Jason Coleman

Like the Galileans, we too have a tendency to want to believe that God is on our side and will judge “the other” who is over against us, or different from us. Such was not the case with Jesus. He observed that God makes no distinctions between righteous and wicked, between oppressors and oppressed, they both need deliverance and God’s blessing. Did he not say, “God makes rain to fall on good and evil and sun to shine on just and unjust?” Matt 5:45

This is perhaps the most important point I am seeking to make in my book The Jesus Driven Life, namely that, like Jesus, it is essential for us to begin to reframe the way we understand the “wrath” or retributive violence of God.

To suggest that God is nonviolent or better yet, that God is not involved in the cycle of retributive vengeance and punishment will undoubtedly strike many as wrong. … Nothing irks some folks more than losing a God who is wrathful, angry, retributive and punishing. This is only because we want so much to believe that God takes sides, and that side is inevitably our side.

via Are you irked at the thought of God not being wrathful? Michael Hardin part 2.

This is the end of a poem by Hannah Notess exploring why some people experience religion so clearly and others do not.

I don’t know why

some buildings burned to cinders

instantly, while others

only turned a little gray,

just kissed by ash and smoke,

and I don’t know why

God touches down on some of us

and not on others,

and I don’t know why sometimes

a prisoner doesn’t even have

a window to look out of

when he writes Rejoice, rejoice

and other times

an earthquake rattles him free.

via Big, Wild and Unanswerable | Addie Zierman | How To Talk Evangelical.

Right after the Golden Rule, the most laudable guideline in the world is “different strokes for different folks.”

Sometimes, Religious Freedom Really Is Under Attack.

Part of the problem, the study concludes, is the human brain itself, which lies in wait for its unsuspecting host to remove itself from all distractions — other people, entertainment, conversation, visual stimulation — before striking. Lying very still and quiet in a dark room is in fact the worst thing a person can do, as it gives the brain an unparalleled opportunity to flood the body with invisible horrors and anxious, waking nightmares.

“It turns out that lying down by yourself in total darkness is the least restful thing a person can do,” Taccone added. “It’s a recipe for setting your brain on fire.”

Via Falling Asleep Actually Impossible, Scientists Discover

Great contrast image here of a living, flowing stream and the stinky drying detritus left to dry on the bank.

The biblical case for full gender equality in the church is clear, potent and overwhelming. It flows with the trajectory of all the major currents of the mighty stream of scripture. It is an inescapable consequence, means and mechanism of the overriding, over-arching biblical mandate of love and justice and love, love, love.

And yet there are some verses, a bunch of them, that can be plucked out of that great stream and divorced from the context of that biblical current. And if you set those verses off to the side and allow them to dry off so as to no longer be tainted by all the other verses and arguments and principles to which they were formerly attached, they can be read in such a way that they seem to forbid gender equality in the church.

This process of selecting verses to extract from the rest, elevating them above the rest, and thereby interpreting them to contradict the rest, is what I call the clobber-text hermeneutic. This approach to the Bible is pandemic in America, where it was perfected and popularized because it provided the only excuse that white Christians could come up with for reconciling their defense of slavery with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

via Why young-Earth creationism needs to be killed with fire part 2.

I am happy to agree that natural selection has never been observed to produce something as complex as the vertebrate eye. Intelligent agents have never been observed to bring universes into being or to create life from scratch, but Sean [Pitman] has no trouble believing that occurred. The fact remains that there is voluminous circumstantial evidence supporting the claim that natural selection can in principle and has in natural history produced complex adaptations.

via Probability and Evolution – EvolutionBlog.

Let’s toss out picking and choosing, and substitute “picking and chewing.” We should take things in the Bible, and chew them over, but should feel under no obligation to swallow them rather than spit them out. And again, we should be ready to explain why we have done so.

via Picking and Chewing.

In a comment after the original post, Scribalishess explains in part how the writers of Genesis 1 could get their theology correct even though we no longer share their ancient view of the physical world.

I see inspiration much like I view the incarnation: God coming to us in a form we understand. If inspiration is “God’s guidance,” then doesn’t it make sense that God would guide writers in ways they could understand?

via Reading Genesis 1 “Literally” | Scribalishess.

Meekness takes injuries like pills, not chewing, but swallowing them down.

Sir Thomas Browne

GL: Some might say the idea that you are just your brain makes life bleak, unforgiving and ultimately futile. How do you respond to that?

PC: It’s not at all bleak. I don’t see how the existence of a god or a soul confers any meaning on my life. How does that work, exactly? Nobody has ever given an adequate answer. My life is meaningful because I have family, meaningful work, because I love to play, I have dogs, I love to dig in the garden. That’s what makes my life meaningful, and I think that’s true for most people.

via The self as brain: Disturbing implications of neuroexistentialism..., emphasis mine.

Does only the existence of Superman confer any meaning on the work of police officers? Or, without Captain American, is the American military meaningless? I’ve never thought about those questions before. They’re obviously silly and wrong unless we use a ludicrous criteria for what it means for something to be meaningful. Does that mean the statement “Our short, impermanent lives have no real meaning without God” is just as silly and is based on criteria just as ludicrous?