Thoughts of a Freethinker

I recall my mother coming home from Bible study in our little rural evangelical church and saying, "One thing I learned today is I don't like Paul." She was referring, of course, to his famous sentences which direct that woman must not teach or preach to men, the male is the leader of the woman and women must obey husbands. This somewhat isolated passage attributed to Paul is HUGELY important, no doubt repeated from some pulpits several times a year. It is repeated by the current Pope Francis.  I'm enjoying a book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became the Gospel Truth by historian Beth Allison Barr. She is part of a growing group of scholars who have looked anew at what Paul wrote. The group finds the one passage about men being rulers over women attributed to Paul did not correctly reflect Paul's opinion of women and condemns the paternalistic branches of the faith that uses Paul to justify their self serving practices. Those who ...

The requirement that one group of students, for example gays and women, must subsidize religious groups who want to take away their rights may end during the next few years. Discrimination, put in place by Trump and his Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, is being challenged by the Biden Administration.  Reporters who covered DeVos, whose responsibility was public sector education, said she spent an unprecedented amount of time visiting and promoting private religious-based schools. Her disinterest in public education set it back and extra effort will be required to bring it back to it previous level. Neither Trump nor his rotating cast of Cabinet members had much interest in what they were tasked by our Constitution to do, run the government. Like the Cabinet of the Reagan Administration, Trump's Cabinet spent much of its time trying to torpedo government by making if inefficient and not effective.  A former staff member of VP Pence who spent many hours in meetings with key T...

Over and over today one reads and hears on podcasts Christian pundits and leader's explanations of the exodus of white people leaving their churches and denominations. The volume and frequency of "Christian explainers" surprises me. Also surprising, however, is the inability of Christian "explainers" and leaders to understand what is happening. The most common explanation of why there are a growing number of ex Christians given by Christians is that the ex people did not read the Bible or were not properly trained. And blame is handed out: parents, preachers other Christians failed. If only the fallen had been given proper training in the Bible there would be no ex Christians.  As a popular podcast producer who interviews ex Christians explains, Christian pundits and leaders have spent no time trying to learn or understand what is happening. They take their own opinion of how ex Christians think and make up worthless solutions: If ex Christians understood the Bi...

George Barna of The Barna Group has been making waves in U.S. Christianity for several years. To me he seems like a devout Christian who is also trying to find the truth of what is happening within the broader Christian slice of U.S. population. He never quotes from the book I refer to here constantly, God is Not One, by Stephen Prothero. In that book, Prothero tried to encapsulate each of the great world religions into a sentence or two. The sentence was not what theologians concluded each religion is but what people in the pews think it is. What George Barna does with his constant polling is ask people what they think Christianity is. Barna does exactly what Prothero did but through questionnaire research instead of paraphrasing.  In many respects, Barna of the Barna Group seems exactly like the normal Christian. He is supremely confident he knows what Christianity is or what it should be and compares that to what people think it is. Perhaps his strategy is to identify mistakes i...

An example of a national healthcare effort better than the U.S. is in the Central American country of Costa Rica. The New Yorker featured a long article about how that country used to handle its healthcare, how it changed and how its data illustrates it has a better health outcomes than we have in the U.S.  My wife and I received our Ph. D.'s from the University of Missouri. A senior faculty member there recently started a new way to improve health in nursing homes. The result was healthier people and lower costs for both the nursing homes and for Medicare. The doctor who wrote the New Yorker article about Costa Rica said the health-care system in the U.S. is an on-demand system. A health problem crops up and the doctor and staff deal with it. Preventive care is not central to the system. Both the Costa Rican and Missouri models rely of a much discussed but never quite implemented preventive care system.  In the U.S. there is a public health discipline. It gathers data and ma...

The U.S. has many time in the last few decades sent troops, equipment and aircraft to do battle around the world. We can barely remember the "Freedom Fighters," the Mujahideen, who fought the Soviets. We sent shoulder fired weapons to them to bring down Russian helicopters. In recent decades a theory of war developed that had the military visiting and respecting locals, all time trying to bring them toward Western thinking. Almost without exception, the places we have tried this things stayed the same in spite of billions of dollars and scores of lost lives. My own opinion is the West's biggest problem with Afghanistan is religion. A rogue version of Islam has enough organization to take over the reins of government. According to interviews with people on the street the biggest problem citizens have with the government supported by the U.S. was its corruption. It is far more corrupt, at least the eyes of many in the Afghan public, than the Taliban.  What can the U.S. do ...

The new theory is based on an assumption young people look to adults for guidance. This assumption is used to build a model of older "friends" influencing youth that will  push Christianity retention numbers up.  The program promotes itself, in the way Christian enterprises often promote themselves, with anecdotes of success. There seems no data showing it has reversed the large exodus of youth from their churches and from organized religion generally.   The recommendation it to befriend, then at the right moment spring the Bible. Long ago that made sense. Now young women, for example, might hear that Paul said women should not be preachers. Young women would want to give the faith the bird. When the mentor claims Bible verses find their young person's close gay friends were deep sinners headed for hell that would make no sense. Goodbye church. The mentor scheme assumes the culture had not changed the last many decades. It avoids the religious right's scoffing at gov...