Thursday, September 25, 2014

Whenever I hear Christian apologetics...I reach for my Bible

It's true. And yes, I just adapted an oft-misquoted line from a Nazi play for the title of this post. I figured I'd go ahead and get Godwin out of the way from the outset.

It is my opinion that the greatest impediment to the intelligibility of the Christian faith is, in fact, its foundational set of documents. Far from being an asset, the Bible is the Achilles' heel soft underbelly of most Christian systems of belief, especially the more fundamentalist ones. It is my observation that the more reliant upon the Bible a brand of Christianity is, the more easily it is collapsed upon itself. Even brands of Christianity that aren't closely tied to it like Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, and Mainline Liberal Protestantism largely fall victim to it as well, often via the very arguments those other denominations more closely tied to the Bible would use against them. Time and again the Bible will contain material that just completely wrecks otherwise coherent systems of Christian doctrine and often the heavy-lifting has already been done by some other group within Christianity.

Monday, September 22, 2014

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 25

In this installment Abraham dies (or does he?) but not before knocking up a concubine to the tune of six more sons, Rebekah needs divine intervention to get pregnant and immediately regrets that decision, and Yahweh hates a guy before he's even born.