CADRE Comments

So, last night I got to be sexually violated in absolutely unspeakable ways. Fortunately, I was only dreaming. I have stress dreams which often turn nightmarish, eight to ten hours every night -- for about forty years now. I can wake up and deal with whatever I was dealt with living and maybe dying through the night before. I've had a lot of practice. But for very many people in the world today, and for vastly many more throughout all history, that living hell isn't a dream they can wake up from. It happens in their waking life (and also, I suppose, in their dreams). Maybe all their lives, for years or months or weeks or days, or decades, until they die. Christmas is for them, of course -- although when I say "of course", let me pause a moment to give cultural context: here in modern Western Civilization we might easily think "of course, whatever good Christmas means, it must be for victims of the worst injustice". But that expectation is a result of C...

I expect that most readers who are the least bit attuned to popular movies will have seen and can remember the movie Independence Day starring Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman. For the rest of you, let me assure you that Independence Day wasn't the type of movie one would expect to find featured at an art house. It was more of a typical guy movie with lots of explosions, ground-breaking (at the time) special effects and huge crowds at the box office. (The movie grossed a whopping $817,400,878 world-wide, but like most highly popular movies didn't garner any Academy Awards other than the typical "Visual Effects" award.) Interestingly, I think that the reaction to the film by the audience makes a point that many skeptics don't grasp when reading certain Bible passages. For the small minority who spent the 1990s in an cultural isolation chamber, Independence Day centered around the arrival of several huge alien spacecraft which hung over major cities aro...

Lee Randolph has posted a catalog of uniformly silly, vulgar and inconsistent stock objections to Christianity. Normally I wouldn't give it a second thought, but since this Sunday is Easter I was struck by the tone of some of the accusations he makes, because he provides an unwitting illustration of the kind of thinking and behavior that Christ came to save us from. So I'd like to take a look at some of his objections, those having to do with Christology, and use them as a springboard to make some more general observations about the meaning of Easter. This will be a two-part series. First, notice the title of the post: The Horror of Easter. I think he meant to say the horror of the crucifixion and Christian adoration of the cross as a symbol of salvation, because I don't see how anyone in their right mind could see something horrific about an event that foretells the eventual transformation of the entire universe into a paradise without evil or suffering. Assuming he is re...