Free Republic

The modern West’s freefall into the abyss of feelings, entertainment, mindlessness, lawlessness, and thoughtless immoral behavior was largely learned in the academic halls of the 1800’s, with the lion’s share of such attitudes coming out of Germany that fostered an unwarranted amount of skepticism toward the historical truths of the Bible. In particular, the German Enlightenment disregarded the Jewish foundations of the Bible. They sought to separate biblical history from both Jews and Christians because they saw the Bible not only as too superstitious with too many miracles, but also and closely connected, as too limiting, exclusionary, and particularistic ....

Don't fall off your chair, but I've recently had to admit I was wrong about something. My list of the individuals whose thoughts form the top three most lamentable cultural influences in modern times needs to be amended. This realization, in turn, raises a question about the influence exerted by a larger group of people: Jews. My top three used to be Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin. But after discovering novelist Rebecca Goldstein's readable, sensitive and entertaining new biography, "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity," I've dropped Darwin from the list and replaced him with...

Rick Miller's Bigger than Jesus is exhilarating, thought-provoking theatre. The show, now playing at the Citadel's Rice Theatre, is neither bloated theological debate nor a theatrical mugging of organized religion. In fact, there are moments of deep spirituality here generated, in no small part, by the performer's obvious love for the language and majesty of the Bible and the Roman Catholic Mass. That is, between his gleefully irreverent knocks on religious attitudes that have grown encrusted and twisted until they can be used to exterminate anyone who disagrees with the "one true way.'' Sadly, a case might be made that...

2.What is Fundamentalism? We find in the Gospel of Saint Luke (chapter 9) a typical and interesting case of a concrete fundamentalist attitude. We read: “They (Jesus and the disciples) went to a Samaritan village to make preparations for him, but the people would not receive him because he was going for Jerusalem. Seeing this, the disciples James and John said: ‘Lord do you want us to call down fire from heaven to burn them up?’ But he turned and rebuked them, and they went on to another village” (Lk 9:51-55).The two disciples indeed show in this incident a concrete...

Has the Bible or the Qur'an been "corrupted"? Are there contradictions in these texts? In all honesty, if one takes a liberal stance (influenced by the philosophy of language) they can claim these questions are unclear. A text is nothing more than a bunch of symbols which the reader assigns value to. A religious text is often taken to be metaphorical by believers, thus if sentence X does not necessarily mean 'X' we cannot claim X contradicts Y. The point here is that it is not clear what any particular religious text is saying; rather that is a matter decided...