Religious

Archive for Religious

The Lesser of Two Evils Is Still an Evil

Happy Easter everyone! He is risen indeed. No, this isn’t a post about the election. It’s broader than that. In our Bible study session this week we covered the horrible and amazing tale of Joseph, whose brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt but in so doing provided for their own salvation. (Note the similarity […]

Were the Early Apostles Socialists?

A few months (?) ago someone emailed me and asked about the apparent socialism that the early Church practiced, as described in Acts of the Apostles. I told him I’d talk about that in a Sunday blog post. Unfortunately, I can’t find the conversation in my gmail now, so I might be doing a poor […]

Mercy Mercy Me

I was discussing the issue of proportionality in punishment with some libertarians the other day. (This means that there are strict limits on how much you can punish an aggressor. You don’t have to exercise your rightful amount of punishment, but the point is you are not allowed to exceed it.) I agreed that this […]

Why Does God Let Really Bad Stuff Happen?

I purposely worded the question in this way, to show what (I think) is wrong with the usual framing. People will often say, “Why would a good God have permitted institutional slavery, children dying from cancer, the Holocaust…etc.?” But nobody says, “Why would a good God have allowed me to stub my toe this morning?” […]

Portrait of the Bible Neophyte as a Young Man

Especially for those of you who are believers, I strongly encourage you to get into a systematic study of the Bible. This should include not only reading the whole thing cover to cover (you might take more than a year to do it), but also supplementing your personal reading with expert commentary. For example, once […]

Forgiveness

Peter asked Jesus if people should forgive a brother who transgresses up to seven times? Jesus famously answered, “Seventy times seven.” The traditional point with this story is NOT, of course, to say that you should forgive someone up to 490 times, but then be merciless on the 491st offense. However, I am pretty sure […]

Isaac Was a Willing Sacrifice

In the course of my Bible study with my cousin I recently learned something that blew my mind: When Abraham obeyed the Lord’s command to (do everything up to) sacrifice his own son, Isaac wasn’t a young boy. In fact, he was probably in his 20s or 30s. (Some think he was 33, presumably because […]

Did Jesus and the Early Christian Church Renounce Violence Against Non-Believers?

Bryan Caplan is sure that they didn’t. In a recent post at EconLog, he first quotes Nathan Smith who wrote: The Old Testament, to be sure, contains some hair-raising passages that seem very much opposed to religious freedom, but that’s part of the Mosaic law, which St. Paul’s epistles clearly and insistently establish is not […]