God

A very liberal United Church of Christ bishop wants to throw out major parts of the Bible

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One of the basic, underlying themes of Christianity, across all of the various denominations, is that the Bible is the word of God, given to authors who were divinely inspired by the Lord to bring his word to us mere, fallible mortals. Some Christians — former President Joe Biden, a (supposedly) devout and dedicated Catholic …

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What a small price to pay

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What does it mean to you to be a Christian?  When you hear someone say they’re a “Christian,” what does that actually mean?  Does it mean they attend a church on a regular basis?  Does it mean they grew up in a Christian family and believe in God?  Does it mean they once prayed a “sinner’s prayer” — perhaps as a child at summer camp?  I ask these things because when people tell me they’re a “Christian,” I have to wonder, because “being a Christian” doesn’t seem to mean what it used to mean.

Men Striving for Godliness: Architects of Order or Architects of Chaos?

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In the quest to emulate godly attributes, men often find themselves at a crossroads: to transform chaos into order or to unleash chaos upon order. This dichotomy, inspired by the insights of scholar Michael Heiser but infused with my own perspective, delves into the essence of human nature and the paths we choose.

Stones, Spectacle, and Shortcuts: The Wilderness Temptation and the Blueprint We Pretend Not to See

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The temptation of Jesus Christ in the wilderness is one of those passages Christians nod at politely and then immediately ignore when Monday morning rolls around. Forty days of fasting, a barren desert, and Satan offering three proposals that look suspiciously like modern self-help advice. If you think it’s a children’s Sunday school story about resisting candy, you’ve missed the plot. It’s a masterclass in how power, identity, and survival actually work in the real world.

Using the Veil of Religion to Advance Tyranny

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We are in a war in which our enemies use the veil of religion to seize power. Few understand this war in which past losses resulted in hundreds of millions of innocents being murdered, tortured, imprisoned or living for decades to centuries under tyranny. The use of religion to seize power is ancient in concept – and often uses one of two approaches. One is to attack or vilify a religion to advance tyranny. The other, to use the veil of religion to hide insidious efforts to advance tyranny. The genius (and danger) in using religion, in this perpetual cognitive war, is its subtlety. There are no tanks in the streets. Rather, memes, sermons, rhetoric, and false narratives and manufactured victims are employed using our cognitive biases (e.g., emotion, moral outrage) that erode shared reality over time.

The Interface, the Code, and the War: Why Christianity Becomes Offensive

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Some of the sharpest minds of the last century sensed the reductionist story was missing something. Carl Jung looked inward and saw conflict. The ego — the conscious “I” — wants control, moral self-justification, narrative dominance. It insists on sovereignty. Jung recognized the ego was not the whole self and that something beyond it pressed inward, demanding humility and reordering. He called that pressure the “Self.” He diagnosed the tension correctly. He simply refused to name the external authority behind it.

Not Random, Not Accidental: Chuck Missler and the Case for an Engineered Reality

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When Missler said we may be living in something like a simulation, he meant that physical reality functions like a user interface. We experience the front end. The underlying code — the laws, constants, and constraints — operate beneath our direct perception. Just as you don’t see the binary code behind your screen but interact with its output, we interact with a physical world governed by informational architecture we didn’t write.

Why Christians Feel Obligated to Defend Israel—and Why the Bible Never Commands It

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There is a quiet anxiety baked into much of modern American Christianity: if you don’t support Israel—always, loudly, and without qualification—God might notice. Entire churches treat Israeli foreign policy as a third sacrament. Question a settlement policy or a military response and someone will reach for Genesis 12 like it’s a theological panic button. This fear wears the costume of faith, but it isn’t biblical. It’s superstition with a study Bible.