Daily Archives: July 11, 2008

The Communion Wafer is Not Just a Cracker—But PZ Myers Shouldn’t Lose His Job for Saying So

PZ Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, is an outspoken atheist and opponent of creationism. He has a popular website, Pharyngula, and is known to sometimes hang out with perhaps the best known living biologist and atheist in the world, Richard … Continue reading

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Newsflash!: UFOs Draw Hot, Sultry Women in Nighties Out Into the Street! Sign that Civilization is Teetering on the Brink of Collapse!

Book cover image, 1960s. UFOs in tricked out metallic colors bring families out of the privacy of their homes at night, into the streets in their robes, pajamas, and nighties. Children cling to their fathers; women cower low to the ground; … Continue reading

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Jim Carey’s The Truman Show and Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Flies: Two Meditations on Existential Freedom

Jim Carey’s The Truman Show and Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, The Flies, are existentialist parables of human freedom. The Truman Show explores the terror underlying the notion that there might be an all controlling father above who manipulates the situation of his creatures for his pleasure. If such a being … Continue reading

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Israel Knohl on Hazon Gabriel—The Vision of Gabriel—Qumran Stone Tablet That Seems to Predate Jesus’s Death by a Generation, But Talks about a Suffering and Resurrected Messiah

Israel Knohl, the Biblical scholar whose book, The Messiah Before Jesus (2002), seems to anticipate the discovery of the recent “Gabriel Revelation” stone tablet, has an important essay on the discovery in the Journal of Religion. Knohl calls the tablet Hazon Gabriel (the … Continue reading

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Not Upton Sinclaire’s “Jungle,” but Jim Jones’s: How Religious Sausage is Made

Cults and New Religious Movements: A Reader (Blackwell Readings in Religion 2003) Editor: Lorne L. Dawson This is one of those “breaking the spell” books on religion in which the intricate social psychology–the underbelly of new religious movements–is laid bare … Continue reading

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From Qumran to Christianity?: The Recently Discovered “Gabriel Revelation” Tablet as the Archaeopteryx of Academic Biblical Scholarship

How similar the “Gabriel Revelation” stone tablet debate is to the evolution-creation debate! Liberal academic scholars have long said that Christianity didn’t just pop out of thin air—a creation ex nihilo—but evolved out of the contingency of circumstances surrounding 1st … Continue reading

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