Today Michael Brown tweeted the following: “What the world calls fanaticism and much of the Church calls extremism, God calls normal.” The observation reminded me of a statement that Noam Chomsky once gave about so-called “religious fanaticism”. In the interview Chomsky is asked about religious fundamentalism. He replies, “There have been a lot of cross-cultural studies […]
Noam Chomsky
Apologetics and the cult of concision or, not every conversation can be had in under four minutes
The other day I was at the Wintery Knight blog when the following article title caught my eye: “What if you only had four minutes to defend Israel’s attack on the Canaanites?” The article provided a brief synopsis of Jonathan Morrow’s book Questioning the Bible: 11 Major Challenges to the Bible’s Authority by focusing on one […]
Canadian war criminals?
Since we’ve spent some time discussing the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I thought it might be good to balance things out a bit by discussing some Canadian blindspots (in case you didn’t know, I’m Canadian). Personally I find nationalism of any stripe quite noxious, especially when it leads folks to criticize the atrocities of […]
Should you care if God exists?
In 2003 Jonathan Rauch hit a cultural nerve when, in an article in Atlantic Monthly, he declared himself an “apatheist”. With this neologism Rauch sought to convey the point that he didn’t fall into either of the traditional theist/atheist camps. He certainly wasn’t a theist, but neither was he an atheist of the traditional sort because traditional […]
Does the Golden Rule apply in geopolitics?
Do you really think the only way to bring about the peace is to sacrifice your children and kill all your enemies? (Larry Norman, “The Great American Novel“, 1972) In “American-based terrorism, or, Why I think I’d like to be a Quaker” I pointed out one terrorist that the United States had harbored for years. […]
