Recently in Religion Category

The producer of the "Matrix" and "The Lord of the Flies" is making a movie about the Prophet Mohammad but since Mohammad can't be depicted, how are they planning to make a movie about him?

A film about the Prophet Mohammad backed by the producer of "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Matrix" is under discussion, a Qatar media firm said on Sunday, aiming to create an English-language blockbuster for the world's 1.5 billion Muslims.

Colbert offers his very funny take on the Pope's offer to the Anglicans (he even gives us a very succinct history lesson of the original break between the churches). He has as his guest Episcopal priest, Father Randall Balmer, (author of God in the White House and Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts Faith and Threatens America) to offer him the chance to join the "winning side." Blamer wasn't too interested, too many negatives and not enough positives (like the gospel) coming out of Rome.

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BTW, Colbert has a new iPhone/iTouch app of his WORD videos for only a buck.

Too bad I didn't see this before I posted a link to the Hitchens article. Hitchens and Wilson on their press tour plugging the Collision documentary were on the Laura Ingraham Show, Fox and Friends and the Joy Behar Show. Here's a clip of the Behar show, you can watch the whole segment here:

Here's Fox and Friends (you have to sit through their other segments first):

And you can listen to Ingraham here.

You have to give him props for taking on all comers. It's not surprising that he hasn't been convinced by the arguments of his Christian opponents. Who has ever been argued into the kingdom of God?

I haven't yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a "script" that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe. I haven't been asked to Bob Jones University yet, but I have been invited to Jerry Falwell's old Liberty University campus in Virginia, even though we haven't yet agreed on the terms.

Wilson isn't one of those evasive Christians who mumble apologetically about how some of the Bible stories are really just "metaphors." He is willing to maintain very staunchly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and that his sacrifice redeems our state of sin, which in turn is the outcome of our rebellion against God. He doesn't waffle when asked why God allows so much evil and suffering--of course he "allows" it since it is the inescapable state of rebellious sinners. I much prefer this sincerity to the vague and Python-esque witterings of the interfaith and ecumenical groups who barely respect their own traditions and who look upon faith as just another word for community organizing.

And as to the Christian right being less monolithic than he thought, I'm surprised that wasn't obvious by the number of Protestant denominations and how much we argue with each other. Case in point.

The article was way too short, I would have really appreciated hearing about what he thought of his debates with other religions (Muslims and Jews). And hearing more about the various types of debates he's had with other denominations. I guess I'll have to wait for the follow up to his book.

Richard Dawkins was on Hewitt last night plugging his new book. I can't link to the podcast (since you have to pay for it now) but he's posted a transcript, so you can at least read it.

Hewitt did a great job asking penetrating questions and the hour was quite interesting and informative. Hewitt asks the questions that cut to the chase and get to the point of dispute, like this one:

HH: But the universe is itself awfully complicated, Professor Dawkins. Where did it come from?

RD: Well, the universe is not awfully complicated at the beginning. It has become very complicated through such processes as evolution by natural selection.

HH: No, I'm talking about the whole cosmos. Where did that come from, 13 billion years ago?

RD: It came from the big bang, which is not a complex process. It's a simple process.

HH: And what preceded the big bang?

RD: Well, physicists won't answer that question. They will say that time itself began in the big bang, and so the question what preceded it is illegitimate.

HH: What do you think?

RD: I'm not enough of a physicist to understand what I'm saying, but I have to say that that's what physicists say.

HH: So when you consider before the big bang, what does Richard Dawkins think was there?

RD: I don't consider the question, because I recognize that it's an intuitively appealing question. I recognize that I, along with everybody else, wants to ask that question. Then I talk to physicists who say you can no more ask what came before the big bang than you can ask what's north of the North Pole.

And it's pretty silly to reject the Gospels because they were written "decades" later:

HH: On the person of Jesus Christ, did He exist?

RD: I suspect He probably did. I suspect there are lots of itinerant preachers, and one of them was probably called Yehoshua, or various other versions of Jesus' name, but I don't think that a miracle worker existed.

HH: How do you rate the evidence for Christ's existence, manuscript evidence, eyewitness evidence, things like that?

RD: As I said, it wouldn't be at all surprising if a man called Jesus or Yehoshua existed. I would say the evidence that He worked miracles, He rose from the dead, He was born of a virgin, is zero.

HH: Well, you repeatedly use the analogy of a detective at a crime scene throughout The Greatest Show On Earth. But detectives simply can't dismiss evidence they don't want to see. There's a lot of evidence for the miracles, in terms of eyewitness...

RD: No, there isn't. What there is, is written stories which were written decades after the alleged events were supposed to happen. No historian would take that seriously.

HH: Well, that's why I'm conflicted, because in your book, you talk about the Latin teacher who is stymied at every turn, and yet Latin teachers routinely rely on things like Tacitus and Pliny, and histories that were written centuries after the events in which they are recording occur.

RD: There's massive archaeological evidence, there's massive evidence of all kinds. It's just not comparable. No...if you talk to any ancient historian of the period, they will agree that it is not good historical evidence.

HH: Oh, that's simply not true. Dr. Mark Roberts, double PhD in undergraduate at Harvard has written a very persuasive book upon this. I mean, that's an astounding statement. Are you unfamiliar with him?

RD: All right, then there may be some, but a very large number of ancient historians would say...

HH: Well, you just said there were none. So there are some that you are choosing not to confront.

RD: You sound like a lawyer.

HH: I am a lawyer.

RD: Oh, for God's sake. Are you? Okay. I didn't know that. All right. I will accept that there are some ancient historians who take the Gospels seriously. But they were written decades after the events that happened, and they were written by people with an axe to grind, written by disciples. There are no eyewitness written accounts. The earliest New Testament...

HH: I understand you believe that, Professor. I do. But what I don't understand is how you can use the analogy of the Latin teacher or the detective, when it breaks down given your dismissal of evidence you don't see fit to deal with squarely?

RD: I think that's a very, very specious comparison, because the Latin teacher is dealing with enormous numbers of documents. Remember, my Latin teacher is supposed to be confronted with skeptics who don't even think the Latin language was ever spoken. And there's huge amounts of documentary evidence of the Roman Empire. We're talking about the entire Roman Empire here. There's enormous amounts of eyewitness accounts written down at the time. It just is no comparison.

HH: Actually, it is. It's actually a very persuasive...in fact, the arguments for the manuscript evidence of Christ and His doings is much stronger than anything, for example, Tacitus or Pliny wrote. It's just much stronger. Now you might counter with Cesar's Gallic war commentaries, and you do mention those, and those are contemporary accounts by an eyewitness, but so are the Gospel evidences, say, of Luke accompanying Paul about. And yet you're dismissive of the miracles that occurred in there. So I'm just wondering...

RD: They may be. The accounts of Luke accompanying Paul may be real, but Luke never met Jesus.

HH: But again, I'm not arguing that point with you. It's just that you dismiss that all without dealing with it serially, which would not be, I think, consistent with your detective argument, or your Latin teacher argument, because...

RD: I cannot believe that you're doing more than just trying to score points. You cannot seriously be saying that the case for the existence of the Roman Empire is as weak as for Jesus.

HH: That's not what I'm saying at all. I didn't say that. I said that your argument, by analogy, to a Latin teacher being harried by people who deny certain things, but especially your idea of a detective using evidence at a crime scene, that it doesn't comport with your dismissal of the evidence for Christianity and the historical Jesus.

RD: Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine?

HH: Yes.

RD: You seriously do?

HH: Yes.

RD: You actually think that Jesus got water, and made all those molecules turn into wine?

HH: Yes.

RD: My God.