Judaism

Canaanite Dieties

It’s Easter time again (next Sunday is Easter if you weren’t paying attention.)  Easter is that one holiday that Mormons observe, but don’t really celebrate.  With Easter comes the story of the Passover.  (This is one of those strange years in which Easter occurs a month BEFORE Passover.)  In the past, I’ve blogged about various […]

Birth of the Devil

Abraham is known as the father of monotheism.  Growing up in a culture of polytheism with both good and bad gods, Abraham declared that there was only one god, YHWH. Egyptologist Kara Cooney has narrated a Discovery Channel series (now on Youtube) has said that archaeological evidence has shown that ancient religions have always been […]

Posts Restored – Back to the Present

Many of you have noticed a blast from the past on my blog.  Back in Feb 2013, my host server crashed and I had to back up my blog and try to restore it.  I picked WordPress.com, thinking that was a good choice.  Well, it didn’t restore all my posts–I was missing about 150 of […]

Abraham for Liberals and Conservatives

The story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac is one of the most perplexing moral dilemmas in all of scripture.  It has long been held up as an example of Abraham’s faithfulness.  Orthodox members do not question the traditional interpretation of the story.  They seem to reason that if God wants you to do something, you […]

Would you let your kids watch “The Bible”?

The History Channel just produced one of the most successful series dealing with the Bible in a few decades.  I heard so much good about it that I decided to purchase the entire series on iTunes, having never seen the series at all.  I’ve had occasion to watch the first 2 episodes and wanted to […]

How do you feel about School Prayer?

[poll id=50] Please answer the poll question before you continue on to the rest of the post.

Re-Evaluating Gay Scriptures

Reverend Dr. Laurence C. Keene, Disciples of Christ, “When people ask questions about homosexuality, almost always they follow with, ‘and what does the Bible really say about it?’ The preceding quote comes from an interesting documentary on Netflix called For the Bible Tells Me So.  The documentary discusses traditional and liberal Christian beliefs about homosexuality […]

Abraham: Breaking the Cycle of Child Abuse

The Biblical story of Abraham is an interesting story for me on several levels.  In the past, I’ve talked about different academic perspectives of him, my personal discomfort with how he mistreated his wife Hagar, and I have also compared the Book of Abraham to Islamic texts.  Tresa Edmunds has her own blog, and is […]

Were Jesus and Mary Married?

The Da Vinci Code created a bit of a stir in making the claim that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were married.  How do LDS handle the issue?  Dale Bills, a spokesman for the Church, said in a statement released Tuesday, 16 May 2006: The belief that Christ was married has never been official church doctrine. […]

Scandalous Behavior of Jesus around Women

Jesus was a social revolutionary.  He gave women a much larger role in his movement than was traditional in ancient Judaism.  In a previous post, I talked about the story in Luke chapter 7 about a woman wiping Jesus’ feet with her tears and hair.  Such behavior would have been considered lewd by first century Jews. […]