May 2012
6 posts
7 tags
Contemporaneous Accounts of Jesus?
I’ve been challenged on my assertion that there are no contemporaneous accounts of Jesus’ existence. The proof offered was Cornelius Tacitus and Josephus. I’m not a history expert, but here’s what I find:
Cornelius lived from 56 C.E. to 117 C.E., instantly disqualifying him from this challenge, but I’ll give a quick summary of what I see.
Here is the...
10 tags
330 schoolgirls & teachers poisoned in 1 month in Afghanistan. #Islam keeps giving & giving. Or is that taking & taking lives & liberties from women. As described in Jonathan Turley’s article, Islamic men work to close schools that dare teach girls and women and, failing that, work to disfigure or kill them.
Interesting then, the comparison with the US religious right and...
10 tags
I’m having trouble with this article in Religious Dispatches, by Austin Dacey, representative to the United Nations for the International Humanist and Ethical Union and author of “The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights.”
In it he uses the plight of one Alexander Aan, imprisoned in Indonesia for the crime of “inciting hatred or enmity of a...
10 tags
I’m having trouble with this article in Religious Dispatches, by Austin Dacey, representative to the United Nations for the International Humanist and Ethical Union and author of “The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights.”
In it he uses the plight of one Alexander Aan, imprisoned in Indonesia for the crime of “inciting hatred or enmity of a...
8 tags
I’m first on the wagon to keep #sharia from being used here in the US and everywhere. But it seems to me to be a tricky strategy to go exclusively after sharia. When I think of sharia I think of it in terms of not just the worst options like beheadings, stonings, honor killings and loss of limb but the more insidious things like all the subjection of women to second class status. But what...
8 tags
“The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.” H.L. Mencken
