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!
One of the primary objections that conservative Christians have to the work of historical Jesus scholars is that they often have a tendency to create Jesus in their own image, or at least in an image congenial to them. This is said particularly of the scholars of the third quest, and of the Jesus Seminar…
My sister was going through my older YouTube videos and called my attention to the one titled Idolatry and Trust from six years ago. It relates to some of my more recent comments on God in my study on John. I’m amused to watch myself in this, as I clearly had a written transcript and…
I have written a few times before on the need for a core of essential beliefs that provide a basis for community along with a broader set of non-essentials on which people can agree. Probably my most comprehensive discussion of the issue is in Unity, Diversity, and Confusion. Over the last few days I’ve been…
And a well worthwhile read it is (or they are).
Easter services are much better attended than Good Friday services. I suspect this is inherent in human nature. We prefer the solution to the hardship getting there. We prefer the happy ending to the suffering that led up to it. It’s not surprising that we do. Who doesn’t prefer those good times? Who doesn’t want…
. . . from their point of view, that is. This is a kind of “take-2” on my Conscience of a Christian Publisher post. Centuri0n had a brief spurt of posting comments, but seems to have been silent since accusing me of deleting them at the very time I was restoring them from backups following…
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.)