The happiest place on earth

Posted on March 13, 2014 by PaulVK

Not Disney, but Yosemite

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Why are the Dutch so tall?

Posted on March 13, 2014 by PaulVK

One answer

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Advertising to Children

Posted on March 13, 2014 by PaulVK

The Atlantic

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Christians and Wholistic Healing

Posted on March 13, 2014 by PaulVK

Hermeneutics

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Do Atheists “Evolve” Their Communal Ideas More Quickly than Religious People? Is that a good thing?

Posted on March 12, 2014 by PaulVK

Do Atheists “Evolve” Faster?

Interesting post by Chris Stedman notes that while atheists are seen as more sympathetic to LGBTQ issues they are not uniform in this. A bit ago there was a post on the same site wondering if the atheist community has trouble treating women well.

What interest me is the question of whether atheists change their minds more quickly than religious people in alignment with societal trends. If we were to poll atheists 30 years ago where would their ideas about Same Sex marriage be? What about 100 years ago? What about atheists in ancient Greece? (Beyond Greece atheists in the ancient world are hard to find.)

Old Ideas of Dead Men

A caricature of religion is often the embrace of old beliefs by dead men. There are a cluster of ideas here, some are generalizations, some are biases, some are just assertions

  • Old beliefs are outdated and perhaps disproved by better science.
  • Religious people uncritically embrace these old ideas which are preserved by religion which is a fear response to change or chaos
  • Religious people get stuck in old biases and religion keeps them bound to them
  • Religion keeps people reading old books and believing in old myths

Compared to this the competing generalization is that “scientific” minded people based on what “science” discovers today are quicker to jettison old, outdated (hear “wrong”) ideas for newer ones with more support from better science. There is a clear chronological bias or as CS Lewis calls it “snobbery”.

“Right Side of History” Continue reading →

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Atheists and Porn

Posted on March 12, 2014 by PaulVK

Also in the blogs this week by Andrew Sullivan  and Damon Linker about the morality of pornography. Not only are the young more in favor of Same Sex Marriage but also for porn. One article argues (predictably) that societal attitudes concerning pornography are a residue of asserted negative Christian attitudes towards sexuality. Their conclusion:

We must at least entertain the idea that all the hooplah over porn as a shameful and bad industry is a reflection of our incorrect Christian moral assumptions, not any demonstrable negative effect discovered by science.

A ThinkAtheist.com discussion thread discusses the matter. It is interesting that they very much tend to track with Jonathan Haidt’s harm-free questions.  Most seem to come down to a rather libertarian/consent based morality. Huff Po had a piece on straight men who watch porn are more supportive of same-sex marriage. 

 

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Dreher on Bratt on Kuyper

Posted on March 12, 2014 by PaulVK

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/james-bratt-on-abraham-kuyper

 

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On the Samaritan Woman of John 4

Posted on March 12, 2014 by PaulVK

A close friend, the Reverend Donn Moomaw, told me that this is the story of a woman who came for water but who went home with the well.

Bruner, F. D. (2012). The Gospel of John: A Commentary (p. 273). Grand Rapids, MI;Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans.

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The “First Kiss” Commercial

Posted on March 12, 2014 by PaulVK

This video went viral.  It’s really a clothing commercial and most of the people are actors or models.

To me it felt icky. It is titillating because it invites us to identify and imagine physical intimacy with strangers, but it feels icky (or maybe forbidden) because it is physical intimacy divorced from life context. How might a “participant” explain their kiss to a spouse or partner? Would it be something constructive for building a true relationship in the rest of their life?

  • Jezebel
  • Slate I’m betting that if Pilieva had filmed the video with a more diverse cast of all the people in the world who constitute “strangers,” the result would have been more unsettlingly comedic than searchingly romantic. It would also have been more interesting, if infinitely less sharable. The video peddles the fantasy that beauty can spring from an unexpected connection between two random people, but what it’s really showing us is the beauty of models making out. It’s like the hipster Bachelor. I doubt that millions of viewers would be so quick to celebrate a video of randos kissing if they were all less thin, hip, stylish, charming, and well-manicured. 
  • Take two daily dish and Slate
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Worship in Spirit and in Truth

Posted on March 12, 2014 by PaulVK

“The true worshipers will be worshiping the Father by means of Spirit and Truth.” This sentence “[h]as commonly been taken to mean that God, being Spirit, is present everywhere and can be worshiped anywhere; the important thing is not where men worship, but how they worship.… [However, it] means the precise opposite; it means that God is present in his own realm, to which man as such has no access. To worship God in spirit is not a possibility that is always and everywhere open to man.… But this is just the gospel of Christ, that this possibility has now been opened to men.… The meaning is that the location has been redefined, and God is now to be worshiped in the place where he is present, i.e., in Him who is the truth incarnate [Jesus Christ].” G. S. Hendry, The Holy Spirit in Christian Theology, 31, in Leon Morris, John, 272 n. 62

Bruner, F. D. (2012). The Gospel of John: A Commentary (p. 259). Grand Rapids, MI;Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans.

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