Ever since Dan Brown’s book, The Da Vinci Code, there has been a mass of misinformation about Constantine and the Council of Nicaea. This information was already circulating before Brown’s book, but he helped propel this conspiracy theory into the mainstream. Brown isn’t a historian, but he made very clear historical statements. But as with…
Every once in a while, I see a meme pop up about religion. For a long time, I’d think about them, and then my wife would hear about all that was wrong with the meme, but recently I started saving the meme itself. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them, but…
Christian faith does not have to be a belief in the unbelievable. Yet over the last few decades, this is how many have begun to speak about Christianity. That Christian faith requires one to blindly accept it, regardless of whether the ideas are truly believable. For many within the faith, this wouldn’t be a fair…
Every few years, headlines proclaim that belief in God is declining in the United States. The claims often stem from polls conducted by the Pew Research Center, which have for some time shown a gradual increase in the number of people classified as “nones,” those with no religious affiliation. At the same time, those who…
What do you do when your minister makes the bold claim that Jesus was definitely not born of a virgin? When Matthew states Mary was a virgin, the word Matthew used didn’t actually mean virgin. Or that virgin births were a common trope, that even the Emperor was said to be born of a virgin….
Did you know that Christmas is a pagan holiday? It’s one of those “facts” that gets passed around during the Christmas season every year. Most people simply take it at face value. But this fact is a 19th-century creation. It arose at the same time as the myth that Easter was inspired by pagan celebrations…
Millennia before I sat down to try to tackle the question of why bad things happen to good people, another had set out to do the same thing. Drawing on traditional wisdom and using it as a framework for his own argument, the author of the Book of Job created a foundation that a host…
Why do we suffer? I’m not sure that question can ever be fully answered. The ways in which we suffer are exceptionally diverse, and the factors that lead to suffering are infinitely varied. But in order to even begin to understand how suffering could coexist with an all-loving God, we need to at least scratch…
When faced with the reality of suffering, the classical view of God becomes exceptionally difficult to defend. The idea that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving is challenged by the existence of evil. It brings up the age-old question of theodicy: how do we reconcile our notion of a loving God, a God who has…