I’m not religious anymore, but as my mind wanders, this snippet of advice keeps popping into consciousness: “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to… Continue reading Itchy Ears
One of the dangers of generative AI is what happens when its work becomes self-referential. When an AI model is trained on its own output, it can “drift away from reality, growing further apart from the original data that it was intended to imitate,” as reported in a recent piece in the New York Times,… Continue reading Poisoned with Its Own Projection of Reality
Where is an eye-roll emoji when you need one? 🙄 I am not too young to remember the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Indeed, when I was a kid, my parents prohibited me from Halloween fare, playing Dungeons and Dragons, and similar demonic activities.
I had noticed the Republican party beginning to slide from the late 1980s and through the 1990s… just after I was old enough to become politically aware. I initially sympathized with Republican positions and attitudes. As the years passed, I moved further to the libertarian center and became more politically independent. After I left the… Continue reading The GOP’s Slide towards Perdition
Aside from being the name of a Mars rover, curiosity is a key value in forming and maintaining cross-cutting friendships. These relationships are important to maintain social peace in a diverse community and to build the character of both ourselves and others. But increasingly they seem more elusive than ever.
Franklin Veaux posted a piece, “Virtue Signaling Left and Right.” It ties in nicely to a conversation I recently had, about tribalism and shunning behavior on the left and right. Virtue signaling is definitely part of that process, but in my thoughts I usually skip over it.
I ran across this trailer for a new documentary on Discovery, about Hillsong Church. We used to listen to and perform music from them all the time, back when I was religious. One line (taken completely out of context, I’m sure) from the trailer: “There’s a fine line between cult and culture.” I’m not sure… Continue reading A Fine Line between Cult and Culture
Often the Bible presents us with a quid pro quo: worship God, and your life will be good; reject him, and you will suffer. This flies in the face of the idea that God is love, that he “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous… Continue reading Plausible Deniability
Drew McCoy over at Genetically Modified Skeptic took a free Evangelical course about atheism, which turned out just to be a series of short videos by Greg Koukl repeating some of the same disinformation that we used to disseminate when I was an Evangelical Christian. This is a video that I would so love to… Continue reading The Apologist’s True Mission
As Christians we always used to talk about unconditional love, divine love, so-called Agape love. God loved us SOoooo MUCH that he had himself incarnated and executed in a most ostentatious manner on our behalf so that he wouldn’t have to kill us, even while we were still his enemies.