Jason Coleman

Rachel Held Evans says it’s not always bad to be a stumbling block, depending on which ideas you trip up and where you cause people to land.

The truth is, there are some beliefs that I think Christians should doubt.

…I think they should doubt the notion that God belongs to a certain political party. I think they should doubt Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins. I think they should doubt restricting the roles of women in church leadership. I think they should doubt the wealth, health, and prosperity “gospel.” I think they should doubt religious nationalism. I think they should doubt the idea that Jesus is simply a personal savior and that being a Christian is about being right.

If challenging my fellow Christ-followers to think more critically about these issues makes me a stumbling block in the path of bad ideas, then I accept that role.

And she offers these thoughts to help us calibrate exactly how big of a stumbling block to be:

In my desire to challenge what I believe are false fundamentals, I must be careful of creating false fundamentals of my own. I’ve got to be wary of growing so big and obtrusive and unyielding that those who fall over me have no safe place to land.

Jeremy Smith writing about a Hindu story that seems to comport with C. S. Lewis’ story The Great Divorce.

You bring your own fire to Hell.

A comment by Gav at KesterBrewin.com:

Firstly, for me, I think the understanding of what exactly a sunset is and how/why it occurs takes nothing away from the experience of its beauty, for me it only adds to it.

From a review at JesusCreed of the book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think

…The skeptical improvement of all knowledge. That’s what science is all about…

Paul Seely writing about The Flood at BioLogos.org, says we can trust the theological lessons of Gen 5—9 even if the Flood story is not historical.

Although the human author probably did not make a sharp distinction between Legend and History, the account [of Noah’s Flood] was factual to him. But because of the light we have received from modern science, we must think of it as parabolic. Some, however, still raise the question, How can we believe the moral-theological lessons in the account if we reject its historicity since the lessons are based on the assumption that the account is historical fact?

The answer is that we are reading the account over the shoulders of the ancient Israelites to whom it was addressed. They believed it was factual. This was a naïve belief, but they had no reason to question the account’s historicity. We must remember that their understanding of the natural world was that of little children. As the conservative nineteenth-century Princeton theologian Charles Hodge said, they believed the sky was solid, the earth was flat, and the sun literally moved.1 As for an anthropologically universal Flood, second millennial Mesopotamians believed it was an important historical fact, and this tradition may well have been passed down to the Israelites through the Mesopotamian patriarchs beginning with Abraham.

Given these inherited naïve “scientific” and traditional beliefs, it was pedagogically wise for God to speak to them in terms of those beliefs.2 We can thus appropriate the moral-theological lessons which are still valid for us while ignoring the accommodated ancient Near Eastern “science” and traditions upon which they are based. These now outmoded concepts are in the text only because the account was not written to us but to the ancient Israelites.

Kathryn Applegate in a post about the human immune system at Biologos.org.

I believe God is sovereign over all of creation, but I don’t imagine he is presently curing my cold by directly controlling the specific gene rearrangements and optimizing mutations in each of the millions of B cells in my body. Could he do so? Of course! But if that were the case, why bother making billions of antibodies in the first place? The evidence suggests that God has chosen to work through a random process, one which involves the routine creation and destruction of millions of cells that never get used. This is the ordinary means by which God maintains our health. The miracles of healing recorded in the Bible are miraculous precisely because they don’t occur by this normal, natural process.

A study looks at the odds that 23 “universal proteins” would appear in bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes under different origins scenarios. The most likely expanation? By far, that they all share a common ancestor.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100513-science-evolution-darwin-single-ancestor/

Karl Giberson explores how responsible God must be for any suffering He “allowed” while creating living organisms via evolution.

I allow my children to drive my car by themselves. If they run down a pedestrian, did I allow that? God allows gravity to function in a regular way. If a tree falls on my head, did God allow that? … The world may very well be such that saying “God allows” is not an accurate description of the freedom that exists in nature.

Seen at Tom Scott’s blog Derivadow.com. From the point of view of web architecture I think that he gets the definition of “stateless” wrong, but the closing sentence here is the stuff of bumper stickers.

The web isn’t politically / ethically neutral and wasn’t designed by people who are / were politically / ethically neutral. Which is why the most important design decision of the web was statelessness … Statelessness means everyone has equal access to information regardless of age or gender or ethnic background or physical location or physical ability etc etc etc. Because the web doesn’t care about who you are, only what you asked for.