Consciencebound

Archive for the ‘Christianity’ Category

I found this to be a pretty good illustration of how the logic of religious beliefs that we take for granted sound when someone else uses them to prove something that we disagree with.

This was taken from http://www.jhuger.com/kisshankbutt.php

You can watch a movie that was made of this at this link:

http://www.jcnot4me.com/Videos/Kissing_Hanks_Ass-video.mov

Kissing Hank’s Butt

This morning there was a knock at my door. When I answered the door I found a well groomed, nicely dressed couple. The man spoke first: Read the rest of this entry »

I had a conversation with someone lately via email and they were asking about how I became a Christian and how I ended up leaving the Christian faith. Most of the time people who are Christians do not see how someone could have been a “true Christian” if they end up leaving the faith so when they hear that I am no longer a Christian they assume that I had a false faith of some kind. I wanted to briefly share my story of how I became a Christian and how I came to not be a Christian. I know that many people will still feel as though I was not a “real” Christian but there is not much that I can do about that. The bottom line for me is that I was honestly a Christian and believed in Jesus and the Bible with all of my heart. I left the faith because I feel that I was bound by my conscience to be honest with myself about what I could and could not truly believe anymore.

I grew up in a Christian home but… Read the rest of this entry »

Below is a conversation that I had via email with a friend of mine from the past that i have not talked to in a long time. He had just heard that I had left the faith and I believe him to be a very sincere man. I wanted to try and point out how easy it is to be blinded by our own beliefs that we do not listen to people who are opposing us. I know that I have done this myself and am probably guilty of still doing it but I want to try and be as open as possible to what the truth is and that means truly listening to people’s questions and thinking them through. This can be a hard thing to do especially when you have Read the rest of this entry »

In my discussions with various friends who are Christians or reading Christian books or online articles and posts I frequently come across an argument that I wanted to comment on here. The argument is directed towards someone like myself who does not think that the Bible is authoritative and who tries to understand the world, ethics, politics, history etc through using logic and critical thinking alone. Although the argument varies from person to person in some respect, it goes something like this:

- Trusting man who is finite is a foolish and arrogant thing to do.

- Relying on your own understanding (prov. 3:5,6) will always lead you down the wrong path and into error.

- Therefore, you should instead trust God and listen to what He tells us in his word, the Bible.

This argument takes on many different forms but Read the rest of this entry »

I referred to this article in my post entitled Loving God by Distorting His Word but felt like it is such a good article that I wanted to post the whole contents here so that more people would be prone to read it. I have taken this article from Robert Price’s web site which can be found at http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/ . This article is at this specific link. I find Doctor Price’s writing to be both very informative and insightful as well as often humorous. In this article, he is describing what he sees as the psychological foundations of the fundamentalist’s “strict” following of the Bible.

“Biblicism, again, is the term for that stance toward the Bible whereby a believer intends to obey whatever the text tells him to do, and to believe whatever the text asserts” Read the rest of this entry »

The Jesus Project

I just listened to a podcast from the Center for Inquiry which is one of my favorite podcasts to listen to on a regular basis. You can listen to the podcast yourself at www.pointofinquiry.org/ (scroll down the page to the Joe Hoffman interview) or you can subscribe through iTunes which is what I do. The particular episode was an interview with Joe Hoffman and is described as follows:

Joe Hoffmann, formerly at Oxford, is director of Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER). He has appeared widely in the media and at venues across the United States speaking on Christian origins, the historical Jesus, the proper role of religion in society, and similar topics. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In this discussion with D.J. Grothe, Dr. Hoffmann details a new project involving scholars from many disciplines that is trying to determine the likelihood of Jesus of Nazareth having ever existed. Read the rest of this entry »

Loving God by Distorting His Word

There is a shocking and ironic thing that happens as we read and interpret the Bible sometimes. We are zealous for God and for His truth and we feel the need to get involved and defend what we KNOW to be the Word of God. We have already done our homework or if we haven’t done it ourselves we know someone who has who fills the pulpit at our church on Sunday or who we listen to on the radio every day in the car. We have come to the conclusions that there are certain things that MUST be believed in order to be considered orthodox or in order to be an Evangelical Christian. We have also come to believe that the world is filled with those who are ministers of “The Enemy” and who want nothing more than to undermine these important doctrines which our faith is comprised of. We must be vigilant! We must be strong! We must not be seduced by the wiles of the devil that would have us not trust the text or take God at his Word.

