Today is Earth Day. We use this day to raise awareness of environmental issues and to encourage people to do something about them, but one thing that is often overlooked is the basic perspective that people have on the world. The perspective that may allow them to ignore the problems, or may force them to confront the issues. That perspective is often influenced or even entirely dictated by religious views, and it can differ dramatically from one religion to another, and even from one practitioner to another, based on the same set of scriptures.
It is not uncommon to hear Christians who follow “Dominion Theology” claiming not only a right, but a God given right to do anything they want with anything non-human on the planet. Whether it’s polluting or otherwise destroying the land, air or water, or using and abusing animals in any way they see fit, they have no remorse and no hesitation because they “know” that God himself said that it was okay.
Genesis 1:26
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
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Sometimes I go out to Mill Ave along with the Resistance but I’ve never before gone to the First Friday Art Walk in downtown Phoenix. I try to be an observer and not get into any real debates, as I dislike forcing my ideas on anyone. However, if someone wants a conversation, I’m more than willing to share. Usually I just try to understand people better, to find out why they believe what they do.
So I’ve loosely sorted out 5 different observations from the people and groups we encountered last night at First Friday.
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“Breathe in…breathe out.
Focus your rage against God, and imagine pulling your ritual dagger across the helpless Christian baby’s throat, spilling its blood for our Lord Lucifer.
Breathe in…bre-”
A wild-eyed and wild-haired man in a Slayer t-shirt shook the Priest who had been leading our Atheist Meditation “Look! White smoke! The new Pope has been chosen!”
We were all on our feet in seconds, all thoughts of the sacrifice pushed to the backs of our minds by the burning question: who had the Cardinals deemed worthy of interpreting our sacred scriptures and creating the Atheist dogma?
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It is true that today much of the world uses the Gregorian calendar with the Anno Domini dating system, and this fact is often brought up by Christians as evidence for Jesus, but this “evidence” would hardly even be worth refuting if it weren’t so commonly used.
Most people don’t know much about the history of our calendar, which is not surprising since it is not often important in our lives, but when it is brought up in this way it becomes necessary to explore it, and it’s actually more interesting than might be expected.
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In this 5 minute video, Dr. William Lane Craig attempts to refute the argument made by Richard Dawkins that using a god to explain where the universe came from leads to an infinite regress of even more complicated gods. This argument can be found in Chapter 4 of The God Delusion, but it is introduced at the very end of Chapter 3.
The basis of Craig’s refutation is that “In order to recognize that an explanation is the best, you don’t have to be able to explain the explanation.”
It is true that explaining one thing doesn’t necessarily require explaining its precursor. For example evolution is perfectly acceptable even if we are entirely wrong about the origins of the universe.
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Boxing Day is an interesting holiday, widely observed across what was once the British Empire. Generally held on December 26th, it is a day when the wealthy would traditionally give gifts to their employees or to people of lower social classes. More interestingly, the wealthy would often trade places with their household servants for a day.
What better way to observe this holiday than to trade places with the boss of all bosses? Let’s take a little time to just imagine trading places with God.
We’ll use the most common Christian view of God as omniscient (knowing everything), omnipotent (being able to do anything), and omnipresent (being everywhere at the same time).
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When I was a child, I (like most children of Christian parents) was told that Jesus was born on December 25th in 0 or 1 A.D. This remains a common belief even among adults, but what reason do we have to believe it?
The first and most easily dismissed claim is that Jesus was born on December 25th, because there is simply no evidence for it. Even the Bible doesn’t give a birth day for him, and we know that December 25th was chosen by the Catholic church more than 300 years after the time Jesus was believed to have been born. The date seems to have been chosen in an attempt to replace the pagan Saturnalia and Solstice celebrations which were already set on or around that date.
There has been speculation from many different people about potential birth dates of Jesus, so much in fact that depending on who you ask it could be in any month of the year, but the truth is that we just don’t have very good evidence to place it at any specific time.
What is much more difficult to figure out is the year…
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Even after I lost faith in Christianity, for years I continued to take the existence of Jesus, at least as a real person, on faith. It wasn’t until the last couple of years when I saw that there were people who doubted his existence that I began to seriously question it.
I believe I can look at this issue objectively, because for me it doesn’t matter whether or not a human being named Jesus (or Yeshua) existed as the basis for the Jesus character in the Bible. I don’t believe in the supernatural elements of the Bible for a multitude of other reasons, and although Jesus not existing would be critical for believers, for me it is not.
I can’t promise to be perfect in my search for and examination of evidence, and I may or may not be able to draw a definite conclusion at the end of the search, but I will do my best to research any evidence I find, and I will try to judge it fairly.
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Have you ever wondered where HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, came from? Science does not have a definitive answer, but for a Christian who believes that God created everything, God has to be its creator.
Not only did He create AIDS, along with every other horrible affliction, but He made sure it would spread like wildfire.
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In Part I and Part II we laid out some basic requirements we should expect any real prophecy to fulfill. In Part III we examined a single prophecy, often referred to as the “Triumphal Entry”, which Christians claim is referring to Jesus. In Part IV we will attempt to draw some conclusions, not about the improbability of Jesus accurately fulfilling a long list of prophecies as Christians claim he did, but about the probability that he actually did.
Since Biblical prophecy is such a broad subject, because we have been dealing specifically with prophecies about Jesus, and because the prophecies about Jesus are the ones most often discussed by Christians, we will continue to focus on them.
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