We've all heard the stories. A guy's down in the dumps, life's shot, no money, no future, in pain from some sort of medical problem that he can't afford to have fixed, probably in trouble for some reason or another beyond that… and then, one day, that person finds God. It's from such ideas that the comfort of the "salvation" story seems to arise.
A recent poll suggests that Americans see religion as increasingly important in their lives. Another shows numbers visiting British churches are on the rise for the first time in decades. However, this is interpreted, the sheep are clearly flocking. It seems the reason is far from shrouded in obscurity, on this occasion there is no movement in mysterious ways, it is caused by the change in attitude following the atrocity of the eleventh of September 2001.
The late, great George Carlin died, as we all must do, in 2008 but left behind him a legacy of intelligent humour and a loyal fanbase. The article printed here enshrines Carlin's view on religion and was a part of "You Are All Diseased" show, recorded live at New York City's Beacon Theatre on February 6, 1999.
In 2002 two young British girls went missing from the house of one of their parents. As a father of two young (at the time) girls, I followed the story to its inevitable conclusion with the girl's bodies being found in shallow graves near an airbase in Surrey and a couple in their home village being arrested for their murder.
Despite being an atheist, I had always accepted the existence of a man called Jesus Christ as actual but Freke and Gandy's "Jesus Mysteries" forced me to re-evaluate my view. Although I did not believe Jesus was the son of any god, I had envisaged him a s real, perhaps a Jewish leader, perhaps a "freedom-fighter", perhaps wise, perhaps soft-spoken and the kind of man around which legends are built ... a kind of early-day Robin Hood if you like. In their book, the authors reveal the mystery religions, whose various dying & resurrecting godmen they refer to as "Osiris-Dionysus", as showing a great degree of similarity in their multi-level teachings that were interpreted more literally by the uninitiated and allegorically by the initiated.
The big bang is decidedly at odds with fundamentalist interpretations of the bible as outlined in Genesis and creationists typically maintain that this theory is, at best, hard to believe as no known cataclysmic events have ever formed order out of their chaos. In lay terminology, the big bang theory describes how the universe started from a huge "explosion" many billions of years ago and that all the material subsequently thrown from it eventually condensed to form galaxies, stars and planets. In this article, I hope to demonstrate what happened following the big bang, provide evidence supporting this theory of the origin of the universe and answer some of the questions/criticisms usually levelled at it by creationists.
September the 11th, 2001 felt like a turning point for the world. Yes, we'd had terrorism before, but never (it seemed) such a catastrophic and appallingly planned one it would seem as well as one that played out, with its bloody aftermath, on TV in front of us all.We laughed when we heard a plane had struck the World Trade Centre, why shouldn't we have done? It wasn't real! Just some daft amateur we thought. We were so very, very wrong!
There exists significant evidence for the evolution of man extending back over five million year (and further to man's ancestors) most of which is based on fossil remains, the geological layer in which the remains were found, and fossils of other species found around them.
A humorous piece of poetry written by a one-time collague of mine who used the handle, "Worldling"
Have you ever been cynical of someone's opinion and have them tell you, you should be more open-minded? What they usually mean by that is that you should be more willing to accept their opinion or their version of events regardless of how much sense it makes, of how rational a view, a claim, it actually is. The really important question is, should you?