Why did Jesus perform miracles? A number of reasons may be suggested:-
Shared recently on Facebook was an image of Pope Francis and the following quote, attributed to him:-
The Christian faith has only a partial answer to the problem of evil. A great deal of mystery remains. Most Christians, however, lean upon several fundamental truths.
1. Christianity acknowledges the reality of evil. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he included the petition “Deliver us from evil.” The Christian faith, unlike some other religions, never regards evil as an illusion. It is not a misguided way of thinking, a problem of human perception of reality.…
‘If you were born in Saudi Arabia,’ the argument goes, ‘you would probably be a Muslim. If you were born in the Bible Belt of the US, you would probably be a Christian.’ Conclusion: religious belief and commitment are conditioned by one’s culture and environment. Truth, evidence, reason and personal decision have nothing to do with it.
But the argument cuts both ways. A person born in France, for example, would probably be a secularist rather than either a Muslim or a Christian. …
A famous Indian fable tells of a number of a blind men who try to describe an elephant. One, touching its side, declares that it is ‘like a wall’. Another, feeling the tusk, think that it is ‘like a spear’. Yet another, encountering its trunk, says that it is ‘like a snake’. Other contenders are ‘like a fan’ (the ear), ‘like a rope’ (the tail) and so on.
The intended moral of the story is clear: no-one has a monopoly on the truth. …
The next is the agnosticism of someone who spends all his time in nightclubs cruising for sex. “I don’t know and I don’t care.” This guy doesn’t require an answer.
Marcus J. Borg describes himself as ‘moderate to liberal’ scholar. In setting out his ‘appreciative disagreement’ with Tom Wright (in response to the latter’s Jesus and the Victory of God), Borg homes in on the question of miracle. He sees the Gospels as a combination of ‘history remembered’ and ‘history metaphorized’. The first of these terms refers to those events that are recorded in the Gospels simply because they actually happened. The second term refers to other things that are related in the Gospels. …
The account (in Genesis 22) of how God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, is one of the most problematic in the whole of scripture. It seems to teach that blind, irrational faith is a ‘good thing’, even the result is that you are willing to slaughter a member of your own family because you think that God has told you to do it. Of, course, God prevented Abraham from killing Isaac in the end (Gen 22:12), but that does not seem to get us off the hook: we presume that Abraham would have gone through with the terrible deed if God had not intervened.…
Yesterday morning (9th November 2014), the Norwich ‘Sunday Assembly’ held its first meeting.
Describing itself as ‘a global movement for wonder and good’, the Sunday Assembly sets out to offer much that a Christian worship service might offer – including communal singing, time for reflection, an address, tea and coffee at the end (can’t get much more religious than that!) – but without God.
The folks behind the Sunday Assembly are peaceable humanists. They regard themselves as godless, but not anti-god. …
Scientifically-minded people seem a little confused about whether they think that intelligent life is rather common in the universe, or exceedingly rare.
In 1961 Frank Drake postulated that there might be between 1,000 and 100,000,000 intelligent, communicative, civilisations in our own galaxy. The range of possibility is now thought to be between 2 and 280,000,000 following further review of the various values contained in Drake’s ‘equation’. In other words, we don’t know.
Christian theology has no great interest vested in the question of extra-terrestrial life. …
