***NOTE: This originally was a short little piece I wrote for the Regent College newspaper back in 1997…it never got published, but it is a piece of writing of which I still am extremely proud. If you’re a Biblical Studies nerd, enjoy… “A” Gospel: The True Source of “Q” I wish to tell of a…
In this post, I’m going to address what Richard Dawkins specifically says about what he calls “religious memes.” If you don’t know what a “meme” is, I encourage you to read my previous post. Dawkins concludes his chapter 5 in The God Delusion by equating religious ideas with the concept of memes. A “meme” is Dawkins’ made-up…
When I first read The God Delusion back in 2011, that was the first time I had ever come across “Meme Theory.” Now, you have probably heard the term “internet meme”: those quirky little snippets on the internet that get hopelessly repeated with minor variations in the message. Well, if you’ve ever wondered, “What the…
Natural Selection, YEC, GG, and ID, and Another Dawkins-Ham Connection Richard Dawkins describes natural selection as a gradual process of adaptations in life, and distinguishes it from both “design” and “chance.” As he states, “natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces…
Now that I have taken a good 3-4 weeks off from analyzing The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, I think it is time to get back to it. I have already written 11 previous posts on the first few chapters of The God Delusion, so now I would like to pick things up with chapter…
Enns, Peter. The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs. New York: HarperOne, 2016 (211 pages + Notes) Peter Enns’ new book, The Sin of Certainty, will make you reflect on your life and question what you believe. That’s a good thing. When I was a college student, I discovered the…
Here we come to the end of Romans, where Paul sums up his argument for unity in the Church. Romans 15:1-6 After his comments on “food and drink,” and how Jews shouldn’t pass judgment on Gentiles, and how Gentiles should not flaunt their freedom in the faces of their Jewish brothers, Paul makes his final…
The final section of Paul’s argument in Romans is found in 14:1-15:13. It deals with relationships within the community of faith. Or to put it another way, it talks about how Christians need to treat each other. By addressing this, Paul is getting to the heart of how he wants the Gentile-Christians and Jewish-Christians in…
News flash: Christians are not called to live only within their Christian community. They also have live in the real world, with pagans and secular (and sometimes hostile) authorities. So how should Christians live in relation to “the world”? This is the very issue that Paul addresses in Romans 13. What is specifically in question…
With all that “Gospel theology” in Romans 1-8, and then the questions regarding ethnic Israel now explained in Romans 9-11, Paul turns his attention to explaining the practical application of all that to the everyday lives of the Christians living in Rome. This is the focus of Romans 12-16. By extension, what we find in…