You don't need God -- to hope, to care, to love, to live.
Why is such a campaign necessary? CFI answers:
One popular myth is that the nonreligious are immoral, or at least that they can’t be relied upon to be as good as those with religious beliefs. If you know any nonreligious people (and almost everyone does—see below), you already know this is not true. Human decency does not depend on religious belief. There are good believers and good nonbelievers; there are wicked believers and wicked nonbelievers. You can’t predict a person’s moral character just from knowing his or her metaphysical beliefs.
I agree with this concern, based on the fact that hundreds of people who have no idea what kind of life I am leading are willing to condemn me for my lack of a belief in "god." I've written about this proud ignorant judgment repeatedly.
I've run into more than a few fundamentalist Christians who have insisted that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.
"Then please explain the results of radiometric dating," I typically ask, adding that even carbon dating can accurately date materials up to 60,000 years old, far older than 6,000 years.
Most modern savvy Young-Earthers won't fight me on the general usefulness or accuracy of carbon dating. Instead, they will insist that A) God has created an Earth that only looks like it is billions of years old, and B) I need to have faith. That is how they would explain everything older than 6,000 years old, including the Old Tjikko tree in Sweden, which certainly appears to be 9,550 years old. God must have transplanted it from another universe when he made this universe.
The Young-Earthers thus offer an provocative argument. I don't believe it, but there's would be no way for me to disprove it.
I'm not yet far into Bart Ehrman's newest book, Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. Ehrman's answer, however (and he warns that his conclusion will annoy many non-Christians--of which he is one--and please Christians) is that a man named Jesus most definitely did exist. I'll be posting on Ehrman's book once I finish it. I should also mention that Frontline has produced a show on the search for the historical Jesus [Here is the video of the entire show].
Assuming that a man named Jesus once walked on the planet, what did he look like? At Popular Mechanics,Mike Fillon discusses what Jesus must have really looked like. Hmmm. He's not the tall blonde haired blue-eyed British-accented guy I've seen in more than a couple movies. Nor could he have been like any of the seven art images of "Jesus" created through the centuries. And what Jesus looked like is no academic exercise. There are real and serious real-world ramifications. For instance, Rudy Giuliani once became perturbed at an exhibit depicting Jesus as a black man. People tend to concoct the Jesus they worship in their own image and likeness.
What is the method by which one might recreate an image of Jesus using other Galilean Semites of his era? It's the field of forensic anthropology, and the assumption guiding this enterprise is that Jesus would, indeed, look somewhat like most other men who lived in that area of the world.
With three well-preserved specimens from the time of Jesus in hand, [medical artist Richard Neave] used computerized tomography to create X-ray "slices" of the skulls, thus revealing minute details about each one's structure. Special computer programs then evaluated reams of information about known measurements of the thickness of soft tissue at key areas on human faces. This made it possible to re-create the muscles and skin overlying a representative Semite skull.
What Neave has offered, then, is not actually the face of Jesus, but how Jesus likely would have looked. Here is a video showing Neave at work.
Based on this reaction, we have some confidence to say the following to European, African and Asian Christian congregations, each of which tend to display a version of Jesus that looks like themselves. "So sorry, but Jesus didn't look like any of you. Will you still worship him?"
I'd love to run the following experiment. Let's put a big reproduction of the photo offered by Neave at the front of Christian churches all across America, right next to the altar. Then I'd like to observe church attendance over the next few months to see how dramatically it suffers. My prediction is that church attendance would fall by 50% within a year.
For more on this topic see this article by BBC News.
[Above Image by BBC].
Let’s imagine the conflict known as the Civil War. It had been brewing since before the Constitution was ratified. The issues were marrow deep in American society, so much so that any attempt to address the issue of slavery was, in effect, a deal breaker for the new nation. The South made it abundantly clear that any action on the part of the North to write into the new guiding document the idea that black slaves were somehow deserving of the liberty being claimed for their white owners—and thereby signaling the end of slavery among the Thirteen Colonies—would be met with absolute refusal to play. Had the reformers, exemplified by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, tried to assert any kind of racial equality at the time, the United States would have been stillborn.
Instead, they put a time limit into the document—20 years—which forbade the topic from even being discussed in Congress until that later year, at which time, presumably, the issue would come to the floor for some kind of resolution. History shows that every such attempt was met with denunciations by southern members of Congress and often with threats of secession—which by then were illegal.
Make no mistake, as some revisionists might have you believe, secession was not an option and everyone who voted to ratify the Constitution knew it. Contrary to popular mythology, the original 13 states locked themselves together permanently.
[More . . . ]
Hello, I invite you to subscribe to Dangerous Intersection by entering your email below. You will have the option to receive emails notifying you of new posts once per week or more often.
