I’ve had a thought rumbling around in my head in recent months - a product of one of my occasional and innumerable hypothetical debates with theists - which a post this morning on the atheist community prompted me to begin to formulate more textually.

It runs along similar lines to a lot of my thoughts on this topic (which you can view as pedantry, ( Read more... )

“Listen, I realize that Lord of the Rings is just a story written by one guy, okay? I’m not one of those fundamentalists who believes everything that Tolkien said just because it’s in some book. I don’t believe in Sauron or anything. That’s obviously bullshit. I do believe in Gandalf the Grey, though, don’t get me wrong. I believe that he was some ( Read more... )

I was giving some thought to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah the other day ( Read more... )

A couple of weeks ago, I watched a fantastic documentary from Nova called "The Bible's Buried Secrets". As people who know me are well aware, this sort of thing is like crack to me. It essentially looks at the very early history of the Israelite people by means of a combination of approaches and creating a synthesis which is very compelling to me. ( Read more... )

I've been working for some time now on a book I would like to write on the primitive morality of the Abrahamic god. To that end, I was scribbling away at my notes this evening, and a thought ocurred to me ( Read more... )

So, my friend Damon was telling me a while back about his once-upon-a-time girlfriend Elle. She was (and presumably is) a Jew, whose family had decided they needed to live in Israel. What's more, Elle had dedicated herself to someday moving there herself, and when he informed her that he did not intend to move there himself, it had spelled doom for ( Read more... )

Lest it be imagined that I'm not still working on that book I spoke about some time back, I feel like posting my rough, rough draft of my section on the topic of the book of Job.

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The book of Job is one of the more outstandingly strange books of the old testament. It is a story which most serious scholars take to be a parable, meant to impart ( Read more... )

I actually posted this in the
( Read more... )

Book Update #1

So, for years upon years now, people have been urging me to write something. Something. Anything. A book. Whatever. Well, peer pressure isn’t the best way to get me to do anything, but my desire to pay my bills while at the same time provide for an upswing in my hate mail is such that it seems that perhaps I ought to heed the advice ( Read more... )