Fiction that Makes You Think
Christian Agnostics
by
5d ago
I have just finished reading my third science fiction novel by the twentieth-century French writer René Barjavel. I have written previously about his novel Le Voyageur Imprudent. A time traveler accidentally kills his own grandfather in the past and thus finds that he does not exist and has never existed. This novel also included a glimpse into a very distant nightmare utopia. Other Barjavel novels dealt straight on with the main issue of the writer’s time, nuclear disaster. In La Nuit de Temps he wrote about a previous utopian world that destroyed itself by nuclear war, but also the explosion ..read more
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I Am Not Afraid to Die
Christian Agnostics
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1M ago
I am not afraid to die, even though I am agnostic about the afterlife, if there is one—about judgment, bliss, suffering, and all the other elements that tradition has accreted onto the afterlife, creating Heaven and Hell. I am afraid of dying, the process of life coming to an end. If it occurs by gentle decline, I will be okay with it; I am already trembling and weak and have many old-man emergencies. Nobody escapes these things. I just don’t want to die in any of the spectacularly painful and outrageous ways that we hear about on the news literally every day all over the world, whether it is ..read more
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The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Christian Agnostics
by
1M ago
This is the phrase that celebrity physicist Richard Feynman used to describe the joy of scientific research. But it also describes the joy of science education. Feynman was as brilliant of a scientist as you could hope to meet, and to him mathematical equations were as obvious as the nose on your face. But he knew very well that science education did not consist of learning piles of facts. He knew it was a matter of joy: professors and students alike should share this joy. This is what I always tried to do as a science educator, even to the extent of trying out what some colleagues thought of ..read more
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The End of Creativity
Christian Agnostics
by
1M ago
Aldous Huxley wrote a short novel in which he saw a pickup truck speeding out of a Hollywood movie studio, overloaded with unsolicited screenplay manuscripts. The truck veered, and one of the manuscripts fell off. This didn’t really happen, of course. But, almost a hundred years ago, one of history’s great writers complained about how people in power (in this case, movie producers, but this would also include editors and literary agents) would barely if ever look at what they derisively called their “slush pile” of submissions. Today, little has changed. The term “slush pile” is still standard ..read more
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What is Faith?
Christian Agnostics
by
2M ago
As a scientist, let me start off by saying what faith is not. It is not simply believing something that somebody else has told you. Faith is something broad and deep that you believe. It is the most important thing in life. It is so important that you are willing to spend years, or the rest of your life, proving or disproving it. Faith is not, therefore, something you believe despite evidence, but because of it. As a result, scientists may have more faith than anyone else. Every scientist will agree that if you believe nothing, then you will never try to find out what is true and what is not ..read more
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What a Secular Society Looks Like
Christian Agnostics
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3M ago
I have relocated permanently to Strasbourg, France, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. There are numerous small and large differences between life in America and life in France. I am not a tourist here acting like an American, but I am a new resident gradually learning what life in France is like. Many Americans think of America as a Christian society, specially blessed by God because of their faith. In contrast, they think of France as a secular society which does not obey commandments of the Christian God. But I have found that French people, in general, behave in a much more Christian fashion, with ..read more
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What Should the World Be Like? Republicans and Gun Violence
Christian Agnostics
by
6M ago
Republicans talk a lot about what the world should be like, following the example of the late hatemonger Rush Limbaugh in his book The Way Things Ought to Be. I am living, at the moment, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nearly every day, there is a public shooting or a bomb threat. One of those threats caused an elementary school to shut down and the students to take refuge at a nearby church. Here in Oklahoma, you can do anything you want to with a gun except actually shoot somebody or point a gun directly at them. This is the paradise that Republicans want to see. How do we know this? Because they suppor ..read more
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Christianity Used to be Interesting
Christian Agnostics
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6M ago
I was an active fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), and went to their national meetings whenever I could, mostly in the 1990s. This organization consists of evangelical Christians who are in the sciences and who get together to exercise their brains to try to figure out possible answers to important questions about faith, science, and reason. At every meeting, you would find scholars, many from Christian colleges, struggling with questions about what God wants us to do in the world with regard to scientific topics. Just a few examples that come to mind are: What does it mean t ..read more
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The Climate Has Changed Before, so Don't Worry?
Christian Agnostics
by
6M ago
Nearly everyone now knows that climate change is real, and that humans are either causing it or making it worse. So I don’t discuss it with anyone anymore. I had a contract to write Encyclopedia of Global Warming for Facts on File but they discontinued the project. Fortunately I got paid an advance for just writing a headword list. Now the fossil fuel protagonist argument is, “The climate has changed before, so don’t worry about it. Just keep buying our oil and gas, and let us make our money, and quit whining.” This is a really bad argument. The reason is that, yes, the climate has changed, ev ..read more
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Thomas Gilcrease: Master of Altruism
Christian Agnostics
by
6M ago
As described in Connie Cronley’s masterful and readable biography of the Oklahoma progressive crusader Kate Barnard, young Native men and women who had oil rights on their Oklahoma allotment properties were frequently the targets of white grafters who would stop at almost nothing to get the oil rights of those properties. This would include a kind of gentle kidnapping known as “spiriting away.” The young Natives, usually from the Muskogee Creek Nation, were invited on trips and given a good time. Alcohol was usually involved. The young Natives were kept under constant supervision, and once the ..read more
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