Yesterday, a 6,000 pound monument to the Ten Commandments was installed on the grounds of the Arkansas state capital building. Then that very night, someone drove into the monument and destroyed it. The driver has been arrested and it is not clear what his motives were. Maybe he was trying to emulate Moses who also smashed up the tablets on which the commandments were written (Exodus 32:19). Not many people recall that bit of the story.
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I am not sure how many people read the comments to my posts but quite often the commenters are very knowledge and their comments are more informative than the posts themselves. My post yesterday on questions about the soul is one such case. If anyone is interested in learning about the origins of the various concepts concerning the soul, I strongly urge you to read the comments to that post.

When I came across this article by Candida Moss and Jessica Baron with the title Where in your body is your soul? I groaned, expecting yet another mushy spiritual mess. (I am sure that many readers of this blog had a similar reaction when seeing the post title.) But it is actually quite an interesting article, tracing the origins of the concept of the soul and how people have addressed the numerous problems associated with it.
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There is no end to the weirdness of religious practices. It looks like animal sacrifices to the gods, a practice that one would have thought had gone extinct, are still seen as a means of removing one’s sins. I recently became aware of this religious ritual practiced by Orthodox Jews known as ‘kaporot’ that seems like it is out of a comedy sketch.
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A young-Earth creationist geologist by the name of Dr. Andrew Snelling is suing the National Park Service to be allowed to take 60 rocks out of the Grand Canyon so that he can prove that the Great Flood of Noah actually happened. He is being supported in his legal battle by a conservative Christian legal group known as the Alliance Defending Freedom. Candida Moss uses that case to anchor her article about why that famous story is far messier than what the Bible actually says.
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The Book of Revelation is something that biblical scholars have been trying to interpret for centuries. As with all such documents that consist of a nutty blend of grotesque and vivid but opaque imagery, it provides plenty of opportunities for imaginative people to come up with fanciful scenarios. The usual Christian view is that it portends what will happen in the so-called End Times when Jesus returns and metes out bloody justice.
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One of the truly weird aspects of Roman Catholicism is their preservation and veneration of body parts of those declared by the church to be saints, seemingly in the belief that viewing and praying to those bits increases your chances of having your prayers answered. This article lists some of the body parts that have been preserved, including (if you can imagine it) Jesus’s foreskin, It is a macabre practice, to put it mildly. This news item about a brain fragment of a saint being stolen raises the weirdness all the way to 11.
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