gleanings from other blogs

I've never been to this blog before, but I like its head quote:

I have come to the following conclusion: Scholarship devoted to the question of the historicity of Jesus, while not a total waste of time, could be better spent gardening.

Joseph R. Hoffmann

Though that might just be the head quote of this post. So much for the Jesus Seminar - and didn't Hoffmann have something to do with that? The post goes on to look in detail at the problems of historicity in the gospels, a subject I've harped on about in the past, and the blogger, Tristan Vick, comes to much the same conclusion as myself:

Modern biblical scholarship has revealed many insights into early Christianity, and when we look into the details surrounding the historical Jesus’ life we are at a lost to formulate any chronology which would be considered a viable model of historic events. Failing to meet the basic prerequisite of supplying the necessary information to be deemed a real historical person is probably the strongest evidence for the Legendary Hypothesis, and which is why I think it is a valid inference. This doesn’t mean I deny Jesus existed or that he was merely a myth. There is enough textual massaging of the Gospel narrative to suggest that there was a genuine Jewish person who fit the description of Jesus lingering somewhere behind the shroud of myth, so I can’t simply dismiss Jesus of Nazareth altogether, but one needn’t dismiss this in order to accept the fact that most of the information we have is either mythical (i.e. improbable) or historically inaccurate.

It's a solid piece, though covering familiar ground.

I found the blog through this site, in which David Lane Craig's version of the Kalam cosmological argument comes in for decidedly and delightfully rough treatment.

Also rather enjoyed this piece via three quarks daily. It is certainly true that some people have adopted environmentalism as their new religion. I was amused by the quote from Freeman Dyson that leftist environmentalism has 'replaced socialism as the leading secular religion', because I know of someone once near and dear to me who used to be a socialist, very much in the 'secular religion' sense, and who is now an environmentalist activist, replete with crusades, missionary work and assaults upon the infidel. There are a great many of these ultra-orthodox, right-thinking true believers around nowadays. The article isn't about  climate change denial, rather it celebrates unorthodox approaches to looking at the problems we're faced with. Heretics.