train of thought

God commands and commits things we'd consider wrong in any other case. Are they okay because he does them? Within any Christian framework, this question is bound to arise; and too often, it is met with deceitfully dogmatic rejections of God's capacity for wrongdoing. Although these rejections are biblically contestable, they are also biblically supportable. Essentially, God has a perfect plan for the ultimate good; thus any apparent wrongdoing, no matter the degree, must ultimately be good.

In another post about my departure from contemporary Christianity, I mention that there are a few ideas that I don't appreciate in the Bible. One of these is its attitude toward women. This is, by extension, god's attitude toward women, according to the presuppositional views of evangelical Christians. While there are certainly redeemable passages about women in the Bible, there are far more that don't seem to line up with what Jesus represents. In this post, I would like to examine some of the depictions of rape in the old testament. The main theme I've gathered about the old testament's views on rape is that god is scarcely concerned with the actual rape victim. It's always about the man who's involved. Here are three ways this theme appears throughout the old testament.

When people ask me why I'm not a Christian anymore, the answer is usually hard to explain. First of all, what does it mean to be a Christian? At its core, I believe it's defined as belief in Jesus as the son of god and a commitment to follow him. But is it also someone that believes in and follows the Bible's teachings? What are the Bible's teachings, and are they cohesive with the teachings of Jesus? With a need to resolve my own cognitive dissonance surrounding these questions, I embarked on a long, ongoing journey to find what makes the most sense to me.

There's a question that keeps bouncing around my head related to common ancestry versus creationist ideas. A few questions, actually, but let me set up the frame for the key question. Most people right now believe in common ancestry, so that's the position I'm going with, although I'm not convinced it's true. But operating under the assumption we evolved, survival of the fittest, that leads me to view everything through a lens of "did we evolve for this?" For example, we clearly did not evolve to, at the young ages we start, sit in a desk in fluorescent lighting for 7 hours a day. It's bad for our posture and, particularly for many boys, it's not stimulating enough. It probably has something to do with the ADHD epidemic. There are probably more ways this burdens us, too. "We didn't evolve to do this." The last in our lineage of evolution, in my understanding, evolved adapted to the hunter-gatherer band lifestyle.

I have a theory that development of the brain may not end after childhood. Our brains continue to "develop" until we die. They're constantly learning, changing, and transforming. One of the books I'm reading, Buddha's Brain, talks about one of the dramatic feats that can occur. The occipital cortex in blind people has been known to repurpose itself for auditory functions. This has happened far beyond the years of childhood.