thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
June 11th, 2017
Which side are you on? The idea of divine healing is a polarising one. Non-believers are generally fairly suspicious, feeling healing is against medical science. Many christians are highly supportive of the idea that God heals today, and quite possibly have a personal story of healing to tell. But other christians are made of sterner […]
May 28th, 2017
This post told the story of Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker. I have now moved this information to this page: “The implications of my atheism were incompatible with almost every value I held dear”.
May 15th, 2017
Hugh Mackay is probably Australia’s leading social researcher and commentator. His book Beyond Belief (2016) explores spirituality and religious belief in Australia. It is, I think, as much a vehicle for Mackay to share his own spirituality as it is solid social research, and it contains some interesting insights. In a chapter titled Reasonable Faith […]
May 1st, 2017
Religious people, especially conservative and fundamentalist believers, are often stereotyped as dogmatic and intolerant. Do the facts support this stereotyping? How do other people compare? And what is the cause?
April 23rd, 2017
Most people like to think they are logical, and have good reasons for their choices – including their choice of believing in God, or not. But modern atheists often accuse christians (and believers in other religions) of not basing their beliefs on evidence and reason. And it’s a plausible argument, for psychological studies have suggested […]
April 14th, 2017
There’s a quiet but dramatic change going on within christianity, about our understanding of the death of Jesus. Critical non-believers often seem to be unaware of it. Many christians seem to be unaware of it too. But it is making a major difference to how christians see God, the scriptures and their faith. And Easter […]
April 7th, 2017
Tim Keller is well known these days. A Reformed pastor who is hip. An insightful commentator and a successful writer of books for christians. Eight years ago he published The Reason for God, a thoughtful book of what we might term “soft apologetics” – that is, he didn’t try to present strong arguments for the […]
March 22nd, 2017
I’ve been reading a little about meaning in life. Psychologists tell us we need to have meaning and purpose in life for our psychological wellbeing. With a sense of meaning, we are more likely to be happy, have a positive sense of our own identity and be more resilient under stress But what gives our […]
March 7th, 2017
Recently I came across a magazine article about the discovery of the remains of a 3,500 year old burial in Greece, dating to the time of the Mycenaean civilisation (about 1650-1200 BCE). I knew little about the Mycenaeans, so I read on, looked at a few other online sources, and made some interesting discoveries. Interesting […]
March 2nd, 2017
The Pool of Bethesda – model in the Israel Museum Picture taken by deror avi on 18th August 2006 (Wikipedia) Fifty years ago, when I was a young christian, there was a clear division in New Testament studies between scholars who defended historic christianity and more secular scholars who took an extremely critical view of […]
A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.