About Canonizing Acts of Paul

I recently responded to Peter W. Dunn in a post of his about the canonical inclusion of the Acts of Paul.  He is a New Testament scholar and the Acts of Paul is apparently a major interest of his, but I’m not sure if his interest is personal or simply academic.  The post I responded [...]

Morality, Politics, and Psychology

Below is a comment I wrote to a blog post on the website of my local paper.  In it, I’m pointing out the problems of ideology that lacks a larger context of knowledge.  I do think that sometimes its necessary to declare a moral principle as valid even if it affronts the commonsense of the majority.  [...]

PKD, ACIM, and Burroughs

Philip K. Dick (PKD) had the idea of God as hidden and yet present in the world.  God invades the world and re-creates it, makes real that which lacks fundamental reality.  In light of this, I was thinking of another idea from A Course In Miracles (ACIM) which is that God doesn’t make real or even recognize our false [...]

Burroughs, PKD, and Ligotti

William S. Burroughs had a powerful influence on many writers, two of note being Philip K. Dick and Thomas Ligotti.  PKD wrote about Burroughs in his Exegesis a number of times and he experimented with Burroughs cut-up technique.  Ligotti considered Burroughs to be his last artistic hero, but disliked his cut-up technique.  Burroughs, for me, acts as [...]

Comment on Freed “Terrorists”

Here is my comment of this NY Times article: Later Terror Link Cited for 1 in 7 Freed Detainees, by Elisabeth Bumiller Of course, the obvious response is that this is a surprisingly low number.  If these were actually all dangerous committed terrorists, then I’d expect the majority of them would return to being a terrorist.  It’s [...]

Response to jesusblogger: early trinity beliefs

My comment to a post by jesusblogger: http://jesusblogger.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/did-the-majority-of-christians-believe-in-the-trinity-before-ad-325/ I’m sure my view of Christianity is different than yours, but I appreciate you pointing out this discrepancy between early and later Christian doctrine. And it certainly isn’t the only example. One thing that I found interesting is how later Christians often judged the views of Christians prior [...]

Suffering… two responses

I was thinking about how my mind works in response to two related things. I was reading some of Tim Boucher’s writings on his site.  I visit his site every so often partly because he comes up in many web searches as he happens to share many of my same interests: Jung, Philip K. Dick, Ken [...]

Morality: Christians vs. Jesus

AS ALWAYS… I’ve been thinking about Christianity.  My mind often returns to the moral issue because there are many glaring moral failures in Christianity’s history… which are magnified by the radicalness of Jesus’ moral ideals.  But lately I was considering morality in terms of modern Christians.  This is a difficult subject.  I’ve been contemplating what Christianity [...]