https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkIJfLfzZ0w
Every time I start to believe that my faith is changing or even disappearing, Easter rolls around again. I know that one of the most unlikely stories in the Bible is buried deep in my heart. I believe it's true.
Christ is risen, y'all!
I like Pope Francis I.
His openness to sexual-orientation minorities and his solicitude toward the poor are in marked contrast to the hard-line intransigence more characteristic of past Pontiffs. Church teachings about abortion, birth control – the “life” issues generally – and such matters as women’s ordination and same-sex marriage remain substantially unchanged. (I say “substantially” because, even on some of these issues, the Pope’s recent statements have been interestingly nuanced. God – so to speak – is in the details.) Bill Maher often says he strongly suspects that Pope Francis – “Pope Frank” as Maher sometimes calls him – is actually a closet atheist. (I think Maher is only half serious about such statements. But the operative word is “half”: I do think Maher is half s
Back in late March, just before Easter, I published a “Skeptic’s Collection” column in which I posed the following question that generated quite a bit of (civil, moderate, thoughtful, and sophisticated) reaction on the part of my readers, to wit:
The Christian belief that Jesus Christ is the full Incarnation of the God of the Hebrew Bible (Col. 2:9) logically entails the consequence that, in addition to being a Baby in a manger and a Man Who loves playing with little kids, Jesus Christ, as God’s full Incarnation (Heb. 1:3), necessarily means that the Person of Jesus also incorporates the Hebrew God’s tendencies toward vindictiveness, violence, vanity, and abusiveness.
If we take the latter seriously as actual attributes of God qua God and not as mere human projections, then we al
