God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

We all want to know what is on the other side of death. Such a compelling topic is certain to sell a lot of books. The latest set that I’ve read in this genre is by Kat Kerr, a handsome woman with purple in her hair. The books, Revealing Heaven and Revealing Heaven II are controversial, however. Several online reviews from bloggers like me are not flattering, and I’m afraid I’m going to add my voice to that chorus. The format. The first irritant is the format, and not just because the books are self-published. The text is double spaced. New chapters begin on an odd-numbered page. If the previous chapter ends on an odd numbered page, the following even page is blank. There is enough wasted space in the 147 pages of the first book to add the information of the second book. But with two books, one can garner twice the profit. The second book is formatted in a similar manner except all in bold text, which takes up even more space. Many stories are similar between the two, so the promis...

When did Adam and Eve live? A friend of mine who was concerned about my soul and my call to teach sparked this post by sending me a flyer which advertises educational material published by a conservative organization called Answers in Genesis. They offer seminars, DVDs, and books, and have built a Creation Museum. My evangelical friends and I will never agree on the amount of time God spent in creating our beautiful and breathtaking earth, but one thing we have in common is that God’s hand was in all of it. For many reasons, including the fact that I've taken geology classes and I'm married to a geologist, I cannot accept a literal six-day creation. Here is just a few of them.  When Genesis 1 and 2 were written down, probably in the seventh century B.C.E. (although we really don’t know when), Hebrew was a well-established language, emerging from Canaanite, Eblaite, and Sumerian. The Israelites were already a coherent people and state unto themselves. In fact, given space and ...

A sophistry is something that looks good, feels good, and sounds really good...so good that it becomes an absolute truth for long periods of time, deeply impacting culture, before people realize that it's just wrong and they have to let the idea go. A sophistry stops all progress until it is exposed. One example in our own history in the U.S. is that black people are not fully human, so it's OK to buy and sell them on the open market. One of the biggest sophistries in the world today is promoted by the global Christian church. It is the evangelical belief that the Bible is inerrant, that there is no error in the Scripture, that all ideas expressed are those of God Himself. The belief that there can be no human content or cultural bias in the writing of the Bible is just wrong. To continually aver that the Bible is perfect, inerrant, and always reflects God's current view of the world sounds so good, so pious, so holy, so heroic...and is always rewarded with amens and "...