The Genesis account portrays Abraham as a wealthy man, with sheep, goats and camels -- except there's one big problem with this account. There is no archeological evidence of the domestication of camels until some centuries later than the latest possible date for the Patriarchs. Even then, it was in the Arabian peninsula, not the Levant ( Read more... )

Recently I saw an online discussion of Clarke's famous dictum any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to the uninitiated, in which the argument against it rested upon a very specific definition of "magic" in the field of theology, which restricts the term to involve a pact with unclean spirits ( Read more... )

After writing three essays on fictional portrayals of religion gone bad, I realized that I do have an Evil Religion in one of my stories.


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By "Dark Religion" I am referring to a whole cluster of tropes, including the Evil Church of Evil or Evil Religion (exactly what it says on the tin), the Corrupt Church (which started out good and got taken over by tyrants or crooks), and the various kinds of Fake Church, including the Synthetic Church or Path of Inspiration (made up to control the ( Read more... )

Recently, John C. Wright had an essay on his blog about the sf trope of the fake religion (he uses the term synthetic religion) set up entirely to manipulate and control a group of people who are regarded as less educated or even less intelligent than the people doing the manipulating. One thing he commented upon was how, if this religion is ( Read more... )

Here's an interesting panel from this year's Capricon. Why does pretty much every human culture have at least some concept of an afterlife? Maybe it's just part of a vague "spirit world," or maybe it's an elaborate system of heavens and hells for different classes of people (Chinese tradition has eight cold hells and eight hot hells, each lasting ( Read more... )

I was planning to write an essay on anticipating the moral norms of future societies. And then I read some news that reminds me of William Gibson's "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed ( Read more... )

Most of us have learned the basics of the Protestant Reformation as part of world history classes in school. There is the vivid image of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the church, and generally some notion of the issue of the selling of indulgences (which most people can relate to in terms of the shennanigans of various ( Read more... )

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