Recently, we’ve been looking at what we’ve coined as The Stephen Fry syndrome – the idea of hiding behind the views of people more famous/clever/socially acceptable than yourself. Whatever our worldview, it’s easy to lazily hold up as truth things that the glitterati have said, rather than engage with the questions at hand. Below is […]
This is a direct continuation from Part I (astonishingly) so read that first. Here we are, then, having a bit of a play around with some of the sound bites that get erected as defensive shield walls by people. “Every thinking man is an atheist.” Ernest Hemingway Ok, Ernie…but what if I think hard about […]
There’s something called ‘an appeal to authority’. It involves glibly quoting someone more famous or more intelligent than yourself as though that proves the point you’re trying to make. Both Christians and Atheists do it, and it’s annoying. I call it the Stephen Fry syndrome (Melchett from Blackadder for our American readers): here’s a wonderfully […]
“To err is human; to forgive, divine.” – Alexander Pope The week before I got married, my Dad and I had a stand-up fight. A proper all-guns-blazing fight that saw him throw me across a table, cutting my back open. It started because I told him to shut up. I told him to shut up because […]
Richard Dawkins famously said that faith is belief without evidence. That’s not how the Oxford English Dictionary would describe faith, but the phrase has stuck and so the idea that there is no evidence for God has memed its way through our culture. We’ve talked before about the difference between evidence and proof. Evidence is […]
This week, we’re looking at some of the gnostic gospels discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. The Gospel of Thomas Gospel means Good news. This is actually not a Gospel at all. It has no theme, no actions of Jesus, no crucifixion or resurrection. It is simply a collection of 114 phrases attributed to […]
The Gnostic Gospels. Something that you have probably heard of a bit, but you couldn’t give much detail on. Like an Arsene Wenger signing. In 1945, near Nag Hammadi in Egypt, an earthenware jar was found containing a series of manuscripts that can be dated to the end of the 4th Century. Lots of them […]
When someone raises an objection to Christianity like: ‘There’s no proof of God’, it’s relatively easy to respond. You can talk about how, outside of pure maths, we don’t talk about proof, or look at how most of the important decisions we make in life are not down to irrefutable proof (see our blog, Prove […]
So, in Hell: Part 1, we discussed how God wouldn’t send good people to hell because there are no good people. In Hell: Part 2, we discussed how God wouldn’t send anyone to hell because we choose it for ourselves. This week, we want to look at the solution to the problem that hell creates. […]
God wouldn’t send good people to hell. Last week, we looked at the idea that there are no ‘good’ people for God to send to hell: There’s Jesus, and then everyone else. Here we want to look at the idea that God doesn’t send anyone anywhere – we satnav our own eternal destination. A lot […]