And so it is, in light of these views that we come to the Bible so often. Not always maybe, but often. We do not expect to find something in the text that is at variance with orthodoxy. Of course, why would we? We already KNOW what the Bible says and now it is only a matter of seeing for ourself where God actually says what we already believe. Then comes the difficulty. That neighbor of ours, that coworker who sees us reading our Bible at lunch time or that pesky brother in law who has this sadistic desire to always play the devil’s advocate. They don’t believe the truth as we know it and for some reason they want to talk about it. They ask us what we believe about this or that doctrine of the Bible. They point out “apparent contradictions” that they learned in their freshman college class on world religions that was taught by that liberal professor who wanted nothing more than to see unsuspecting Christians loose their faith. They think they have all the answers. They don’t understand the commitment of faith that we have made or how we can believe these things. They are blinded by their sins just as Paul said. Read the rest of this entry »

Prayer: Shouldn’t it Work Like the Bible Says it Does?

Prayer can be a pretty interesting thing. There are countless anecdotal stories that point out where prayers were answered in very specific and undeniable ways in people’s lives. In fact, this can be found across various religious lines. People from almost all faiths can attest to their prayers being answered by God so clearly that it is a proof to them of the truth of their faith. I don’t like to rule out the possibility that God in fact does answer prayer, even across these various religious lines, but what i would like to do is to take a look at prayer as a proof for God in a way that modern Christians often do not do.

We all look upon the reports of answered prayer from a religion different then our own as being highly suspect. It is put in the same place that we put reports of Jesus’ face appearing on a tortilla in South America, or a potato that looks like the Virgin Mary. As Christians, we don’t have a category to put these “answers” to prayer that come from faiths that are seemingly blatantly wrong like Islam or Mormonism, or Hinduism. “I thought that God did not hear the prayers of the reprobate?” we may think. So we often just assume that these people are delusional or at best overly zealous.

But what about those critiques of prayer in general that are out there? The critiques of the Evangelical version of answered prayer surely would stand up to such criticism wouldn’t they? This is what can be confusing and difficult to really deal with. There is some pretty good evidence to suggest that prayer in general is really not effective Read the rest of this entry »

The Bones of Jesus

Tonight on the Discovery Channel is a documentary on the supposed lost tomb of Jesus. I hope to watch it if I am able and I watched the press conference about it last week which was pretty interesting in and of itself. The claim is that there has been a tomb found in Jerusalem which seems to have the bones of Joseph, Mary, Jesus, Mary Magdalene and a few other individuals. Whether or not this is actually the case or if these “archaeologists” are engaging in a lot of speculation is besides the point as far as I am concerned. Although I do believe that this would be devastating to conservative Christianity if it is true, I find it interesting and very telling to see how Christians respond to even the idea that the bones of Jesus may have been found. Here are a few responses that I have heard so far Read the rest of this entry »

Kudos to Koukl

Last night the The Lost Tomb of Jesus aired on the Discovery Channel. I watched it with a friend and also watched the follow-up show with Ted Koppel which I thought was very good. I must say that I was quite disappointed with the evidence that was presented and the manner in which was presented. I am admittedly a skeptic when it comes to faith claims and my faith in Christ has decreased quite a bit in the last few years and so I would be certainly open to a finding of the “bones of Jesus” and would have no theological axe to grind which would oppose me to such findings. There are plenty of arguments that show that Christianity is based on faulty assumptions in my opinion but the Lost Tomb of Jesus is not one of them. In fact I found it rather annoying at times. The amount of leaps of logic that were made were nothing short of embarrassing for a person who is skeptical of Christianity and would even welcome a find like this.

Read the rest of this entry »