The Secular Frontier

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So, I have a new essay out - part 1 of three on Robyn Faith Walsh. Check it out: Gospels, Classics, and the Erasure of the Community: A Critical Review Testing the Hypothesis of Robyn Faith Walsh’s The Origins of Early Christian Literature, Part A ... Read Article

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12bU6BFsStU Sufficiently advanced aliens would be able to capture vast quantities of energy from their star using a massive structure called a Dyson sphere. Such a device would give off an infrared heat signatu ... Read Article

The argument seems to be they should be allowed to have the jets because they really enjoy using them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWt5PJhCmmg ... Read Article

One of the slam dunks scholars as diverse as Bart Ehrman and John Loftus name against the existence of the Christian God is the problem of horrendous suffering, for surely the world is not reflective of a powerful, loving God. If there is such a God, why ... Read Article

The "not religiously affiliated" group is now a large societal group, although strict atheism is not yet surging. See article HERE. ... Read Article

Hypatia was an ancient female philosopher who taught neoplatonism. Though she saw rationality in the universe that was in some sense divine, she did not ascribe to any particular god and welcomed students of all backgrounds to her school. See the 5 ... Read Article

Check out this week's Misquoting Jesus podcast to see why Bart thinks Jesus was left on the cross to be food for the birds! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BXmyB6OT30 ... Read Article

I come from the Continental Philosophy tradition and this professor's sentiments are mine as well: ... Read Article

In this video, a sociologist shows that on issue after issue (eg Racism), secular people take a more ethical stance than strongly religious people. For example, the more religious someone is, the less likely they are to believe climate change science or ... Read Article

I come to the end of blogging through the first half of "Lamb of the Free" which looks at OT sacrifices. We saw that while the day of atonement/decontamination was basically a factory reboot of the sanctuary. However, major moral sin couldn't be address ... Read Article

One of the key takeaways from Rillera is that kipper is about the individual doing their part to help decontaminate the holy place from contamination, not an animal substituting for the individual. We read as an analogy to a child taking care of a pet: ... Read Article

We lost philosopher and major secular activist Daniel Dennett today. RIP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGrRf1wD320 ... Read Article

As I've been reading along the author's study of sacrifice in the old testament, both of purification and atonement, what is clear with atoning sacrifices the issue isn't the salvation of the individual who sinned, but rather sin was a aerial miasma thoug ... Read Article

As long as there have been Jesus followers the apocalypse warning alarm has been sounding. Jesus thought the end of the age was coming in the lifetime of his disciples, and Paul thought the end had already started. Skip forward a few thousand years, a ... Read Article

Rillaro points our that Jesus is most basically seen in one sense as the passover lamb. In the chapter currently under consideration, we see in detail passover is not an atonement ritual. He summarizes: the Passover does not have an atoning function ... Read Article

In this section, we finnish up Rillera's thoughts on what the Levitical sacrifices are not. There is no connection between the suffering of the animal and the sacrifice, because an animal is killed quickly and humanely, because if an animal is blemis ... Read Article

Previously, Heidegger’s Hegelian Phenomenological Method (Part 1/2) Heidegger’s Hegelian Phenomenological Method (Part 2/2) Dr. Carlo Alvaro and Dr. Richard Carrier Debate the Kalam Cosmological Argument The Joy of Philosophy (4/4) On t ... Read Article

My previous 3 posts in this mini-series were: Heidegger’s Hegelian Phenomenological Method (Part 1/2) Heidegger’s Hegelian Phenomenological Method (Part 2/2) Dr. Carlo Alvaro and Dr. Richard Carrier Debate the Kalam Cosmological Argument P ... Read Article

Human blood in the OT defiled rather than purified, and God viewed human sacrifice as false worship. Laying on of hands doesn't imply substitution, as some non atoning sacrifices require laying on hands, while other atoning ones do not. Rillera cites ... Read Article

So, as I said, there may in fact be a problem of applying Old Testament animal substitutionary logic to Jesus. In fact, our author Andrew Remington Rillera points out there is no such animal substitution sacrifice logic in the Old Testament, such as an a ... Read Article

Rillera is going to argue 4 theses regarding OT sacrifice as not being substitutionary. He outlines these as follows: ( 1 ) There is no such thing as a “ substitutionary death " sacrifice in the Torah . ( 2 ) The hand - laying ritual is not saying ... Read Article

Rillera provides some helpful foreshadowing of what we will see in the book: But Tyndale then used the noun “ atonement , ” and the verb form " to atone , " to translate the Hebrew root word k - p - r in the Torah ( Genesis - Deuteronomy ) . But t ... Read Article

From Campbell's preface to Rillera's book we read regarding sacrifice: The set of equations at the heart of the PSA model is , quite simply , untrue . The practice and logic of OT sacrifice has nothing to do with substitution , retribution , or punish ... Read Article