I feel it would have been mentioned in our extant texts if he were a eunuch, as that was an established class with a notorious social role in Roman/Jewish society. But if he was no eunuch, if he had testicles, then he was a "sexual being" with sexual urges and sexual expression, even if that...
If anything, tolerance of public nudity has been regressing over the past few decades, here in the US from whence I am writing. You are not the first to reflect on the irony of the current situation, but alas conservatives are completely immune to recognizing such contradictions in their...
Throw me in with position #2. Our conception of existence is not really "built" to handle a notion like God.
I note that if #1 is preferred, then it is very obvious that God does, in fact, exist. I mean, it is easy enough to demonstrate that God concepts exist, if nothing else in people's minds...
Lots of poor neighborhoods whose schools no one wants to fund. You can still get a very quality education in, say, Palo Alto. But Palo Alto is not the whole state.
Hard for anyone, especially a Christian, to argue with his point. You cannot love God or love your neighbor if your first love is a visible symbol of accumulation beyond need.
Pantheacon, critical to the development of big-tent Paganism on the West Coast of my country, is meeting for the last time this month, and its organizers cite factional squabbling and debates as a major reason why. It cannot be a good sign if you want to imagine an ecumenical future.
A hypothetical question:
Many religions highly revere individuals who were put through great suffering and privations before they died as martyrs. Jesus, Giordano Bruno, the Bab, Joseph Smith.
My question is, how important is this, ultimately, to such traditions? If Jesus had died quietly...
Many of his teaching were declaimed at a later council, about 75 years after Nicaea. Origen himself as a person never was and still has not been, at least not by the wider church community.
Anti-Gnostic they certainly were.
Because his private letters are worshiped as the Word of God, a title which should rightly belong to Christ alone. If Paul were just another early theologian, like a Clement or an Irenaus who only theology geeks and historians ever talk about, I would have no great grudge against the man. But...
Yes. We all have no true creator but God, and are sons and daughters of God. More literally than we are descendants of our biological parents, who had no more ability to "create" us than they did to "create" themselves. You and your parents and your parents' parents all breathe by the will and...
Well, slaves had been considered a part of the household under the Greco-Roman hegemony. So the changes to the traditional family can't be all bad.
Seriously though, I don't think the article makes a heck of a lot of sense. For one thing, the meaning of the term incestum actually covered a much...
You know I've heard that said, even in my own history classes as a child, but there have long been plenty of Chinese folks abroad. Indeed, the borders that the PRC claims now well exceed the boundaries suggested by the various Great Walls. Just ask Tibet.
Assuming he were absolutely stationary, he would not be able to land anywhere; the earth itself would have moved about 130,000 kilometers along its orbit, and the solar system itself will have moved another 160,000 km or so around the galactic center point, leaving him either smashed into its...
You're saying a defensive measure that has been tactically obsolete since the end of the medieval era somehow failed to work at repelling the will of an illegal but lucrative multi-billion dollar industry? I am shocked. Shocked.