Does it all seem like déjà vu? It should. Most of us first heard the unfolding national story while sitting on our parents’ laps, courtesy of Dr. Seuss. A con artist comes to town to exploit a glaring weakness: the willingness of the citizens to act out of bigotry. In…
One of the Sunday morning pundits today (4/16/06) made an excellent point. He observed that President Bush has refused to give a firm date for withdrawing US troops from Iraq, because, Bush says, such an action would embolden the terrorists to just wait us out. However, Bush then ignored this principle…
As part of his Easter homily, Pope Benedict XVI invoked evolution in describing Christ’s resurrection: If we may borrow the language of the theory of evolution, it is the greatest ‘mutation,’ absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history…
I can always tell when an opponent of Darwin's "theory of evolution" has never read Darwin, because they try to claim that Darwin's "theory of evolution" means that "evolution is a theory." Unfortunately for them, the phrase "Darwin's theory of evolution" does not mean evolution was Darwin's theory. Scientists recognized evolution long…
I was raised Roman Catholic. Many things about the church puzzled me, Good Friday perhaps being the most puzzling of Holy Days. On the lighter side, the kids at Catholic school insisted that it always rained on Good Friday, usually in the afternoon while Jesus was dying on the cross. Whenever it did rain this was seen as proof of something important. When it didn’t rain on Good Friday, that lack of rain was merely an exception to the rule.
Throughout my life, I’ve found that Catholics are very skeptical about religious beliefs . . . well, as long as it isn’t their own beliefs that they are questioning. Growing up Catholic, I always heard about those “bizarre” beliefs of other types of religions. “How could anyone ever believe such silly things?” Catholics would often ask. For reasons I still don’t understand, I found myself asking these same skeptical questions about my own church (and everyone else’s church). I started asking these questions even as a young child. Good Friday has always been the focus for many of my questions, for at least three reasons:
I. False Suspense.
The Good Friday church services were always dreary. Tears were shed, incense was burned, and sad songs were sung. Those attending the services went away from them thinking that all bordering on hopelessness, as though this might be the year that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. This was puzzling to me, given that Easter was already marked on everyone’s calendars. The …