I haven’t brought this up in a while, but thought I’d mention it to the new members. The next couple months of my atheist sermon helper are some of the best of the 3 year cycle. They hit on women’s rights, Einstein, comparative apologetics, support for caring for the poor, and much more.
Wow, nicely done.
If only I were into Bible studies.
Sorry too busy with Earth and geology studies - and tomorrow I get to spend all day at Canyon deChelly in the heart of the Pangea Supercontinent. I’ll share a link once I get that story, with pictures together.
I appreciate more folks are into Bible studies, so I’m sure the substance over there is worth the read for them.
The Bible, God are beautiful things to study, — so long as people appreciate “It’s” is about our human reality and our individual minds and souls ( cumulatively = mindscape) - and not about the actually physical planet and her processes - the stuff that’s enabled our existence and which supplies our life support system. Too bad we are destroying those as fast as possible.
Nature, not our personal gods will dictate those events and all our convictions will add up to nothing. so it goes.
Lausten, for some reason the link to your “atheist sermon helper” is blocked here at work (I very rarely use a computer at home, so this is about the only place I can check it out).
What exactly is your “atheist sermon helper”? It sounds like it could be interesting.
I know I’m banned in China, but just about anything religious is banned there. Thanks for your interest.
I started when I noticed the big names in atheism were not acknowledging modern scholarship, so they’d make fun of Jesus cursing a fig tree, but that ignores what we know about the symbolism of fig trees. Also, believers are constantly pointing to their favorite parable or half-verse and saying how it supports their thesis that the whole Bible is all about love. So, picking a dataset that is already cherry picked, the 3-year Lectionary, I went looking for good advice. I found a half dozen or so things that could be said to be both good and unique, or at least better than most others. There is plenty of other common sense advice, the kind you can find anywhere, a whole lot of politics, and of course stories that reference earlier stories and claim that means something, aka theology.
To me, it’s a laymen’s guide to interpreting scripture. I try not to favor a particular viewpoint, sometimes drawing on liberal theologians, other times a Jewish scholar or a historian independent of religion like Bart Ehrmann. To believers, I think it’s threatening, so I don’t get much comment, and non-believers just don’t care.
So it’s your personal studies and ideas on the 3-year-Lectionary, that you put online so anyone can use it?
I will try to spend some time at home, over the winter, checking it out. My Bible knowledge is pretty lame, so I need to learn some stuff in order to understand what my friends are talking about and point out their errors with Biblical references. At the moment all I have are iron-clad moral and scientific refutations to their Christian views, none of which have any value in a religious conversation.
I don’t dare have a real Bible study with my close friends (or I can see us not remaining friends), so this might be a good substitute.