Quote of the Day – June 23
From Dave Black Online, Rhino Evangelism:
What a tragedy that some Christians, while having a commendable zeal for evangelism, also display the sweet approachability of a rhinoceros!
From Dave Black Online, Rhino Evangelism:
What a tragedy that some Christians, while having a commendable zeal for evangelism, also display the sweet approachability of a rhinoceros!
What meaning is evoked in people’s minds by the word “sacrifice?” One of the things I like to do when teaching is to simply write a word on the board that is commonly used in Biblical and/or Christian discourse and get people to give me various things that this word means to them. I try…
Harold Camping seems to be repeating the mistakes made by the early Adventist movement. While I disagree profoundly with Seventh-day Adventist eschatology, I don’t hold that history against the church. Good and interesting movements can result from mistakes, but only if you correct those mistakes. Now consider Camping. He predicted the rapture in 1994, and…
[Since I have readers from a variety of viewpoints, let me note that the following is written from within the Christian tradition and to those in that tradition. It’s OK to read, of course, but it’s unlikely to be of great interest to non-Christians.] Mark at Pseudo-Polymath has started a discussion on health care and…
… at Crossroads.
From The Peculiar Club, there is How to Know God, simple, practical, brief, down to earth–all the things my posts usually aren’t! This one would be worth putting into practice. After reading the book unChristian, Tom Gilson says “Christianity has a reality problem.” He then does a very thoughtful job of discussing just what is…
I’ve noticed in recent discussions both online and offline that there seems to be some fuzziness about the difference between these two concepts. I think that perhaps our human tendency is to either excuse or condemn. By “excusing” I mean either minimizing a transgression or perhaps even claiming it’s not a transgression at all. When…
Actually I’d disagree. Of the Christian evangelists I’ve met, the only one whose company I didn’t particularly enjoy was one who had clearly given up on me as a lost cause.
I was in a park and a couple of really nice evangelists came over and started chatting. The conversation started to get beyond the limits of their knowledge, particularly on evolution/creationism, so they called over their apologist-in-chief.
This guy was clearly not interested in discussion, having (correctly?) pegged me as a lost cause, so was only debating to retain face with the junior evangelists. He clearly wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. The conversation degenerated into a bizarre speed-chess version of the God debate, with points and counter-points bouncing backwards and forwards at a rate of about one every ten seconds.
It ended when the apologist-in-chief pulled the Just Pray About It exit manoeuvre and scarpered. I can only hope his associates found the experience as weird and bemusing as I did.
(The punchline was that later that day I actually did try praying, just in case. The only thing I got was a splitting headache. Thanks, God.)