I Believe in You, Rocky
Let’s engage for a moment in what is sure to seem like a hopelessly pedantic exercise. What does a person mean when he or she says, “I believe in god”? Might not be an affirmation of confidence in...
View ArticleParadiddling All Over Religion
I don’t have anything against atheists. Atheism makes perfect sense to me. Really. Half the time, I am an atheist. There’s no empirical evidence for a super-being god, so we may as well believe in...
View ArticleGod Comes in Flavors
Let’s talk about condiments. It turns out that spicy pickles reveal a lot about religion. In the New Yorker a decade ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote at some length about mustard, ketchup, and spaghetti...
View ArticleThe Death of Humanism in Our Religionless Future
Physicist Lawrence Krauss apparently suggested this past week that religion could disappear in a single generation if we were to plant doubt effectively in the world’s children. As happened with...
View ArticleAmericanism: Our Common Cult
Where are the bonfires? What we should see around the country these days are crowds of thousands, flinging their U.S. passports into soaring fires, renouncing their citizenship and their allegiance...
View ArticleArchimedes’ Divine Lever
Archimedes is reported to have said, lo, these more-than-two-millennia ago, that if he were given a sufficiently long lever, he, personally, could move the earth. Now, according to some enterprising...
View ArticleGod’s Body Just Isn’t What It Used to Be
One of the things that keeps Mormonism from being Christian is its dogmatic attachment to god’s embodiment. While the Christian world insists on god’s transcendence—that is, that god is...
View ArticleGod’s Law Does Change
I’ve been hearing a lot about “God’s Law” in my local congregation, recently. Particularly the tune that “God’s law doesn’t change”—being sung with the conviction that if it were only 1980, again, all...
View ArticleIf God Does Not Die
Nietzsche, famously or infamously towards the end of the nineteenth century, declared the death of god. All of us pushing the twenty-first century forward can roll our eyes and concede that Nietzsche...
View ArticleA Dis-Christian Nativity
Taxation, some say, started it all. Or a census. Augustus, some say, decreed an accounting. Some say he didn’t. Some say he did, but not before Herod, so something in the start of the story is screwy,...
View ArticleThe Most Religious Song in the Songbook
Name the most genuinely religious song in the songbook that the LDS church has approved for the Sunday spirituality of children. For outsiders, the LDS church (often mis-identified as the Mormon...
View ArticleNot the ‘Why’ but the ‘What’ of the Western Wall
“Eff the ineffable”, wrote Terry Eagleton in an attempt to figure out Samuel Beckett’s work. “There must still be a trace of truth in the world.”* Everything is torn open by why—a hole, a great,...
View ArticleMormons Do Not Just Believe
I’ve seen the Broadway musical twice. I’m on record in The Commercial Appeal, a Memphis newspaper, as quite liking it. Nevertheless, I think the play is wrong when it sings that Mormons “just believe”....
View ArticleToxic Theology: There Are No Coincidences
In its quest to infuriate by greater and greater degrees, this blog presents Toxic Theology, a new series in which are examined particularly treacherous dogma that too many folks seem to accept as...
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