Thoughts of a Freethinker

This term " worldview " is used a lot, mostly I think by Christians. Maybe I'm not understanding it right but it seems to be that a Christian "worldview" is that faith is the sole source of order and high morals. The non Christian worldview is one without order or high moral grounding. That is, the Christian view is correct, the non Christian incorrect. Anyone with even a scintilla of sense knows organizing society and establishing rule so behavior that serve the greater good comes from human experience and human reasoning. The God of the Bible killed a couple of million innocent people, if we are to take literally the god's deeds. Lofty moral values is not what the Bible is about. For whatever complex reasons, the public is turning away from what Christians call the Christian worldview. A series of polls in recent years finds smaller percentages each time. A recent poll by the Christian Barna Group ask 51 questions of respondents to gauge the level ...

In the couple of centuries before our Constitutional Convention, which took place in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787, there were a blizzard of articles published which lampooned Christianity. They covered exactly the same topics we discuss here these days. Atheist authors wrote about the ancients who never saw Jesus but quoted him. They wrote about the folly of calling unusual events miracles and of believing their exists a Holy Ghost and invisible God. One of the most biting and influential wrote under the pen name, Voltaire. Voltaire died just ten years before the Constitutional Convention. He was a contemporary of the men in Philadelphia. Voltaire made a comfortable living writing sarcasm about Christianity and all other religions. Thomas Paine wrote about Voltaire, "His forte lay in exposing and ridiculing the superstitions united with statescraft that had interwoven with governments." What could be a better reflection of the separation of church and state. T...

In the Des Moines Register is a poll about public attitudes toward abortion. A majority of older voters does not approve of abortion in some cases. A solid majority, 57%, of those under 35 years old generally approves of abortion. This trajectory follows the same demographic path as approval of gay relationships. Time is not on the side of social conservatism. At the heart of politics which have the goal of depriving gay people and women the same rights as straight people and men is prejudice. It is a prejudice we did not create but one that existed and we were born into it. Prejudice against some non white races was huge in my lifetime is has slipped into acceptance over time. People as old as I am know of the incarceration of people of Japanese decent as well as 400 years of slavery and segregation. How could something that went on for so long and was so well ingrained in our culture be upended? It was, or, at least we are quite far along in upending it. And so it is with ab...

There are four "gospels" in the New Testament, Mathew, Mark, Luke and John. The first three were believed to have been written between 30 and 60 years after the time Jesus was supposed to have lived. The fourth, John, was written over 100 years after the alleged Jesus years. In churches, it is my impression John is read more often than the first three. Some say it was developed after many decades of reading to people out loud and was changed to read more easily as spoken. These days with a small army of scholars combing over the Bible as literary critics arguments break out about how different the four books are in the way they portray their main character, Jesus. The book of John, the one written over 100 years later, portrays a much different Jesus character than the stories in the first three. Writers or rewriters of the first three portray Jesus as being somewhat secret about his religious significance. They include his story of a virgin mother and humble birth. H...

It's quite obvious the Noah flood tale came from oral stories passed down over camp fires for generations. Versions of it existed around the world. We can image a person who has not traveled more than a few miles over his life time would consider the entire world to be whatever he has seen. A local flood, then, becomes a world-wide flood. From the region where the Bible was written there were long periods of flooding . It would be logical a flood myth would have been passed down from prehistory times. I have written several times about the Noah flood myth and with the "lock down" I decided to spend some time looking at the Catholic Encyclopedia. That is a massive document as I understand it approved by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and is on line. It has a long segment about Noah's flood. It is amazing Catholic staff, and I suppose other branches of Christianity, have spent so much money going over the story and splitting hairs about what it may or may n...

Today I walked to a neighborhood super market. I mentioned to the produce manager I had seen  plastic gloves tossed on the ground in the parking lot and where we were standing sanitary wipes were tossed on the floor. He smiled and said yes, people are a bad mood and careless in their behavior. I asked to friendly young check out woman if she had many mad customers. "Oh yeah." she said. "They demand to know when the TP will be restocked. We have no answer because we don't know." It got me to wondering how long the public will tolerate these new circumstances. The President has hinted everything will almost normal by Easter.  This is not what people who study the spread of virus are saying . If behavior normalized, "packed churches for Easter services", the disease will spread faster and farther. To me there are two questions. What level of distancing will still allow the economy to generate the money it takes to treat sick people?  A poor country ...

A former preacher said he grew tired of being required to preach the same message after every disaster. The requirement was for a sermon which let God off the hook. Even though God is supposed to love his people and/or take care of them, he doesn't. This obvious fact had to be dodged the Sunday following something horrific. I'm reading articles to see if there is any different message from priests and preachers these days. I found the same required message is being preached everyday: Don't blame God for the Coronavirus. A conservative Protestant preacher/writer wrote the other day this was part of God's big plan and we needed to understand Coronvirum will ultimately be a good thing. A  priest with a higher intellect wrote he did not know where God was during all of this or why it is happening. He said both believers and non believers should realize Jesus gave us the model for caring for the sick and the poor. The priest at least came face to face with what he c...