Wednesday, June 08, 2005
CATCHING UP ON EMAIL
Brian Fleming, Director of a new documentary titled "The God Who Wasn't There" which premiered in Los Angeles last week, offers the following comments on being an "Atheist Christian":
Once you're a Christian, I don't think you ever shake being a Christian, and personally I don't want to. When I realized that the first-century science that Christianity proclaims is basically completely wrong, that didn't mean Jesus was evil. It didn't mean Jesus was bad. Jesus is in many ways still a great character. As you see in the movie, when he calls for everybody who doesn't want him to reign over them to be killed, that's not the Jesus I'm talking about. But the Jesus that I hold in my mind as the Jesus who taught me my moral values in many ways, I don't want to lose that. I like Jesus. When I see a picture of Jesus that doesn't make me feel bad, it makes me feel good. I'm an atheist because I only believe those things that can be demonstrated and proved. I don't believe that faith is a good thing at all. But I'm a Christian in that I love Jesus.
How is that again? You don't believe Jesus was God because basically you don't believe there is such a thing as religion. You only believe in something you can prove? And yet you believe in "moral values" though presumably you can't prove them in any concrete way that would exclude proving religion is real. Which means that you are conflicted about what you really believe, holding two mutually exclusive concepts to be simultaneously true.
And we wonder why such strange nonsense comes out of Hollywood! Does this man even know who he is?
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MORE JESUS IN THE NEWS
Reuters tells us:
An Israeli researcher has challenged the popular belief that Jesus died of blood loss on the cross, saying he probably succumbed to a sometimes fatal disorder now associated with long-haul air travel.
Professor Benjamin Brenner wrote in The Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis that Jesus’ death, traditionally believed to have occurred 3 to 6 hours after crucifixion began, was probably caused by a blood clot that reached his lungs.
Such pulmonary embolisms, leading to sudden death, can stem from immobilization, multiple trauma and dehydration, said Brenner, a researcher at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa.
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HARVARD PROFESSOR BELIEVES ALIEN ABDUCTIONS ARE REAL
From BBC News:
Not many scientists are prepared to take tales of alien abduction seriously, but John Mack, a Harvard professor who was killed in a road accident in north London last year, did. Ten years on from a row which nearly lost him his job, hundreds of people who claim they were abducted still revere him.
Professor John E Mack was an eminent Harvard psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and Pulitzer Prize winner whose clinical work had focused on explorations of dreams, nightmares and adolescent suicide.
Then, in 1990, he turned the academic community upside down because he wanted to publish his research in which he said that people who claimed they had been abducted by aliens, were not crazy at all. Their experiences, he said, were genuine.
I wonder if he and Fr. Seraphim Rose are collaborating up in heaven?
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LET YOUNGEST PREMIES DIE
From the Times Online:
BRITAIN’S top medical ethics expert has urged doctors to let the most premature babies die, with treatment offered only in exceptional cases.
Baroness Warnock believes Britain should follow Holland in setting an age limit below which babies would not routinely be resuscitated.
She says this would prevent doctors competing for the “triumph” of keeping babies alive at increasingly young ages even though they may not survive in the long term or may be left severely disabled.
Warnock’s comments were backed in part by Britain’s most senior paediatrician, who said the setting of a lower limit should be considered.
In Holland, doctors do not routinely administer intensive care to babies born before 25 weeks of pregnancy. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a medical think tank, is considering proposing similar guidelines in Britain. It is consulting doctors, nurses and parents about setting a 24-week limit.
I think I know what the Church's opinion on this would be, and I'm pretty sure it would not be what I think on this. So I'll refrain from comment.
