thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
This scene from the Egyptian Book of the Dead (c 1275 BCE), shows the dead scribe Hunefer’s heart being weighed by the canine-headed Anubis on the scale of Maat. The ibis-headed Thoth, scribe of the gods, records the result. If his heart is lighter than the feather of truth, Hunefer is allowed to pass into […]
Stereoscopic vision is a useful and subtle aspect of how we, and some animals, see. Because our two eyes both face the front (unlike some animals and insects whose eyes face more left and right), they both see similar but subtly different views. For example, if two objects are in line, one behind the other, […]
In Mark 3, it is recorded that when Jesus’ family heard how he was attracting a great following, they thought he was “out of his mind”. These days a similar charge is sometimes made – that Jesus exhibited behaviour that suggests he suffered from a mental disorder. I’ve come across it several times, most recently […]
Is there a conflict between science and religion? Do religious people and scientists think in different ways? In the next few posts I’m going examine the perceived conflict between science and religion. First, a quick look at some statistics of who believes and who doesn’t.
I remember being concerned about it more than 40 years ago. How could God command his people to murder everyone living in each Canaanite city that they captured? And I am not the only one to feel revolted by these commands in the book of Deuteronomy and the accounts in the book of Joshua. Critics […]
A few months back I responded to a discussion I was having about Jesus’ miracles by writing a post on the historical evidence. I have since turned that post into a permanent page, Did Jesus really perform miracles?, so I thought I would summarise the main conclusions here. Some of them may be surprising to […]
Many people claim to have experienced God directly in some way. They claim to have seen a vision, or received divine healing, or they have had some deep spiritual experience, or God has turned their lives around in some way. They come from different religions, even from no religion and atheism. Sometimes the experience changes […]
It’s Easter again, which evokes different responses in different people. Some people think about the claim that, after he was executed, Jesus was raised to life by God. Of all the critical comments I have received on this blog, criticism of christian belief about the resurrection of Jesus is one of the most common and […]
People move into and out of faith. Probably most of us stay with the religious beliefs we form in our late teens, but a fair number change their basic belief somewhat later. These changes in belief can be difficult to make and to carry through. But probably nothing is more difficult than when one partner […]
Recently I came across two articles that came from very different viewpoints, but raised some similar issues. It certainly made me think about how religious and anti-religious movements and ideas can have a lot more in common than you might think.