CADRE Comments

On Thursday, my local newspaper ran a quarter-page article on the translation of a newly translated approximately 3rd Century papyrus which quotes Jesus as referring to "my wife." Needless to say, if Jesus had a wife, that would be news to most of church history where there is almost nothing supporting such an idea other than a few heretical texts. But, of course, that is the question regarding the Jesus Wife Gospel (which, given the fact that it is only a fragment of a work that may be very short, should not be called a Gospel at all). Is it an heretical text or is it something worth reading? In saying, "my wife", was Jesus (if he really did utter those words) referring to his bride, the church, or to an earthly wife? Rob Bowman on his Religious Researcher blog, has published a page which he plans to keep updated with resources both in favor of and counter the authenticity of the Jesus Wife Gospel. You can find the resource here: Karen King's Jesus Wife Pap...

Scientists have been chewing over the mass release results of the ENCODE experiments for the past several days, and will doubtless continue to do so; while ID and creationist proponents hop up and down and proponents of completely non-intentional biological development scramble defensively in various ways and... ...and, frankly, at first I didn't see what the big deal was. At first. I'm going to assume for sake of relative brevity that anyone who is reading this page on the internet knows how to search the internet for pages to read, so if you don't know what I'm talking about, search around for "ENCODE", or click on our sidebar links for Proslogion (which tends to slant young earth creation) and/or Evolution News and Views (which tends to slant old earth creation)--you won't have to page around far to search them for discussion on it. Very shortly, and somewhat oversimply, the project involved mapping genomes (I honestly don't recall if it wa...

It's safe to say that many Christians have an ambivalent stance towards paranormal activity. Many Western Christians have been culturally conditioned to posit a stark dichotomy between two realms: the natural world, which they define in terms of the everyday, humdrum, physical reality we experience most of the time, and the supernatural world, more or less limited to God and angels. If they allow for the possibility in our day and age, they take miraculous healings and visions to be signs of God's direct intervention in human affairs, with immediate evidential value in arguing for Christianity. Further along towards the charismatic end of the spectrum, demonic influence and exorcisms may enter the picture. This world-picture is problematized, however, by the fact that seemingly supernatural occurrences, including dramatic healings, visions of the departed, precognitive dreams, etc. are not confined to Christian saints or even Christians in general. In fact, they're not ev...

Atheists such as Dawkins often argue that a complex creation such as the universe (or the Multiverse) requires a complex creator. If the creator is complex, these clever people think, then the odds of "him" existing are much less and so God is improbable. It would hysterical to hear what Kierkegaard would say, probably something like, "sure God is improbable, there's no better proof he's real." Aside from the ridiculous idea of attaching a probability to the likelihood of the basis of all that is existing, the atheist's point is to counter the design argument. Of course to make the argument they must assume God is like a big man in the sky rather than the ground of being. Tillich argues that this big man in the sky is behind much atheism. It is an anecdotal observation that now seems to be backed up by some emerging data. It is certainly the case that atheists are embroiled in a struggle against the superego-li...

young Paul Tillich (right) at Science Conference with Einstine (second from left back row) Atheists are always bad mouthing theology, but the vast Majority of them have never read a single page of real theology. They have no concept of what a real theology is about, they probably think it's like Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. They know nothing about it but they are so sure it's stupid. The bad mouthing began with Dawkins trying to overcome his deficit in theology without having to learn any. People who criticize his swill with the attack "he knows nothing about theology" which means his books are worthless when they attack theology. So he came up with the extremely inane response that "theology is stupid so I don't have to know about it to know its' stupid." Obviously if he doesn't know about it then he can't know it's stupid. I've seen atheist say "well it's about God so that's how I know it'...

Once upon a time I wrote an article called "cracking the Jesus Myther's Phony Scholarship code." It was about things like the Jesus project which appears to be a true scholarly endeavor but is just a front for Jesus myth propaganda. Another good example of that is Religious tolerance.com. It poses as a sight about religious tolerance but is really about how evil Christianity is. This is about the Jesus project . Now this is not the Jesus Seminar. let's be clear. This is the Jesus myther project of destroying belief in Jesus. This is an old blog, the piece I'm referring to is old also. The blog is "Richard Carrier Blogs" . Friday 26, 2008. The aims set froth: This will be like a fourth "Quest for the Historical Jesus" (or fifth or sixth, depending on how you count), with two major differences that shall define the Project: It will exclude all theological and dogmatic bias--conservative or liberal (none attending were sympathetic to either...

excavation in 1999 December of 2010 I did a piece updating a controversy from the early days (late 90s) of my apologetical life: the Nazareth as Inhabited at the Time of Jesus . This was on Atheist Watch, and the comment below was sent to Atheist Watch. That piece I did on atheist watch was in 2 parts. part 2 is here. Of cousre the mythers say no. The Pfan excavation, which they had been sighting as documentation for their view (it was going around big time, every message board had posts on the mythers using Pfan excavation. I'm the one who actually got hold of the guy to find his findings and who read his article to see if they were misquoting him. Now a new gang is saying his findings were no good (now that they know he doesn't back them). I recieved a comment (on Atheist Watch) to that old post from 2010: Anne Carly Abad says: I read this article about Nazareth: http://www.nazarethmyth.info/naz3article.html And the author debunks the dating of some of Pfann's finding...