One reason why the separation of church and state is a good idea is that uniting religion and politics tends to do more harm to both than either could self-inflict on its own. Indeed, many of the early settlers in America were people who came here to escape from the Christian nations of Europe, which …
Category Archive: History
Sep 09 2012
Bad lip syncing
No, it’s not Bad Lip Reading, it’s this week’s dose of Justin Martyr over at Evangelical Realism.
Aug 24 2012
What you are, not what you aren’t
I have to say, I’m tremendously encouraged by the emergence of a new “Atheism+” movement as the logical outgrowth of the New Atheist movement. The problem with atheism (if you’ll pardon me phrasing it in those terms) is that it’s a definition based on what you’re not, or in other words on the things you …
Aug 19 2012
Justin and the “virgin”
Over at Evangelical Realism, we’re working our way through Justin Martyr’s First Apology, and we’ve come to the second of his “incontrovertible” proofs that Jesus is the Son of God. Would it surprise you to find out he’s taking an Old Testament passage out of context?
Aug 05 2012
The proof that wasn’t.
Over at Evangelical Realism, we’re looking at the First Apology of Justin Martyr, and in this week’s installment, Justin presents us with a Messianic prophecy that somehow manages to be almost, but not quite, entirely unlike anything he says it is. And yet believers today still use that verse as proof that Jesus is the …
Jul 08 2012
The 3 proofs of Justin Martyr
I’ve gotten out of the habit of announcing it here, but over at Evangelical Realism we’re working our way through the First Apology of Justin Martyr, just to see how ancient Christianity compares with the modern version. In this week’s installment, Justin wraps up his discussion of the many parallels between the Gospels and a …
May 15 2012
The apologist’s dilemma
Thanks to some articulate and well-informed comments on yesterday’s post, I now understand that there’s a lot more to it than just needing to verify your conclusions before you accept them as true. Verificationism (or at least, the strict forms of verificationism that William Lane Craig was referring to) can go so far as to …
May 08 2012
Perverted Science
Writing for the Finance section of Townhall.com (wait, the Finance section?), Mark Baisley has great hopes for the future of science. Galileo was a true scientist. I like Wikipedia’s description, “He displayed a peculiar ability to ignore established authorities, most notably Aristotelianism. In broader terms, his work marked another step towards the eventual separation of …
May 07 2012
Gay Marriage in the 10th century Church?
I have to confess, I’m a bit skeptical of this story about St. Serge and St. Bacchus. But it is interesting. While the pairing of saints, particularly in the early church, was not unusual, the association of these two men was regarded as particularly close. Severus of Antioch in the sixth century explained that “we …
Apr 10 2012
Mesopotamian Park
This is just idle speculation, mind you, but I was wondering the other day about time and tradition. There’s two kinds of tradition, or at least two ends of the spectrum. At the one end you have what you might call the reasonable ideas, the principles and conclusions you arrive at by looking at how …
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