This in-depth article by Margaret Talbot of the New Yorker explores Bristol's pregnancy and yet another aspect of America's major cultural rift: Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but…
Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi assumed the role of a true Believer in order to see what it's like to be one. In Taibbi's entertaining and well-written article, "Jesus Made Me Puke: And other Tales from the Evangelical Front Lines," he describes that he almost got too caught up in…
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, …
I can’t get enough of Way of the Master Ministries. Way of the Master’s Biblical Evangelical movement, hosted in website, radio, and television format by former child actor Kirk Cameron and evangelist Ray Comfort, have swept internet culture recently, appearing in nearly equal footing on freethinking and faithful websites alike. Apparently, many other people get a kick out of Comfort and Cameron’s teachings, too; as of this February, Way of the Master has not only “witnessed” to tens of thousands of potential sheep, but the website’s evangelical methods have enrolled over 6,500 eager “students”.
Way of the Master’s gimmick hinges on its oddly friendly use of guilt and fear– like the fire-and-brimstone preachers of old, but nowhere near as menacing as “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The website opens with this introduction by Cameron:
“Did you know that every day 150,000 people die? People just like you and me. Every twenty-four hours, 150,000 people pass from time into eternity. Do you ever think about that? Isn’t there something within you that says, ‘I don’t want to die!’? That is your God-given will to live. And we hope you listen to it, because we make some big claims on this site…”
Ray Comfort’s personal website, Living Waters, runs a constant counter of people who have died since you have opened up his page. Comfort also reminds us that, “The vast majority of those people are entering Hell.” These warm, fuzzy Christian thoughts prove …
Reading Dispatches from the Culture Wars, I learned of this recent article published by the Telegraph (U.K.): Powerful evangelical churches are pressing Kenya's national museum to sideline its world-famous collection of hominid bones pointing to man's evolution from ape to human. Leaders of the country's six-million-strong Pentecostal congregation want Dr Richard…