This just popped into my head and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, so I decided to just post it as-is.
Q: Why does time only flow forwards and not backwards?
A: Some time does flow backwards, but since its point of origin is also the big bang, we can’t see it because it’s headed the other direction.
(I have no reason to believe this is true. Or false.)
Here’s a riddle for you. What do you call a father who never shows up any more to spend any time with his children, who stays away so much that they wouldn’t even recognize his face or his voice, and never shows up to help when they really need him?
A) A deadbeat dad.
B) God.
Tough one, ain’t it?
“I’ll never understand atheism. I mean, there’s tons of evidence for God.”
“Like what?”
“Like morality, for instance.”
“Morality.”
“Exactly. Everybody knows that there’s a real right and a real wrong. You can’t just make it up and call it morality. It has to come from God.”
“So in other words, you’re telling me that all moral values come from an unmarried Father, and illegitimate Son, and a guy that got someone else’s fiancée pregnant.”
“Yes, that’s—wait, what?”
Remember Daniel Avila, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops staffer who published a column blaming homosexuality on demonic activity in the womb? He screwed up.
Daniel Avila, an attorney who serves as policy advisor for the Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), has retracted a Boston archdiocesan newspaper column linking Satan with the origins of same-sex attractions.
Sadly, though, this withdrawal does not indicate any actual change in opinion. He merely failed to follow the proper technical procedure.
Statements made in my column, ‘Some fundamental questions on same-sex attraction’ of October 28, do not represent the position of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the column was not authorized for publication as is required policy for staff of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
I’m not sure if this is my post going viral, or if it’s just a case of Great Minds Think Alike…
On my way home from work, I happened to flip to a Christian radio station, and the talk show host was interviewing a guest who apparently had written a book using the metaphor of Hollywood monsters to describe different personality types. So, for example, a “werewolf” would have one set of problems in his or her social relationships, while a “vampire” would have a different set, and so on. When I tuned in, the guest was describing how some people were a “mad scientist” type, who tended to give people advice out of a sense of pride and superiority rather than out of sincere compassion.
This led the host to say, “You know, there’s another type of person, and I don’t know, is there a monster for this one? It’s the kind of person who wants to give you advice because they know the right answer. You know what I mean?”
“Oh yes,” says the guest, “They want to tell you what to do because they know the right—they THINK they know the right answer.”
“They’re so sure—”
“They’re so sure they have all the right answers, and it never occurs to them that other people might be in different circumstances, or have different needs…”
“Is there a name for that monster?”
“Well, no, no, that would be a good one but I don’t have a monster for it.”
And I’m laughing out loud, because I’d recognize that monster anywhere.
It’s called an evangelist.
True story: I once had a dream that I somehow found myself in heaven, or rather, on a long bridge leading up to heaven. I wasn’t dead, and I don’t know if the people around me were, but we were all walking up this bridge. Ahead of us was a somewhat larger group of people who weren’t walking. They were gathered around one guy, and as I got closer someone told me it was Jesus. Not everybody standing there looked very happy, because Jesus was explaining to them that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were right all along. People were peppering him with questions (and not entirely friendly questions either), but Jesus was holding his own and causing great consternation among the non-JW’s around him.
Finally somebody suggested that he surely could not be a Jehovah’s Witness, because the JW’s so greatly diminished his own importance. But Jesus laughed this off and claimed that he was still a supremely important person, and in fact he was the very Logos of God. At that point, a white-haired gentleman said, “You know, I’ve always wondered about that. Why would a Jew adopt the theology of the Logos? The Logos was a Gnostic deity, not a Jewish one.” Jesus faltered for a moment and said, “Really? I didn’t know that.”
It went downhill from there: this admission of ignorance destroyed his credibility as a divine (or semi-divine) being, and finally he gave up and admitted that, in fact, he wasn’t even the real Jesus. But, he protested, his motives were good: he just really loved God and was hoping to help us all find the way to heaven. The crowd wasn’t too impressed, but he kept insisting that it was true, and what’s more, that Heaven was just up ahead, and we should all just go there, and God Himself would confirm the things that (pseudo-)Jesus was telling us. A surprising number of people joined him on the trek upwards, but as I was about to join them, an old guy plucked at my sleeve and pulled me aside.
If you’ve seen Richard Dawkins’ response to William Lane Craig, you know that he really does not need my help. I can’t resist making one suggestion, though. If Craig goes through with his intended stunt, and puts an empty chair on the stage at Oxford to represent Dr. Dawkins’ non-appearance, Dawkins should respond in kind. But he shouldn’t waste his time on the small fry. Dr. Dawkins should challenge God to a debate. There should be an empty chair on a stage somewhere, and Dawkins should stand up beside it and say, “Well then, I believe that according to William Lane Craig’s rules of engagement, I am now entitled to declare that God is afraid to face me because He knows He’s wrong.”
Not only would God’s failure to show up make great blog material, but the Christians would fall all over themselves explaining why a refusal to show up does not mean you’re running away scared.
William Lane Craig is really hyping Richard Dawkins’ refusal to debate him on-stage in Oxford. But, as Dr. Dawkins himself points out, this is not just Craig’s, um, “victory.”
In the interests of transparency, I should point out that it isn’t only Oxford that won’t see me on the night Craig proposes to debate me in absentia: you can also see me not appear in Cambridge, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and, if time allows, Bristol.
I’m sure that believers ought to be able to find any number of opportunistic evangelists, in each of those cities, to stand up and boldly declare that they’ve out-argued the famous biologist on that night. Could be the most “successful” night apologetics has had in nearly 2,000 years.
And just by the way, is William Lane Craig as afraid to debate John Loftus as he pretends Dawkins is?
This parable is about a bank manager, a good Christian man, who discovered one day that his bank had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars through a combination of negligence and mismanagement. Even worse, it was entirely and exclusively his fault. What was he going to do?
He remembered the story of Gideon and the fleece, and decided to pray for God’s guidance. That night, in bed, he quietly prayed, “O Lord, if you want me to turn myself in and take the consequences, please let the dew be heavy on the ground tomorrow, but if you’ll forgive me for hiding my mistakes and if you’ll bless me in undoing the damage, then please let the ground be dry.”
In the morning he got up, and the ground was saturated: every blade of grass was covered with heavy droplets, and so much was dripping off the trees it looked like it was raining in the shade. So he looked around, and frowned and thought, and went to work, but didn’t say anything to anyone about what was going on.
That night he came home and decided to try again. “O God,” he prayed, “if you want me to give up and disgrace my family and destroy my career, then please let the ground be dry tomorrow, but if you’ll help me pull this off and make things right again, then let there be more dew.”
Next morning he got up, and everything was dry as old bones, and the grass actually made a slight crinkly sound when you walked on it. So he frowned, and thought, and went to work, but didn’t tell anyone anything.
That night he decided to try one more time. “Merciful Lord and Savior,” he prayed, “if you want me to cause a major banking crisis and risk financial panic, besides devastating my family and leaving me with no way to support my children, then please let it be wet only on my side of the street, and dry on the other; but if you will help me get through this without anyone finding out, then let it be a quiet morning. Amen”
The next morning he was awakened by a huge crack of thunder, and he jumped up and ran to the window. All down his side of the street, there was a howling thunderstorm—and yet, inexplicably, it stopped precisely in the middle of the road, and not a drop of rain was falling on the other side. There was even a warm, golden sunrise shining on the houses opposite, while his own side was steeped in gloom and almost invisible in the heavy deluge.
The banker could take no more, and fell to his knees weeping. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” he cried, “how am I ever going to discover Your will if Satan keeps screwing up the weather?”