Check out this article and video posted on Think Progress. Don't forget to read the citations to "stay the course" and the comments. Hey! Somehow, this man is still in charge of our country. Really, time kick this fratboy out of the oval office before he accidentally (or intentionally) launches a nuke.
How often do we hear people “explaining” religious beliefs by stating “The Bible says so,” as if the Bible fell out of the sky, pre-translated to English by God Himself? It’s not that simple, according to an impressive and clearly-written book that should be required reading for anyone who claims to know “what the Bible says.”
The 2005 bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, was not written by a raving atheist. Rather, it was written by a fellow who had a born-again experience in high school, then went on to attend the ultraconservative Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Bart Ehrman didn’t stop there, however. He wanted to become an evangelical voice with credentials that would enable him to teach in secular settings. It was for this reason that he continued his education at Wheaton and, eventually, Princeton, picking up the ability to read the New Testament in its original Greek in the process.
As a result of his disciplined study, Ehrman increasingly questioned the fundamentalist approach that the “Bible is the inerrant Word of God. It contains no mistakes.” Through his studies, Ehrman determined that the Bible was not free of mistakes:
We have only error ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.
(Page 7). At Princeton, Ehrman learned that mistakes had been made in the copying of the New Testament over the centuries. Upon realizing this, …
In Eastern cultures (Chinese, Navajo, Sri-Lanka, etc) they respect and even worship their direct and distant ancestors as a part of everyday life. The religions all embrace this basic respect for your elders. However, in the West, what's done is done, and the past buries its own dead. Except when…
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A few months ago I stumbled on a preacher on television. The reason I stopped to listen was that on the screen he was scrolling through a litany of famous scientists, their fields and contributions, and noting that each was a Great Christian. Then the preacher–I don’t know who he was, sorry–ended his litany by making the claim that science and religion are inextricably linked, that they must have each other to work, that there is no dispute between them–
–and that evolution is wrong.
This was a week after I listened to an NPR interview with Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania in which he made the claim that it is vital to settle this question of where “we” (meaning humans) came from because if evolution is true, then we would have no basis for morality.
This is one of the most perverse false syllogisms I have ever heard, and it baffles me no end. Underlying it is the assumption that morality only ever comes from a supernatural source, that without a deity we are too dumb, puerile, self-serving, and just plain hopeless to ever do anything right–for ourselves on anyone else. (The Erik Von Danniken theory of moral provenance.) That atheists are a priori immoral and that evolutionists, who reject special creation, are necessarily atheists, and therefore, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, likewise immoral. They can’t help it. They have no god giving them direction.
A minute of clear thought shows how this is substantively untrue. …