Easter


The resurrection. Something we all believe in.




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The new rules are killing us

In present-day Western society, emotional arguments prevail even when calmer thought shows them to be baseless or ill-founded. Calmer voices are drowned out or booed off the stage. Today the crowd is booing a senior churchman who has his own take on Catholicism's sex abuse scandal. "The real scandal is that the Catholic church hasn’t distinguished itself from the rest of society. . ."   Society “forgets or covers up the fact that 80 per cent of cases of sexual assault in the church involved male youths not children,” [Cardinal Brandmüller] told Germany’s DPA news agency in an interview a few days ahead of his 90th birthday. Click the link to see the firestorm of response, and to read the very obviously slanted story reporting the controversy.  This man who is an officer in the church sees the church's problem as one of cultural syncretism, stemming from worldly indifference within the church toward homosexual conduct. He sees the church's sex scandal as
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Reality, fantasy and ecumenism

By Charles Marsh Recent conversations online and off have shown me something very curious. Some of what I believe to be Christian verity some other Christians take to be mere fantasy. They are cessationists and I am not . According to them, the things that I believe about tongues and prophecy and words of wisdom and of knowledge are sheer moonshine. So while in some churches I am thought orthodox enough, in others I am regarded as delusional or something rather like it. There are other matters in which, in like manner, some Christians view certain beliefs of other Christians as no better than free imagination, runaway fantasy or perhaps something worse: damaging falsehoods not harmless nuttiness. I admit to being somewhat dismayed by other Christians' newspaper novenas and Facebook prayer schemes. I do not think that is how prayer works. Their idea seems to be that if you repeat such and such a prayer x times, or republish it or "like" it or retweet it, then you w
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Science versus religion is a phony issue

By Charles Marsh The problem is that science, well suited to look at repeatable events, is at a loss about singular ones.  Some people suppose that science trumps religion, that a modern understanding of the world through science renders religious understandings obsolete. Some others suppose that religious understanding can be used to refute science. Both views are wrong. Science is rooted in philosophical naturalism. That is the stance that says we will explain what we see without reference to supernatural agencies. Science describes what happens without recourse to explanations involving angels, demons, gods, fairy godmothers, humors, vapors or ghosts. Acting on this basis, science has done a great deal of good. It has gotten rid of superstitions about what causes disease, where insects come from and a good many other misunderstandings. Notice that science is morally neutral. The same disciplines that give us vaccines and disease prevention can as aptly be turned to germ
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