Miracles, evidence and scepticism

August 19th, 2012

I don’t like to take things on faith, without evidence. I like to research things, gather facts, or alleged facts, sort and sift and mull over them – and then come to a conclusion. And over the past year or so I have been looking at the evidence for miraculous healings.

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Is belief in God just subjective?

August 15th, 2012

Objective truth is something that is really true, it corresponds with reality, and can in principle be verified by others. Subjective truth, on the other hand, may be true for you but not for me, and cannot be verified by another. “Dogs have four legs” is an objective truth, but “I like dogs” is subjective. […]

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Why believe?

August 8th, 2012

Why do christians believe? There must be many reasons. Why do I believe? That’s a much easier question to answer. Here’s the briefest summary I can make.

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Visions of Jesus? (again)

August 5th, 2012

Back in February I posted about people who claim to have seen visions of Jesus. The post was a short one, and general. I have now read some more on the subject, and I think it is worth outlining a couple of the stories.

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Jesus vs the pagan gods

July 28th, 2012

Egyptian gods

Is the story of Jesus just a legend, copied from common stories at the time about ‘dying and rising gods’? Some sceptics are saying so, but what are the facts? I have already looked at Mithras, one of the gods most often compared to Jesus, now to consider all the other pagan gods.

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Jesus vs Mithras

July 20th, 2012

It isn’t uncommon on the internet to find claims that christianity is just a copy of some pagan religion, and Jesus is no more historical than some mythical pagan god. I want to look at what the experts say about these claims – today, Mithras.

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A small victory in the fight against child slavery

July 18th, 2012

There has been a long campaign for chocolate companies to only source their cocoa from farms that don’t use trafficked child labour, and who pay the workers a fair wage. And progress has been slow. I have previously reported how I have joined many others in writing to chocolate companies here in Australia asking them […]

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Did Jesus’ followers worship him as divine?

July 2nd, 2012

Christians believe Jesus existed, the gospels record his words and deeds with reasonable accuracy (at least), and that the best way to understand Jesus is that he was divine, God’s son establishing God’s kingdom. Non-believers contest some, sometimes all, of these claims. Sometimes scholars give definitive answers to these questions, sometimes they don’t.

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The global food crisis – 1 billion hungry

June 24th, 2012

Almost one billion people, an eighth of the world’s population, are hungry as you read this. Why?

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The moral argument for God

June 19th, 2012

Most people believe some things are right (e.g. helping others or being honest) and other things are wrong (e.g. rape, genocide or pedophilia). And if you tried to defend any of those “wrong” behaviours, most people would think you had lost your humanity. They think those things really are wrong. But what makes them wrong? […]

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A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.