is often given as a reason for unbelief. It makes the Christian God out to be a vindictive, unforgiving task master which is a huge turn off to many people. That is at least what the perception is.

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Does faith actually give us information that we cannot get with our senses? Can we gain knowledge by faith? Or is it an assumption that we make about what someone told us that God has said? Or is it something that we throw up like a white flag of surrender when we realize that we don’t have enough information but we still feel like we have to defend our belief?

In the Bible we are told:

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